MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by meowface | 2025-12-22 19:56:26+00:00
On one hand this is true. On the other hand it does seem possible, in theory, that through enough post-training and other measures they could become a bit closer to human minds and not just be token guessers.

The human brain may at its fundamental level operate on the principles of predictive processing (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-un...). It might be that it has many layers surrounding that raw predictive core which develop us into epistemological beings. The LLMs we see today may be in the very early stages of a similar sort of (artificial) evolution.

The reflexiveness with which even top models like Opus 4.5 will sometimes seamlessly confabulate things definitely does make it seem like it is a very deep problem, but I don't think it's necessarily unsolvable. I used to be among the vast majority of people who thought LLMs were not sufficient to get us to AGI/ASI, but I'm increasingly starting to feel that piling enough hacks atop LLMs might really be what gets there before anything else.
by potsandpans | 2025-12-22 19:56:29+00:00
If it's important to the argument, my title is "Principal Software Engineer MTS". I review code, ADRs, meeting summaries, design docs, PRDs etc...

> I assume that many people complaining here about the LLM slop are more worried about functional correctness than creative originality.

My point is, I've been in the game for coming up on 16 years, mostly in large corporate FAANG-adjacent environments. People have always been functionally incorrect and not to be trusted. It used to be a meme said with endearment, "don't trust my code, I'm a bug machine!" Zero trust. That's why we do code reviews.

> Sure, but LLMs allow people to be wronger faster now, so they could conceivably inundate the reviewer...

With respect, "conceivably" is doing a lot of work here. I don't see it happening. I see more slop code, sure. But that doesn't mean I _have_ to review it with the same scrutiny.

My experience thus far has been that this is solved quite simply: After a quick scan, "Please give this more thought before resubmitting. Consider reviewing yourself, take a pass at refining and verify functionality."

> Maybe your take on it is slightly different because your job function is somewhat different?
> I assume that many people complaining here about the LLM slop are more worried about functional correctness than creative originality.

Interestingly, I see the opposite in the online space. First of all, as an aside, I don't see many people complaining at all in real life (other than the common commiseration of getting slop PRs, which has replaced the common commiseration of getting normal PRs of sub-par quality).

I primarily see people coming to the defense of human creativity and becoming incensed by reading (or I should say, "viewing" more generally) something that an llm has touched.

It appears that mostly people have accepted that llms are a useful tool for producing code and that when used unethically (first pass llm -> production), of course they're no good.

There is a moral outrage and indigence that I've observed however (on HN, and elsewhere) when an LLM has been used for the creative arts.
by aidenn0 | 2025-12-22 19:56:40+00:00
In the 1940s, Kinsey et. al. found that 37% of Adult Males had at least one homosexual experience, and 10% were "more or less exclusively homosexual for at least 3 years."

The numbers for women were much lower, but 30% doesn't seem crazy high if you consider the reduced stigma of the bisexual label would allow people who are primarily heterosexual, but are open to homosexual experiences to label themselves as bi.
Show HN: Find games with few -but positive- reviews based on games that you like
by AmbroseBierce | 2025-12-22 19:56:45+00:00
NotSoAAA is a website to find games on Steam with with few -but positive- reviews (by default it shows games with less than 42 reviews but users can select up to 100), so it's a way to give a second chance to games that maybe deserve better! The user can hover any game to watch it's trailer video.

At the beginning the user can filter games by selecting popular games that they like so it tries to find similar ones, or they can just keep scrolling to view all games.

Also worth noting that after scrolling a few games another sections show up that allows the user to filter by tags instead, where the user can select multiple ones, or they can ignore it and keep scrolling to continue viewing games based on existing filters.

Initially I tried scrapping all games from Steam but they throttle such attempts after a few hundreds requests so I kept looking for alternatives and find a really nice dataset on Kaggle so I used that instead, you can find it by `fronkongames/steam-games-dataset`

The site uses vanilla JavaScript, the backend uses PHP for templates and Python for all the scrapping and scripting.

Any feedback or questions are welcomed.

Some more technical insights (AI generated):

- Hybrid filtering pipeline combines JSON-backed datasets with session-level exclusion to keep recommendations fresh per visitor.

- Uses a single reusable <video> element managed by dash.js/Hls.js to minimize memory churn while previewing trailers across many cards.

- Implements dynamic batching plus scroll-throttled infinite loading with server-side session tracking to avoid repeating games between requests.

- Shares filter state between PHP and front-end sliders, including custom review/price ranges that trigger server rebuilds via abortable fetch calls.

- Normalizes scraped Steam data with Python scripts that add derived metadata (tags, similar games, app IDs) and aggressively de-duplicate entries before publishing.

- Generates video compilations by clipping MPD streams via ffmpeg, overlaying game titles, and auto-marking processed entries to prevent reuse.

- Adaptive UX toggles between tag and “similar games” discovery modes, automatically disabling tag filters when curated picks are active.
by geor9e | 2025-12-22 19:56:50+00:00
Author posted to Instagram >
Author shared the Instagram link on Mastodon >
Mastodon mobile app unfurled the link into a preview >
app concatenated mystery text from a hidden metadata field in the Instagram page > turns out Meta's LLM wrote first-person inspiration slop in the "I" voice for SEO > Author feels impersonated
by freeone3000 | 2025-12-22 19:56:57+00:00
It’s not anti-democratic, it’s simply a matter of exposure. China can WANT to do whatever they want to me, but I have no assets in China, no trade in China, and neither me nor anyone close to me will ever go to China. So it simply matters a lot less what China has on me than the country where I have friends, loved ones, financial assets, property, and frequently visit.
by cm2187 | 2025-12-22 19:57:36+00:00
I know that attributing to western countries the responsability for any bad thing happening in this world is a common reflex, but we are 30 years after the handover, 40 years after the negotiation, so surely China bears some if not pretty much all the responsibility here.

And it's not like the UK had much of a choice in the first place. China threatened to invade and there is very little the UK could have done to prevent a full control.

Worth also remembering that "one country, two systems" came with an expiration date that is rapidly approaching anyway.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-22 19:57:37+00:00
The author did not do this. The author thought it was wonderful, read the entire thing, then on a lark (they "twigged" it) checked out the edit history. They took the lack of it as instant confirmation ("So it’s definitely AI.")

The rest of the blog is just random subjective morality wank with implications of larger implications, constructed by borrowing the central points of a series of popular articles in their entirety and adding recently popular clichés ("why should I bother reading it if you couldn't bother to write it?")

No other explanations about why this was a bad document, or this particular event at all, but lots of self-debate about how we should detect, deal with, and feel about bad documents. All documents written by LLM are assumed to be bad, and no discussion is attempted about degrees of LLM assistance.

If I used AI to write some long detailed plan, I'd end up going back and forth with it and having it remove, rewrite, rethink, and refactor multiple times. It would have an edit history, because I'd have to hold on to old drafts in case my suggested improvements turned out not to be improvements.

The weirdest thing about the article is that it's about the burden of "verification," but it thinks that what people should be verifying is that LLMs had no part in what they've received. The discussion I've had about "verification" when it comes to LLMs is the verification that the content is not buggy garbage filled with inhuman mistakes. I don't care if it's LLM-created or assisted, other than a lot of people aren't reading and debugging their LLM code, and LLMs are dumb. I'm not hunting for em-dashes.

-----

edit: my 2¢; if you use LLMs to write something, you basically found it. If you send it to me, I want to read your review of it i.e. where you think it might have problems and why you think it would help me. I also want to hear about your process for determining those things.

People are confusing problems with low-effort contributors with problems with LLMs. The problem with low-effort contributors is that what they did with the LLM was low-effort and isn't saving you any work. You can also spend 5 minutes with the LLM. If you get some good LLM output that you think is worth showing to me, and you think it would take significant effort for me to get it myself, give me the prompts. That's the work you did, and there's nothing wrong with being proud of it.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-22 19:58:08+00:00
As a med-school dropout, in his early 40s (left medicine two decades ago), I cannot even imagine having enough energy to even apply for medical school. At least in the United Hates of America, this is my jaded perspective.

I became an electrician, instead, with stints IBEW and self-employed residential. Lots of money-making opportunities, but lots of unlicensed competition from handymen that "know just enough to be dangerous" — most customers only care if the light turns on, not that it's long-term safe.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-12-22 19:58:12+00:00
I wonder why activating a venv ended up being implemented as a script you source (updates env vars in the current process) and deactivate (puts them back) rather than being something that puts you in a subshell (detects your current shell and re-invokes it with new vars).

subshells would let you nest venvs so you could have a "sane defaults" venv, and then you could descent into madness with another "wacky experiment" venv, and to return to sanity you'd just exit the subshell. As it is, deactivating takes you all the way out to the system package namespace (or maybe you can nest them, not sure, but it's up to the venv implementation and not your OS to restore the intermediate env).
by blueflow | 2025-12-22 19:58:45+00:00
> No one in their right mind believes that you can accomplish widespread, high speed communication via "talking to people IRL" like you can with the internet.

Nobody claimed that. I'm not sure whether this sort of comms is meaningful at all or whether "staying informed" is just the dopamine thing in effect.

> Going back to the stone age

Its actually 20 years ago. That's less than the median age.
by lowkey_ | 2025-12-22 19:58:50+00:00
1) Years ago for work, I went deep investigating these; some of the team actually flew to China to see it all first-hand and verify the data. This is not a bunk narrative.

2) I've never made this accusation on HN before and apologize if I'm wrong, but this is a new account with 3 comments, all on this post (one of the largest posts about Hong Kong I've seen in a while here), and it looks a lot like a paid actor for China. This makes me thankful for the green-name feature on HN, if the random string of numbers wasn't enough of a tell.
by weinzierl | 2025-12-22 19:59:20+00:00
In C, the token sequence

T * x;

can be interpreted either as a declaration or as an expression (multiplication). Resolving this ambiguity requires context, namely whether T is a typedef name or an object name, which cannot be determined from syntax alone.

One could argue that it is acceptable to produce an ambiguous parse and defer the decision, and in practice compilers do rely on semantic information to resolve such cases.

However, this is not what context-free means in the Chomsky sense: a context-free grammar must be able to determine the syntactic structure without reference to prior declarations or semantic state.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-12-22 19:59:49+00:00
the fact that there's practically no visible regulatory response to autonomous/remote-controlled vehicles that violate traffic laws or put people/pets/property at risk is a big part of why i'm personally not okay with these vehicles being allowed to use public rights-of-way.

when a waymo can get a traffic ticket (commensurate with google's ability to pay, a la the new income-based speeding ticket pilot programs in LA and SF), and when corporate officers down to engineers bear responsibility for failures, i think a lot more people will stop seeing these encroachments onto our commons as a nuisance.

story time: i've literally had one of those god awful food delivery robots run straight into me on a sidewalk. once, one of them stopped in my way and would not move, so i physically moved it myself and it followed me to my apartment. i'm about to start cow-tipping them (gently, because i don't want a lawsuit alleging property damage, even though they're practically just abandoned tech scrap without a human operator nearby to take responsibility).
by meowface | 2025-12-22 20:00:36+00:00
I think it's very likely counterfactually better than USSR (now Russian) or Chinese hegemony. Imagine if Al Gore had won 2000 - America at the helm while growing increasingly wary of violent foreign interventions seems like the least bad path for Earth. (I am not sure if such a path still remains.)

China ultra-liberalizing and becoming a democracy and then the hegemon could be an okay path but I am not too optimistic about the prospects of those first parts.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-12-22 20:00:41+00:00
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-...

> There is no clear correlation whatsoever between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate. Not within the USA. Not regionally. Not internationally. Not among peaceful societies. Not among violent ones. Gun ownership doesn’t make us safer. It doesn’t make us less safe. A bivariate correlation simply isn’t there. It is blatantly not-there. It is so tremendously not-there that the “not-there-ness” of it alone should be a huge news story.
by svara | 2025-12-22 20:01:08+00:00
You picked an example to support your conclusion in mentioning QA jobs which typically don't require a PhD. There still very much are other jobs that do require a PhD so I don't see what the point is there.

More fundamentally this mentality of looking at education only through the lens of financial return is just so disappointing. Of course your country is self-sabotaging its science system if it's full of people who think that way.

I can pretty safely say that me and most people around me, when we got our PhDs, what job we'd later get really wasn't the primary concern.

We wanted to work on interesting problems at the frontier of what's known (and maybe also get a job doing that later).
by robswc | 2025-12-22 20:01:10+00:00
I'm OOTL, but there _is_ a ton of waste when it comes to money we give out.

The article itself even says here:

> [...] the US government has cut scientific grants to academics working on diversity-related topics, halted biomedical grants to international partners, and demanded universities shut down academic units that “belittle” conservative ideas [...]

I'd say it's fair to question if taxpayers should be paying for "diversity related projects." The "belittle conservative ideas" thing is problematic, as that is totally subjective. However, I don't think anyone can say in good faith that most universities aren't incredibly bias. Having been in one circa 2020, it was not a welcoming place if you weren't firmly liberal/progressive. Of course I have to place my disclaimer that I'm not a fan of what Trump is doing, or the man himself for that matter.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-22 20:01:26+00:00
> one has to ask what is behind it.

The human body is stupid and makes a lot of mistakes. It's very obvious to me that our bodies and minds were not built for their current environment.

When someone's brain has a bug in which is has seizures, we do not ask them "what's behind" their epilepsy medication. No, we understand their brain has a problem that should be fixed. There is no ulterior perspective, some secret hidden ability they might possess. It's just bad.

But when it comes to food, we forget this is how we view things. In it's place comes moralizing.
by Pastaza | 2025-12-22 20:01:35+00:00
I built Cardly — a minimal, card-first app for capturing people, notes, and follow-ups. It’s optimized for fast capture, low cognitive load, and repeating quick follow-ups. Private beta + waitlist open. Would love feedback from the HN community on the product, UX, and priorities.

What it is

Cardly treats each person/item as a “card” you can capture in <10s (name, short note, tags) and schedule follow-ups or snooze.
Designed for makers, founders, recruiters, and anyone who needs a frictionless way to remember follow-ups without a full CRM.
Think: the speed of a note + the structure of a mini-CRM.

Why we built it

Full CRMs are heavy for one-off or personal relationships.
I kept losing threads after conferences and demo days. Cardly is what I wished existed: fast capture + simple follow-up workflows.

Core features

Capture a card in under 10 seconds (name, note, tags)
Follow-up scheduling, snooze, and lightweight reminders
Activity timeline per card (calls, notes, outreach attempts)
Quick outreach templates / copy-to-clipboard snippets
Tagging + fast search
CSV export — you own your data

What makes it different

Minimal, card-first UX (no sales pipeline complexity)
Optimized for capture speed and repeating small workflows
Focus on being delightful for single users and indie teams

Try it / join the waitlist

Waitlist (private beta): https://www.cardlyai.app/join-waitlist
Reply here with the workflow you want to test (e.g., recruiter outreach, investor follow-ups, community building) and I’ll try to invite a few people each day.

What I’m asking from HN

Would you use something like this? If not, why not?
What one feature would make you sign up today?
UX or pricing feedback welcome — I’m prioritizing a small set of high-value features for the first public launch.

Roadmap highlights (what we’re considering next)

Multi-device sync and a tiny web + mobile PWA
Email/DM integrations (send and log)
Shared/team cards for small teams

Thanks for reading — I’ll be in the comments to answer questions and give early invites to folks with specific workflows to test.
by jp57 | 2025-12-22 20:02:03+00:00
If the problem is, as I posit that it is, that universities cynically exploit cheap labor in the form of grad students and postdocs in order to keep indirect funds flowing into the universities' accounts', then many earnest efforts to improve would necessarily involve putting a lot of researchers out of work, and that improvement would be a good thing.

My issue is with the uncritical defense of the status quo in both the article and most of the comments. Though I suppose I can understand the impulse for scientists to say that the field's problems are internal, to be dealt with internally, and that the government needs to just give the money they ask for and not make any effort to see or change how the sausage is made.
by uragur27754 | 2025-12-22 20:03:34+00:00
I recently joined a project where the manager greeted me cheerfully that my new task is fully described and specified in a technical architecture doc. The manager left shortly after and considered my onboarding complete. It took the next couple of weeks to realize that the docs were AI generated, surprisingly detailed and accurate. However they were largely irrelevant to the actual problem the client has.

I was later asked why is it taking so long to complete the task when the document had a step by step recipe. I had to explain why the AI was solving the wrong problem in the wrong place. The PMs did not understand and scheduled more meetings to solve the problem. All they knew is that tickets were not moving on the board.

I suddenly realized that nobody had any idea of what’s going on at all on a technical level. Their contribution was to fret about target dates and executive reports. It’s like a pyramid scheme of technical ignorance. The consequence is some ICs forced to do uncompensated overtime to actually make working software.

These are the unintended consequences of the AI hype that CEOs are evangelizing.
by dheera | 2025-12-22 20:04:25+00:00
Life costs a LOT more than you estimate.

Start with housing. A few more square meters costs ~$1000 more on top of what I pay now, per month.

That's $200K in today's dollars or $500-700K over their childhood (0-18 years) if you include inflation, rent increases over the next 20 years.

If you want to sleep 8 hours a day AND work demands 12-15 hours a day, you absolutely need nannies, add $500K for that.

Because today's work environments demand that many hours a day, you evidently don't have time to cook anymore so you need to buy all your food, add $20K/year for that, or $350K.

Costs add up pretty quick.
by petcat | 2025-12-22 20:04:54+00:00
I've loved and used Django ORM and SQLAlchemy for many years. It got me a long way in my career. But at this point I've sworn-off using query-builders and ORMs. I just write real, hand-crafted SQL now. These "any db" abstractions just make for the worst query patterns. They're easy and map nicely to your application language, but they're really terrible unless you want to put in the effort to meta-program SQL using whatever constructs the builder library offers you. CTEs? Windows? Correlated subqueries? It's a lot. And they're always lazy, so you never really know when the N+1s are going to happen.

Just write SQL. I figured this out when I realized that my application was written in Rust, but really it was a Postgres application. I use PG-specific features extensively. My data, and database, are the core of everything that my application does, or will ever do. Why am I caring about some convenient abstractions to make it easier to work with in Rust, or Python, or whatever?

Nah. Just write the good SQL for your database.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-22 20:04:57+00:00
My PO Box is listed in my /hn/ profile, and I respond with funny homemade postcards. I stopped using email a decade ago; quit texts right after Covid started. Yes, I have a one-way pager (digits only) that is given out to less than a dozen contacts.

Love letterwriting — have had and regularly-used my Smith Corona [typewriter] for half my life (over two decades). Its especially helpful for tax forms and legal documents (my area courts still accept non-digital when pro se).

For Christmas last year I helped my state judge brother set up his own typewriter [a very nice IBM Selectric II]. He's not much older than me, but needs it for [reasons].
by JuniperMesos | 2025-12-22 20:05:00+00:00
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/ar-15s-are-mindbogglingly-safe

> While the FBI did break these down by weapon type, they didn’t differentiate between AR-15s or similarly patterned rifles, and grandpa’s bolt action deer rifle. All told, in 2019 there were 364 rifle murders, out of a total of 10,258 firearm murders, accounting for approximately 3.5% of total firearm murders. Nobody uses rifles to murder people because they’re big, bulky, difficult to conceal, and a handgun can do the job just as well.