MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by famouswaffles | 2025-12-14 03:19:42+00:00
1. A context limit is not a Markov order. An n-gram model’s defining constraint is: there exists a small constant k such that the next-token distribution depends only on the last k tokens, full stop. You can't use a k-trained markov model on anything but k tokens, and each token has the same relationship with each other regardless. An LLM’s defining behavior is the opposite: within its window it can condition on any earlier token, and which tokens matter can change drastically with the prompt (attention is content-dependent). “Window size = 8k/128k” is not “order k” in the Markov sense; it’s just a hard truncation boundary.

2. “Fixed-size block” is a padding detail, not a modeling assumption. Yes, implementations batch/pad to a maximum length. But the model is fundamentally conditioned on a variable-length prefix (up to the cap), and it treats position 37 differently from position 3,700 because the computation explicitly uses positional information. That means the conditional distribution is not a simple stationary “transition table” the way the n-gram picture suggests.

3. “Same as a lookup table” is exactly the part that breaks. A classic n-gram Markov model is literally a table (or smoothed table) from discrete contexts to next-token probabilities. A transformer is a learned function that computes a representation of the entire prefix and uses that to produce a distribution. Two contexts that were never seen verbatim in training can still yield sensible outputs because the model generalizes via shared parameters; that is categorically unlike n-gram lookup behavior.

I don't know how many times I have to spell this out for you. Calling LLMs markov chains is less than useless. They don't resemble them in any way unless you understand neither.
by GeneralMayhem | 2025-12-14 03:20:19+00:00
Go with Bazel gives you a couple options:

* You can use gazelle to auto-generate Bazel rules across many modules - I think the most up to date usage guide is https://github.com/bazel-contrib/rules_go/blob/master/docs/g....

* In addition, you can make your life a lot easier by just making the whole repo a single Go module. Having done the alternate path - trying to keep go.mod and Bazel build files in sync - I would definitely recommend only one module per repo unless you have a very high pain tolerance or actually need to be able to import pieces of the repo with standard Go tooling.

> a beefy VM to host CI

Unless you really need to self-host, Github Actions or GCP Cloud Build can be set up to reference a shared Bazel cache server, which lets builds be quite snappy since it doesn't have to rebuild any leaves that haven't changed.
by pizlonator | 2025-12-14 03:20:28+00:00
It’s true that a full blown VM is an excellent sandbox.

The usual situation is like what chrome or OpenSSH want:

- They want to be able to do dangerous things by design. Chrome wants to save downloads. Chrome wants to call rendering APIs. OpenSSH wants to pop a shell.

- They want to deal with untrusted inputs. Chrome downloads things off the internet and parses them. OpenSSH has a protocol that it parses.

So you want to split your process into two with privilege separation:

- one process has zero privileges and does the parsing of untrusted inputs.

- another process has high privilege but never deals with untrusted inputs.

And then the two processes have some carefully engineered IPC protocol for talking to one another.

Could you run the deprivileged process in a VM for maximum security? Yeah that’s one way to do it. But it’s cleaner to run it as a normal process, ask the OS to sandbox it (deprivilege it), and then have a local domain socket (or whatever) that the two processes can use to communicate.

If you used a VM for deprivileging then:

- There’d be more overhead. Chrome wants to do this per origin per tab. OpenSSH wants to do it per connection. Maybe a VM is too much

- You could put the whole browser into the VM but then you’d still need something outside it for saving files. And probably for talking to the GPU. You could run OpenSSH in the VM but then that defeats the purpose (you want to use it to pop a shell after all).

- You can use vsocks and other things to communicate between host and guest but it’s much more gross than the options available when using traditional process sandboxing
by sdenton4 | 2025-12-14 03:20:50+00:00
Sure, but extremely cheap collared with the us.

Here's a UNICEF report comparing childcare policy amongst rich countries: https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/reports/where-do-rich-count...

Sweden ranks third in the comparison metric (what good is free childcare if it is very bad or inaccessible?), and the us ranks 40th out of 41.
by treyd | 2025-12-14 03:21:07+00:00
I don't think this is actually true. LLMs have an impressive amount of ability to do knowledge-transfer between domains, it only makes sense that that would also apply to programming languages, since the basic underlying concepts (functions, data structures, etc.) exist nearly everywhere.

If this does appear to become a problem, is it not hard to apply the same RLHF infrastructure that's used to get LLMs effective at writing syntactically-correct code that accomplishes sets of goals in existing programming languages to new ones.
by thecsw | 2025-12-14 03:21:18+00:00
Oh wow! Did not know that—I went off the original post by Greg and he mentioned to me after I sent him this link that someone looked at Common Crawl as well.

Either way, I updated both the git and the webpage to shout-out the week-before-this findings! I linked directly to your website, lmk if that's how you prefer it.

Cheers!
by thret | 2025-12-14 03:21:35+00:00
I got a working visa for Japan when I was 18 (in 1999), and one night while moving from one hostel to another on the weekend, I fell asleep and missed my train stop. I woke up in the middle of nowhere. It was the last train, it was raining, I had no money on me and the banks were already closed. As I stood there under an awning two ladies asked what I was doing. I brokenly with the help of my dictionary explained the situation. They didn't understand me but flagged down a business man who spoke a little English and he called a taxi, sent it to my hostel and paid for it. It was quite expensive.
by alanfranz | 2025-12-14 03:22:05+00:00
I'd probably want some way to understand whether secret.Do is launched within a secret-supporting environment so that I'm able to show some user warning / force a user confirmation or generate_secrets_on_unsupported_platforms flag.

But, this is probably a net improvement over the current situation, and this is still experimental, so, changes can happen before it gets to GA.
by conartist6 | 2025-12-14 03:23:06+00:00
An AI 101 class taught the way I would want to see it taught would be only a little bit about AI, but far more about philosophy, evolutionary history, and ethics.

You need exposure to philosophical ideas because you need words to be able to think about and describe the similarities and differences between computed language output and a lived experience. You need evolutionary biology to understand that AI is not going to catch up to a billion years of evolutionary progress in the next 6 months. You need ethics because AI is an invitation to ruin yourself through cheating, bullshitting your responsibilities, and generally failing to consider that improving yourself takes work.

But none of that actually requires using AI, which is what makes me suspicious that I would not see eye to eye with Purdue.

What I suspect they're thinking is "every employer wants to hire AI-human centaur employees, so we better make sure are students are the best AI-human hybrids they can be because otherwise there will be no employers who would want them"
by Neywiny | 2025-12-14 03:23:45+00:00
Agreeing that there's a lot of nonsense here and it's a bit painful because there's also seemingly a lot of solid stuff. For example: what does any of this have to do with von Neumann architecture? They didn't say they're going for Harvard, but also nothing about the rest of the page seemed to indicate any preference for a CPU architecture. Maybe they wanted to say they're not a typical CPU in fancier terms. Likewise, THz not GHz. Sure, I guess, but what's the date rate? Infrared remotes are often 300-350 THz ish ish ish. It's anyone out here claiming their IR remote is better because it's at 350 THz instead of 300 when they're processing significant orders of magnitude under the Shannon limit? As far I know, no. Though my goodness I can see the cheapy Amazon listings now... Anyway, I believe good tech speaks for itself. Just let it shine. Don't cloud it in marketing nonsense or technobabble.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-14 03:24:18+00:00
> and then, the form is behind... a Google login wall

Ugh. The people making that should really be informed about the issues they are causing with this. They probably are just uninformed and want to offer a good service, but actually are forcing people to give up personal data to Google, which is a big no-go. This is what happens when digital rights and privacy unaware people are in charge of something like this.
by stevenjgarner | 2025-12-14 03:26:13+00:00
The heart attack danger is a perfect storm of two factors that do not normally occur together:

1) Extreme physical exertion - sudden, intense arm-heavy exercise often as a Valsalva maneuver (straining and holding the breath). This dramatically increases blood pressure, which puts acute stress on the heart and arteries.

2) Exposure to cold air exacerbating the strain on the heart with vasoconstriction (blood vessel constriction). Cold temperatures cause peripheral blood vessels (arteries and veins) to narrow. This forces the heart to work harder to pump blood through the constricted vessels to keep the body warm, leading to an increase in blood pressure. The combination of constricted vessels and high physical exertion means the heart needs significantly more oxygen to function, but the cold and high pressure can limit the blood and oxygen flow (myocardial oxygen demand is increased). Breathing cold air can also trigger constriction in the coronary arteries that supply the heart muscle itself, further increasing the risk of reduced blood flow and a heart attack.
by Wistar | 2025-12-14 03:27:49+00:00
A real Kramer is often much, much more than $2,500. Kramer’s mid-line knives go, even used, for $10–$30K while his high-end, rarer stuff goes for much more. In fact, Bourdain had a real Kramer with meteorite used in its construction that sold at auction in 2019 for $231,500.

https://www.antiquesandthearts.com/anthony-bourdains-bob-kra...

See also, some current mid-line Kramer pricing: https://eatingtools.com/collections/pre-owned
by jliptzin | 2025-12-14 03:28:39+00:00
I am probably going to get downvoted to oblivion for this but if you’re going to have AI write your code, you’ll get the most mileage out of letting it do its thing and building tests to make sure everything works. Don’t look at the code it generates - it’s gonna be ugly. Your job is to make sure it does what it’s supposed to. If there’s a bug, tell it what’s wrong and to fix the bug. Let it wade through its own crap - that’s not your tech debt. This is a new paradigm. No one is going to be writing code anymore, just almost like no one is checking the assembly output of a compiler anymore.

This is just my experience. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I try to get AI to write code that works and is elegant, or if I’m working inside the same codebase that AI is adding cruft to, I don’t get much of a speed up. Only when I avoid opening up a file of code myself and let AI do its thing do I get the 10x speed up.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-14 03:29:39+00:00
Have you asked LLMs about the VASP codebase? With special reference to Tomas Arias' flow-chart(s) [0]

Grad students these days will need to figure out their Altman-informed version of radiance (maybe easier if they spend more time on some dank corners of HN).

I'm jealous you found Chandrasekhar :) going to look at this to train understanding of human and/or AI pedagogy.

I too have my favorite Dover books (Lanczos, Yaglom, the "Green books") but I can't say I got any general techne out of them (yet)

https://www.amazon.com/Applied-Analysis-Cornelius-Lanczos/dp...

These are the underappreciated infra born of the preAI cold-war times (doubt postsoviet mathematicians have an equivalent. Especially not "Bourbaki" =P)!

Worth recommending to gen-A/Z so they have an inkling what semifunctional social infra looked like before *verflow/*stackexchange

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/juarezlfdasilva_flowchart-of-...

Or page 95 https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/8282/50420077...
by consumer451 | 2025-12-14 03:30:52+00:00
Related story:

> Taylor Swift’s Last Album Sparked Bizarre Accusations of Nazism. It Was a Coordinated Attack [0]

I am not a fan of her music, but it was so transparent that when she indicated some political ideas that were not aligned with the one true party, all kinds of astroturffing against her suddenly appeared. This is but one example.

What's really interesting about this technique is that some of her fans got on-board with the scheme very readily.

[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swifts-...
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-12-14 03:31:28+00:00
Last release was May 14, and I only see a handful of commits (looks like minor refactoring). Is this actively maintained / worked on?

Particularly asking because I've been using it and it is great for what it does, but if it doesn't work on new models I'm going to feel more pressure to look at alternatives (which is a pain, because I am quite sure none of the can compete with "download this one file executable and point it at a .gguf file" for ease of use).
by alisonatwork | 2025-12-14 03:32:14+00:00
I never got deep into it, but I remember reading magazine articles back in the 90s that that's exactly what the new generation of MUDs were. Wiki has pages on MOO, TinyMUCK, MUSH etc - these are basically platforms where the players themselves can expand out new objects and locations, presumably in a similar way to Second Life or other MMO sandboxes do today.

So the tools already exist, but it seems to me that they primarily appeal to a very specific type of gamer, one that doesn't have much overlap with the type of gamer who would like an "endless" open world or the type of gamer who would like a tightly-plotted narrative experience. I think it's more something that appeals to fans of table-top RPGs, people who are looking for a collaborative storytelling environment.

I think many gamers have the imagination of an epic infinite metaverse style game, but then when they actually get the opportunity to participate in one, it turns out that that's not really what they wanted after all, because it requires a level of creative labor that they weren't expecting. This is why I think the market has naturally segmented into sandbox builders, survival/roguelikes, traditional narrative adventures etc.
by echelon | 2025-12-14 03:32:32+00:00
I think you're absolutely right about the easiest approach. I hope you don't mind me asking for a bit more difficulty.

Wouldn't fine tuning produce better results so long as you don't catastrophically forget? You'd preserve more context window space, too, right? Especially if you wanted it to memorize years of facts?

Are LoRAs a thing with LLMs?

Could you train certain layers of the model?
by DaveZale | 2025-12-14 03:33:33+00:00
it's a thoughtful discussion, but why bring Covid vaccines into it?

My ldl-c numbers are lower than my wife. We both are in the top few percent of the population for exercise measured in weekly steps. I don't take statins, she does. But her numbers have been going up, while mine have been dropping. I get more fiber though. Clearly, statin therapy is questionable based on this small sample size.

midwesterndoctor, please don't mix arguments
by ofalkaed | 2025-12-14 03:33:47+00:00
That example is what got me to start learning J which I have always found to be unreadable, much prefer my array languages to have their non-ascii symbols. A few nights playing with J and learning was enough to not be completely lost and able to make some progress, but it is still a challenge. When it says it "describes and implementation of J" it is not kidding, it describes the implementation and goes no further. Both the article and the code stick to this sort of terse and very concise language.
by drewfax | 2025-12-14 03:34:16+00:00
I use Mullvad through Tailscale’s exit‑node integration, and it’s awesome. They are the only provider I trust these days.

To highlight virtual routing: it’s useful in scenarios where a country blocks VPNs but you still need an IP from that country to browse local websites. In such cases, virtual routing comes in handy. For example, when India required all VPN servers in the country to log user traffic, Proton moved its Indian server to Singapore and used virtual networking tricks to continue offering an Indian IP address.
by lostmsu | 2025-12-14 03:34:32+00:00
What you described re books are preferences. I don't think majority of people care about authors at all. So it might not work for you, but that's not a valid argument why it won't work for most. Therefore your reasoning about that is flawed.

It also seems pretty obvious (did u not think majority don't care about authors? I doubt it). So it stands that some bias made you overlook that fact (as well as OpenAI MAUs and other such glaring data) when you were writing your statement above. If I were you I'd look hard into what that bias might be, cause it could affect other less directly related areas.
by bgbntty2 | 2025-12-14 03:35:05+00:00
I'd make sure the scripts work with edge cases like unexpected characters in file names (new lines and so on), especially if you don't control the names yourself. Maybe prompt the AI to do some tests if that's possible?

And keep backups. Not because you're using AI, necessarily. And not because you're using shell scripts. But just in case.

The "bubble" part doesn't concern you. If it works for you, it works for you. Whether or not it's a "bubble" is more of an economic issue at a larger scale.
by mlochbaum | 2025-12-14 03:36:03+00:00
It was the subject of quite some debate, see "Panel: Is J a Dialect of APL?" at http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/Vector_8_2_BarmanCamacho.pdf . Ken and Roger backed off this stance after witnessing the controversy.

"Ken Iverson - The dictionary of J contains an introductory comment that J is a dialect of APL, so in a sense the whole debate is Ken's fault! He is flattered to think that he has actually created a new language."
Ask HN: Are we forcing LLMs to be State Machines?
by kodiyak | 2025-12-14 03:36:22+00:00
I'm building a customer service platform and I've hit a wall of frustration. The "AI Agent" demos and tutorials are always sleek, but the reality of bridging messy, unstructured user intent with rigid, transactional internal processes has been a nightmare of edge cases.

It feels like I spend 80% of my engineering effort building guardrails to prevent hallucinations or catastrophic logic failures, and only 20% actually shipping features.

My question for those with actual skin in the game (production-grade only, please):

Have you found a legitimate architectural "sweet spot" between strict business determinism and the probabilistic nature of LLMs?

Or are we just trying to shoehorn a stochastic token predictor into acting like a Finite State Machine, and deep down, this is just unsustainable hype for mission-critical workflows?

I’m looking for war stories and reality checks, not theoretical pitches.
by Groxx | 2025-12-14 03:36:51+00:00
I've seen a couple minor, older-hardware cases when they've been powered off with something on the screen for years, but that's about it. in theory they can also "burn in" by not clearing the display occasionally (afaict it has something to do with accumulating charge) but most or all of those should clear eventually after cycling a bunch (afaict, though it can definitely persist to a minor degree for dozens of full refresh cycles). extreme ghosting, basically.

they seem pretty durable to me.
by chpatrick | 2025-12-14 03:37:04+00:00
I think you're confusing Markov chains and "Markov chain text generators". A Markov chain is a mathematical structure where the probabilities of going to the next state only depend on the current state and not the previous path taken. That's it. It doesn't say anything about whether the probabilities are computed by a transformer or stored in a lookup table, it just exists. How the probabilities are determined in a program doesn't matter mathematically.
by ryanwhitney | 2025-12-14 03:39:08+00:00
I use obscura—which routes through mullvad—and the reddit problem is very annoying.

I finally hit the point of searching for mirrors yesterday and turns out, they exist.[0]

It’s really only suitable for lurking or being able to view search results, but it has eased the pain a bit.

0: reddit-viewer.com
by sigbottle | 2025-12-14 03:39:59+00:00
Have you ever actually worked with a basic markov problem?

The markov property states that your state is a transition of probabilities entirely from the previous state.

These states, inhabit a state space. The way you encode "memory" if you need it, e.g. say you need to remember if it rained the last 3 days, is by expanding said state space. In that case, you'd go from 1 state to 3 states, 2^3 states if you needed the precise binary information for each day. Being "clever", maybe you assume only the # of days it rained, in the past 3 days mattered, you can get a 'linear' amount of memory.

Sure, a LLM is a "markov chain" of state space size (# tokens)^(context length), at minimum. That's not a helpful abstraction and defeats the original purpose of the markov observation. The entire point of the markov observation is that you can represent a seemingly huge predictive model with just a couple of variables in a discrete state space, and ideally you're the clever programmer/researcher and can significantly collapse said space by being, well, clever.

Are you deliberately missing the point or what?
by _jzlw | 2025-12-14 03:40:02+00:00
This seems like something intentionally easy for AI to consume, but hard for humans to read.

Why not allow for formatting and the ability to organize documents into a hierarchy via links? We could use some kind of standard, generalized markup language for this, so that a variety of agents acting on behalf of the user ("user agents," so to speak) can present the information in a visual and interactive manner while the source text remains machine-readable.
by amiban | 2025-12-14 03:42:27+00:00
thank you very much for doing this. I'm a huge bourdain fan, and despite many of his shortcomings as a human i think he was one of the MOST interesting people in the zeitgeist. just seemed so authentic, real, and visceral. his parts unknown series is some of the best human anthro content ever put on TV. this was a very interesting read!
by alisonatwork | 2025-12-14 03:45:16+00:00
I think I just don't really vibe with roleplaying in realtime with other humans, to be honest. I grew up trying to play tabletop RPGs (my dad was a DM and used D&D mechanics as a way to make storytime more engaging), but while I really enjoyed making up characters, I never had much fun actually doing a campaign.

The thing I love about computer games is that I can go through them at my own pace, pause whenever I like, hang around looking at a cool visual, go back to an old save and try something different, whatever. Multiplayer takes all that freedom away because everything has to progress on somebody else's timetable, which isn't as fun for me. Nowadays being expected to perform on a time limit just reminds me of work, which is the last thing I want when I'm playing a game.