MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by observationist | 2025-12-01 17:51:46+00:00
You don't understand how the tech works, then.

LLMs aren't as good as humans at understanding, but it's not just statistics. The stochastic parrot meme is wrong. The networks create symbolic representations in training, with huge multidimensional correlations between patterns in the data, whether its temporal or semantic. The models "understand" concepts like emotions, text, physics, arbitrary social rules and phenomena, and anything else present in the data and context in the same fundamental way that humans do it. We're just better, with representations a few orders of magnitude higher resolution, much wider redundancy, and multi-million node parallelism with asynchronous operation that silicon can't quite match yet.

In some cases, AI is superhuman, and uses better constructs than humans are capable of, in other cases, it uses hacks and shortcuts in representations, mimics where it falls short, and in some cases fails entirely, and has a suite of failure modes that aren't anywhere in the human taxonomy of operation.

LLMs and AI aren't identical to human cognition, but there's a hell of a lot of overlap, and the stochastic parrot "ItS jUsT sTaTiStIcS!11!!" meme should be regarded as an embarrassing opinion to hold.

"Thinking" models that cycle context and systems of problem solving also don't do it the same way humans think, but overlap in some of the important pieces of how we operate. We are many orders of magnitude beyond old ALICE bots and MEgaHAL markov chains - you'd need computers the size of solar systems to run a markov chain equivalent to the effective equivalent 40B LLM, let alone one of the frontier models, and those performance gains are objectively within the domain of "intelligence." We're pushing the theory and practice of AI and ML squarely into the domain of architectures and behaviors that qualify biological intelligence, and the state of the art models clearly demonstrate their capabilities accordingly.

For any definition of understanding you care to lay down, there's significant overlap between the way human brains do it and the way LLMs do it. LLMs are specifically designed to model constructs from data, and to model the systems that produce the data they're trained on, and the data they model comes from humans and human processes.
by dangus | 2025-12-01 17:51:55+00:00
So you are saying the acceptable customer experience for these systems is that we need to explicitly tell them to accept defeat when they can’t find any training content/web search results that matches my query enough?

Why don't they have any concept of having a percentage of confidence in their answer?

It isn’t 2022 anymore, this is supposed to be a mature product.

Why am I even using this thing rather than using the game’s own mod database search tool? Or the wiki documentation?

What value is this system adding for me if I’m supposed to be a prompt engineer?
by mercutio2 | 2025-12-01 17:51:59+00:00
The Apple TV (the device) has a “stuff this user watches” app (called Apple TV) which has a tiny subset of its features dedicated to AppleTV+ (the service).

Netflix refuses to participate in “stuff this user watches”, it would be trivial to do, but Neflix jealously guards its viewership numbers and I expect this is the main reason they don’t do it. That and… they’d rather you just browse Netflix and not watch other services.

The “stuff this user watches” app is very useful! I like it a lot, when I’m not watching Netflix stuff! It works with every service except Netflix!

But the moment the family shifts over to watching some Netflix show, it forces us out of the habit of using the TV app, and then we go back to the annoying “spend 90 seconds trying to find what we were watching on Hulu” experience, which is worse in every way.
by zanvexis | 2025-12-01 17:52:10+00:00
Hey HN, I'm a solo founder. I got tired of paying for complex BI tools, so I decided to build a native Revenue Predictor inside my SaaS using pure Math (Linear Regression) + Recharts.

My stack is Next.js 14, Tailwind, and I'm currently migrating the backend agents to Rust/Substrate for performance.

Would love your feedback on the UX/UI.
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-12-01 17:52:16+00:00
That's a question for lawyers to resolve. IANAL but I have great faith in their ability to impose arbitrary roadblocks to anything as needed. And even if ultimately overturned, just making the bottom line more affordable allowing casting would seem to be the "shareholder value" friendly message. Further, there was already precedent for such behavior on Netflix with some content being downloadable for later viewing and some not.

I'm a bit surprised that you think Google and the streaming services are helpless here when pretty much every foundation model effort has stolen tremendous amounts of IP to build their AI models without consequence.

Otherwise, frog.pot.boiled, no?
by thot_experiment | 2025-12-01 17:52:18+00:00
No it's absolutely not. One of these is a generative stochastic process that has no guarantee at all that it will produce correct data, and in fact you can make the OPPOSITE guarantee, you are guaranteed to sometimes get incorrect data. The other is a deterministic process of data access. I could perhaps only agree with you in the sense that such faults are not uniquely hallucinatory, all outputs from an LLM are.
by iguessthislldo | 2025-12-01 17:52:36+00:00
Out of all the dead Google products so far, I'm probably going to mourn for it the most once the existing ones are basically unusable, which I know is coming someday. I've always loathed the idea of giving TVs themselves internet for various reasons. The various boxes are marginally better, but the Chromecast felt revolutionary to me when it launched, because the TV didn't need to be complicated by UI or a remote with a million buttons, it was all in the phone. Also to me personally this user hostile act feels like a betrayal because in the early days of Chromecast Netflix's app seems to have the least number of issues with Chromecast. Even if that was just my subjective experience, it was still the app I used most with Chromecast when I got my first one because Netflix was a different beast then.

I still have my dead 1st gen and I look at it with fondness. I'm not surprised the mega corporations don't have the same feeling, but it still feels bad when they want to take away something they made that I actually liked.
by dhosek | 2025-12-01 17:52:47+00:00
Oh man, the first graphics code I ever wrote used Tektronix vector commands for drawing. It used ASCII escape sequences to specify diagonal lines on the screen, but, as I recall you could also tell it that instead of drawing a diagonal line, you could have it draw a rectangle with what would have been the endpoints of the diagonal line being opposite corners of the rectangle. These codes were supported by some VT-series graphics terminals as well as at least one dial-up terminal program on the PC back in the 80s so that’s what I targeted on my code (which was a DVI previewer for TeX running under VM/CMS).

The original Tektronix terminals (I only ever saw one once) did all screen drawing with these vector commands (think the look of the classic Asteroids game which I think may have used a similar hardware interface to the CRT display), which naturally was not especially fast for ordinary text which is why hybrids like the abovementioned VT-series terminal (I think it was the 240/340/440 that had this) ended up supplanting the Tektronix displays.
by jfindper | 2025-12-01 17:52:54+00:00
>I'm not for/or against a particular style, it must be real nice if life just solves everything for you while you just chill or whatever. But, a nice upside of being made of talent instead of luck is that when luck starts to run out, well, ... you'll be fine anyway :).

This is wildly condescending. Holy.
by janlin1999 | 2025-12-01 17:52:55+00:00
1 point by janlin1999 27 days ago | parent | context | next | edit | delete [–] | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025)

DocSpot | ONSITE (Santa Clara, CA) | https://docspot.com DocSpot helps people find doctors by indexing information from a plethora of sources and empowering patients to search through one unified interface.

Tiny company, entry-level candidates welcome (no experience required):

Back-end developer: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IvcTtE7yE7m5u0NfrVmvtR_i...
by burningChrome | 2025-12-01 17:53:15+00:00
>> Going with the flow seems like a bad advice. going Analog as in iRobot seems the most sane thing.

I've been doing a lot of photography in the last few years with my smartphone and because of the many things you mentioned, I've forgone using it now. I'm back to a mirrorless camera that's 14 years old and still takes amazing pictures. I recently ran into a guy shutting down his motion picture business and now own three different Canon HDV cameras that I've been doing some interesting video work with.

Its not easy transferring miniDV film to my computer, but the standard resolution has a very cool retro vibe that I've found a LOT of people have been missing and are coming back around too.

I'm in the same age range and couldn't fathom becoming a developer in the early aughts and being in the midst of a gold rush for developer talent to suddenly seeing the entire tech world contract almost over night.

Strange tides we're living in right now.
by ffsm8 | 2025-12-01 17:53:24+00:00
I wish there was a service like steam for videos: not subscription but high confidence purchase of video content available "forever" (even if they remove it from the purchasing options, license would remain).

Personally I watch so little tv/movies that any subscription was always overpaying. I still did it for a while, because the price wasn't high enough to push me to seek out other options.

I'm no longer subbing and moved on, but the right holders are seriously detached from reality if they think this is a sane business strategy
by hunterbown | 2025-12-01 17:53:33+00:00
Hey HN! I've been exploring how to guide LLMs into better thinking patterns. After working on Hegelian dialecticism (https://github.com/Hmbown/Hegelion), I've now implemented Peircean Abduction, Charles Sanders Peirce's method of "inference to the best explanation" (famously used by Sherlock Holmes).

This MCP server forces them into a detective's mindset: 1. Explicitly quantify surprise (0.0-1.0 anomaly scoring) 2. Generate multiple, distinct, testable hypotheses 3. Evaluate via Inference to Best Explanation with a "Council of Critics"

Current status: - MCP server with zero-config setup - JSON output for structured reasoning (great for analysis tasks) - Working on conversational/natural language output (for coding/chat)

My goal is to move away from "prompt engineering" and toward "logic architecture," forcing the model to make its uncertainty visible before committing to an answer. To test it, I fed it a scenario about a "defunct" satellite collision (see the README). It correctly deduced it was a dormant weapon where standard LLM responses hedged if they mentioned that possibility.

Would love to hear what use cases you come up with!
by alexfoo | 2025-12-01 17:53:45+00:00
Gutted about this. I use Zipcars 4-5 times a month specifically to get to things that are unreachable by public transport within reasonable timeframes.

What can be 45 minutes in a Zipcar can sometimes be more than 2 hours by public transport, and sometimes impossible given some time constraints and rail engineering works.

Local car rental companies do rent cars by the day, and can sometimes be cheaper, but they come with more complications: admin faff, parking problems, and inflexible 8am to 8am rentals mean that a simple 3 hour Zipcar rental from 6am to 9am becomes a 2 day car rental, or needing a car on a Sunday means a 2 day rental from Saturday to Monday as none of the local car rental companies seem to open on a Sunday. Some of the major ones (Hertz/Avis/Budget/Enterprise/Thrifty) do but then I'm travelling an hour to pick up the car.

If Zipcar does shut down in the UK, and no-one jumps in to fill the void, then I may have to buy (more likely lease) a cheap car and add to the clutter on my local street with something that is only used 4-5 times a month. More convenient for me, costs about the same year on year, but terrible use of resources.
by aaroninsf | 2025-12-01 17:53:47+00:00
Every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon.

Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to preclude some feature from future realization is false.

Lemma: contemporary implementations have almost always already been improved upon, but are unevenly distributed.

(Ximm's Law)
Ask HN: Are there any business monopolies that you like?
by NewUser76312 | 2025-12-01 17:53:50+00:00
It seems a common pattern that a business gets big enough, dominate through network effects and/or regulations and high barriers to entry, and then their services and customer support deteriorate to awful levels. But they end up being the only major game in town, so consumers begrudgingly use them.

That's the common pattern I see, at least.

So I'm curious about the opposite - are there any businesses that are relative monopolies in their industries that you're happy to use / do business with?

I'm struggling to come up with an example myself. Are monopolies doomed to become awful to consumers?
by xl0 | 2025-12-01 17:53:54+00:00
SEEKING WORK Location: Nomadic, Colombia at the moment Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: depends Technologies: PyTorch, Deep Learning, LLM, Diffusion models, NumPy, JAX (a bit), CUDA | SvelteKit, TypeScript, tailwind, drizzle | DevOps: Linux (25 years), AWS, Docker, common sense URL: https://alexey.work/?ref=hn46109141 Email: alexey.zaytsev@gmail.com

I'd love to get back into Deep Lerning (torch, cuda, etc, etc).

In my past lives: Linux kernel development, Molecular Biology masters, Electronics engineering in Shenzhen.

Some cool stuff:

https://github.com/xl0/lovely-tensors

https://lovely-docs.github.io/
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-12-01 17:54:02+00:00
The worst epubs are bad because some jackass took some poorly OCRed text and dumped it into the format. The best (retail) epubs are on par with the best PDFs except you don't have to pan-and-scan to read a fucking page. It just reflows.

For novels I want and prefer epubs, but also non-novels if they were released in the last 5 years or so. PDF isn't magic, and there are bad pdfs out there too, scans of photo-copied books and other nonsense.
by thomastjeffery | 2025-12-01 17:54:02+00:00
Absolutely!

The entire narrative of "cheating" is a giant misdirect. People don't actually care about cheating, they care about fun. If a player is making the game less fun, it does not matter how.

The real problem is that ~10 years ago major game studios decided to monopolize server hosting. This means that the responsibility of moderation is now in their hands. The only way this problem can ever be resolved is by giving the authority to moderate servers back to players. Until then, the responsibility to moderate will be unmet, no matter how fascist and authoritarian game studios become. Fascism cannot guarantee fun!
by shevy-java | 2025-12-01 17:54:08+00:00
"in favor of the homegrown and inferior AVIF"

I am using .avif since some years; all my old .jpg and .png files have been pretty much replaced by .avif, in particular fotos. I am not saying .avif is perfect, but IMO it is much better than .jpg or .avif.

I could have gone .webp or perhaps jpeg-xl but at the end of the day, I am quite happy with .avif as it is.

As for JPEG XL - I think the problem here is ... Google. Google dictates de-facto web-standards onto us. This is really bad. I don't want a commercial entity control my digital life.
by hilti | 2025-12-01 17:54:08+00:00
I agree with your points about ImGui's intended use case, though I think the landscape is a bit more nuanced. You're right that ImGui excels for dev tools and that its non-standard UX isn't ideal for end-user apps. That said, devs reach for ImGui in end-user apps because lightweight cross-platform alternatives are scarce. Qt is heavy, Electron is heavier, native toolkits mean multiple codebases. I built a techy tool with ImGui (JSONL Viewer Pro) and it works well enough for users who care more about functionality than polish. Not saying it's right for consumer apps, but for technical tools it can be pragmatic.
by seryvtva | 2025-12-01 17:54:26+00:00
I ran my own matrix server for a number of years, then learned that any matrix homeserver would happily serve up any media from matrix without authentication. I shut it down the next day because I have no desire to operate a proxy for downloading csam.

A url like https://my.domain.com/_matrix/media/<some.other.domain>/<some-bad-media-id> would happily proxy the bad media through my server.

I think they've fixed this, but it's not worth the risk to me.
by orwin | 2025-12-01 17:54:42+00:00
Most antifascist groups are not protest groups. Most of them are watchdogs. When a story about military groups (including police) making nazi salutes or getting nazi tattoos or praying in front a a picture of Hitler come out, 99% of the time it's an antifa group that contacted a journalist and provided them picture, dates and specifics about the story. If you want to arrest all antifascists, you will have to arrest half of the OSINT community, because they're the one who developed a lot of the tools.
by bluGill | 2025-12-01 17:54:42+00:00
There is value in both. Sometimes fishing will find a great job at a place you have never heard of. Often hunters come home at the end of the day having got nothing.

Hunting is still your better bet overall. figure out who has a need and position yourself to fill it. This also takes a lot more time to pull off than just sending 1000 resumes, and there is no guarantee. there is generally a mix of course, you start by casting a net to see what is there, and then when there is a potential bite you start tailoring your resume to that potential. Not all leads will result in something. Who you know is always important.
by hollerith | 2025-12-01 17:54:44+00:00
>Creators can just omit that some product is sponsored.

Not true in the US, where the FTC requires (and has required for decades) disclosure by the creator to the viewer whenever a payment has been made to the creator to promote anything. On Youtube, this is typically done by the creator's saying (in the video) "this video is sponsored by Foo Corporation", or, "I wish to thank the sponsor of this video, Foo Corporation".

Personally, I'm unhappy with Premium's built-in sponsor skip. For one thing it becomes available to me only after enough previous viewers have manually skipped over the sponsored segment. For another, it sometime skips ahead too far (probably because the viewers who manually skipped weren't precise in skipping exactly to the end of the sponsored segment). I'd much rather Youtube allowed the uploader to declare (to Youtube) that the upload is free of sponsors (e.g., by checking a box) and then punishing the uploader somehow if he routinely declares falsely. With that information, Youtube could and IMHO should give me the option of telling Youtube somehow (e.g., by checking a box) that I prefer for sponsored videos to be omitted from my recommendations.
by graemep | 2025-12-01 17:55:01+00:00
> Wikipedia gives 2191 for "at least New Testament", which I assume means all the books of the New Testament

Yes, and that number is too low because some single books you be translated mroe times.

> So it's still #1, since #2 (Le Petit Prince) is at 610.

I am not disputing that. The Bible is far ahead of anything else.

> It wouldn't surprise me if the number for the four Gospels is higher than the full New Testament number.

As there are separate translations of the gospels (e.g. the Lindisfarne Gospels) that must be true. I would be interested in know things such as whether any particular gospel has more translations.
by benoau | 2025-12-01 17:55:41+00:00
I think you missed a key ingredient for Apple's ability to charge 30%: their policies banning developers from referring users to any other payment options in the app or on their website or in communications meant and in many places still means, consumers make an uninformed choice to pay that fee. The extent Apple has gone to to prevent this bubble being pierced suggests it's not actually sustainable without forced consumer ignorance.
by llingelo | 2025-12-01 17:56:08+00:00
In 2011, Notch created "Prelude of the Chambered" during Ludum Dare 21 – a Wolfenstein-style raycasting dungeon crawler in Java. I rewrote it entirely in TypeScript with Vite, using only Canvas 2D (no WebGL). Runs on any browser, no install needed. The original level design system where each PNG pixel defines a game element is preserved and quite elegant.
by hitekker | 2025-12-01 17:56:13+00:00
Hmmm, I don't see the outstanding part of the rebuttal. While it raises real evidence, it doesn't address the elephant of overeducation. The cited countries, for example, are faltering in myriad ways that their electorates have decidedly reacted against; enormous education sold to too many, falling far short of its promises.

Like many of us here, I've been overeducated and I'm against overeducation. "Not letting your education get in the way of your learning" summarizes that view, which I think use to be a tenet of the hacker ethos underlying this forum.
by trunksuzieross | 2025-12-01 17:56:44+00:00
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by martin_drapeau | 2025-12-01 17:57:32+00:00
Most analysts seem to forget what actual consumers do. Normal people use ChatGPT. They accidentally use Gemini when they Google something. But I don’t know anyone non-technical who has ditched ChatGPT as their default LLM. For 99% of questions these days, it’s plenty good enough—there’s just no real reason to switch.

OpenAI's strategy is to eventually overtake search. I'd be curious for a chart of their progress over time. Without Google trying to distort the picture with Gemini benchmark results and usage stats which are tainted by sheer numbers from traditional search and their apps.