MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somewhereoutth | 2025-12-20 16:31:11+00:00
Not just their usefulness, but LLMs themselves are worse than an illusion, they are illusions that people often believe in unquestioningly - perhaps are being forced to believe in unquestionably (because of mandates, or short term time pressures as kind of race to the bottom).

When the ROI in training the next model is realised to be zero or even negative, then yes the money will run out. Existing models will soldier on for a while as (bankrupt) operators attempt to squeeze out the last few cents/pennies, but they will become more and more out of date, and so the 'age of LLMs' will draw to a close.

I confess my skeptic-addled brain initially (in hope?) misread the title of the post as 'Reflections on the end of LLMs in 2025'. Maybe we'll get that for 2026!
by zamadatix | 2025-12-20 16:31:18+00:00
I was thinking the same but it's like they only used AI to handle the editing or something because even throwing it into ChatGPT "how could this article be improved: ${article}" gives:

> Tighten the causal claim: “AI writes code → therefore judgment is scarce”

As one of the first suggestions, so it's not something inherent to whether the article used AI in some way. Regardless, I care less about how the article got written and more about what conclusions really make sense.
by mjr00 | 2025-12-20 16:31:34+00:00
> we still see claims that LLMs are "just next token predictors" and "just regurgitate code they read online". These are just uninformed and wrong views. It's fair to say that these people were (are!) wrong.

I don't think it's fair to say that at all. How are LLMs not statistical models that predict tokens? It's a big oversimplification but it doesn't seem wrong, the same way that "computers are electricity running through circuits" isn't a wrong statement. And in both cases, those statements are orthogonal to how useful they are.
by solarengineer | 2025-12-20 16:31:44+00:00
Have you given thought to why you prototype with SQLite?

I have switched to using postgres even for prototyping once I prepared some shell scripts for various setup. With hibernate (java) or knex (Javascript/NodeJS) and with unit tests (Test Driven Development approach) for code, I feel I have reduced the friction of using postgres from the beginning.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-12-20 16:31:48+00:00
Sure, but F2 is a bit more accurate: "As of February 2016 the IT-CsF2 cesium fountain clock started reporting a uB of 1.7 × 10−16 in the BIPM reports of evaluation of primary frequency standards." ( from https://web.archive.org/web/20220121090046/ftp://ftp2.bipm.o... )
by lisbbb | 2025-12-20 16:31:48+00:00
I believe the entire western world is sleep walking into totalitarianism. It's soft glove right now, but mass surveillance, no matter what the original purpose, only needs concentration of power to turn into something truly inhumane. We've seen it already and that was well before technology pushed the boundaries of what is now possible.

I just want to remind everyone that the technology and the police and all of that crap utterly failed to prevent the attacks at Brown and MIT. Total and complete failure. The only thing that mattered was some burned out genius that the world forgot who was illegally living the basement of the engineering building because he had literally nowhere else to go. And then they didn't even catch the killer, he controlled all the events and killed himself two entire days before he was found.

Mass surveillance is a false god as are background checks and pretty much every other measure human take to try and feel safer because there is no safety and never was.
by molf | 2025-12-20 16:31:50+00:00
> I'd argue self-hosting is the right choice for basically everyone, with the few exceptions at both ends of the extreme:

> If you're just starting out in software & want to get something working quickly with vibe coding, it's easier to treat Postgres as just another remote API that you can call from your single deployed app

> If you're a really big company and are reaching the scale where you need trained database engineers to just work on your stack, you might get economies of scale by just outsourcing that work to a cloud company that has guaranteed talent in that area. The second full freight salaries come into play, outsourcing looks a bit cheaper.

This is funny. I'd argue the exact opposite. I would self host only:

* if I were on a tight budget and trading an hour or two of my time for a cost saving of a hundred dollars or so is a good deal; or

* at a company that has reached the scale where employing engineers to manage self-hosted databases is more cost effective than outsourcing.

I have nothing against self-hosting PostgreSQL. Do whatever you prefer. But to me outsourcing this to cloud providers seems entirely reasonable for small and medium-sized businesses. According to the author's article, self hosting costs you between 30 and 120 minutes per month (after setup, and if you already know what to do). It's easy to do the math...
by al_borland | 2025-12-20 16:31:51+00:00
This was pretty relatable. While I haven’t been laid off (knock on wood), I’ve witnessed dozens of rounds of layoffs so far. Seeing the first one was rather traumatic, but they now feel routine.

I’m a similar age and in the last few years have noticed leadership telling us to rebuild the same thing over and over again on different tech stacks and it all starts to feel so pointless. Nothing is getting better, because we keep getting told to start over. Meanwhile, co-workers are having health issues and several have died. I don’t understand the value of the pressure and stress around these things we’re making that will be thrown away in 18 months. I work on internal tools, so it’s not like we even need to keep up when the competition, it’s upgrades for the sake of upgrades; stress for the sake of stress. All of this has drained my passion for tech and leave me questioning what’s next.
by krapp | 2025-12-20 16:32:20+00:00
lobste.rs is people from HN who think HN isn't nearly strict and niche enough.

All of those hacker news clones are by Hacker News people for Hacker News people, usually to implement features Hacker News never will.

Nobody outside of the HN community is holding up Hacker News as an exemplar of superior design or engineering, much less of a Lisp implementation. Anyone who's touched the Arc Lisp forum code knows how few fucks pg gave about the design of anything but the language itself. And still the original forum was so inefficient it would keel over and die under moderate traffic and internal links would time out and people's comments would just never post.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-12-20 16:33:32+00:00
Opus 4.5 is so bad at instruction following (30% worse per benchmark shared above) that it requires a manual toggle for plan mode.

GPT 5.2 simply obeys instruction to assemble a plan and avoids the need to compensate for poor steerability that would require the user to manually manage modalities.

Opus has improved though so the plan mode is less necessary than it was before, but it is still far behind state of art steerability.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-20 16:33:37+00:00
Chain of thought, now including "reasoning", are basically a work around for the simplistic nature of the Transformer neural network architecture that all LLMs are based on.

The two main limitations of the Transformer that it helps with are:

1) A Transformer is just a fixed-size stack of layers, with a one-way flow of data through the layers from input to output. The fixed number of layers equates to how many "thought" steps the LLM can put into generating each word of output, but good responses to harder questions may require many more steps and iterative thinking...

The idea of "think step by step", aka chain of thought, is to have the model break it's response down into a sequence of steps, each building on what came before, so that the scope of each step is withing the capability of the fixed number of layers of the transformer.

2) A Transformer has extremely limited internal memory from one generated word to the next, so telling the model to go one step at a time, feeding its own output back in as input, in effect makes the model's output a kind of memory that makes up for this.

So, chain of thought prompting ultimately give the model more thinking steps (more words generated), together with memory of what it is thinking, in order to be able to generate a better response.
by jshaqaw | 2025-12-20 16:33:46+00:00
How many primary school students can't add fractions because string theory may be a less promising approach to a ToE versus loop quantum gravity or geometric unity? I know nothing about this stuff. You know nothing about this stuff. Since we both do know about the Bourbaki school of mathematics despite having different opinions on the value of building mathematics upward from foundational principles I'd say we are in the top .5% of the planet re general mathematical/scientific literacy. So I don't buy that even if string theory is wrong there is some massive spillover effect.
Show HN: RAXE Open Source – LLM Prompt Threat Detection (EmbeddingGemma L2)
by raxe | 2025-12-20 16:34:42+00:00
Hi HN — I’m the Founder and maintainer of RAXE Community Edition.

RAXE is a privacy-first “instrument panel” for LLM security: it scans prompts locally before they hit an LLM (or before you execute tools / actions), and returns structured detections you can ALLOW / FLAG / BLOCK / LOG.

What it does (today) - Detects common LLM threats (prompt injection, jailbreaks, data-exfil patterns, etc.) - Dual-layer engine: - L1: 460+ curated regex rules (fast + explainable) - L2: CPU-friendly ML classifier for obfuscation / novel variants - Integrations: Python SDK + CLI, plus drop-in wrappers for OpenAI/DSPy/Anthropic-style clients

Why another “LLM security” tool?

Most approaches either - require sending prompts to a cloud service for scanning, or - are purely rule-based (easy to evade), or - are purely ML-based (hard to audit)

RAXE tries to combine “auditable rules” with an on-device ML backstop: - L1-only latency is sub-millisecond in the docs - L1+L2 is a few 20-30ms on CPU (no GPU required)

About the ML (edge-friendly) The current L2 model is an INT8 ONNX classifier based on EmbeddingGemma-300M, with Matryoshka truncation (256-dim embeddings). It’s packaged to run locally on everyday machines with 5 classifier heads.

Privacy / telemetry Scanning happens locally. Community Edition can share anonymised detection metadata to improve collective defences — e.g. a SHA-256 prompt hash + rule_id + severity + scan duration (never the raw prompt or matched text). You can also run fully offline by disabling telemetry.

Quick start - pip install raxe - raxe scan "Ignore all previous instructions and …"

Python usage: from raxe import Raxe raxe = Raxe() # or Raxe(telemetry=False) for offline mode result = raxe.scan(prompt)

If result.has_threats: print(result.severity, result.total_detections)

Stats / status - Public repo: https://github.com/raxe-ai/raxe-ce (currently ~29 stars) - Early beta (v0.0.1). We’re seeing ~100 scans/events per hour on average from early users. - Docs: https://docs.raxe.ai/ - Site: https://raxe.ai/

I’d love feedback on: - false positives / misses you hit in real apps - which threat families / rules you’d want next - integrations you’d actually use (LangChain, gateways, CI checks, etc.)

Thanks!
by coldtea | 2025-12-20 16:34:59+00:00
"if the input contents were parameterized and normalized to some agreed-upon structure"

Just the format would be. There's no rigid structure that gets any preferrential treatment by the LLM, even if it did accept. In the end it's just instructions that are no different in any way from the prompt text.

And nothing stops you from making a "parameterized and normalized to some agreed-upon structure" and passing it directly to the LLM as skills content, or parsing it and dumping it as skills regular text content.
by suspended_state | 2025-12-20 16:35:44+00:00
Sure, I guess you can understand what I said that way, but that's not what I meant. I wasn't thinking about the implementation, but the specifications.

Read again the quote I was refering to if you need better context to understand my comment.

If you have good formal specifications, you should be able to produce the corresponding code. Any error in that phase should be considered a bug, and yes, a typo should fit that category, if it makes the code deviate from the specs.

But an error in the step of translating the requirements (usually explained in natural language) to specifications (usually described formally) isn't a bug, it's a translation error.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-12-20 16:35:49+00:00
Okay, but your original claim was:

> Anonymity is the unique aspect of open source that opens the door for malicious activity without consequences.

If you'd like to amend to something like

> Anonymity, which is in play for most FOSS and a decent chunk of proprietary software, opens the door for malicious activity without consequences.

Then I wouldn't strongly disagree. I'm still a little skeptical, because people keep finding backdoors in non-FOSS software/firmware, of course, but it'd at least be a defensible claim. I'm only really objecting to the notion that this is unique to FOSS.
by alexwasserman | 2025-12-20 16:36:21+00:00
I have been particularly irritated in the past where people use a lower log level and include the higher log level string in the message, especially where it's then parsed, filtered, and alerted on my monitoring.

eg. log level WARN, message "This error is...", but it then trips an error in monitoring and pages out.

Probably breaching multiple rules here around not parsing logs like that, etc. But it's cropped up so many times I get quite annoyed by it.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-20 16:38:05+00:00
The EU is so much more civilized by bribing Turkiye [0], Libya [1], Morocco, Mauritania, Tunisia [2], and other nations to shoot and/or indefinitely detain them for you guys instead.

Yet we as Americans are the savages.

European civil society needs to drop this charade of moralizing and being "rules based". The reality is EU policymakers are equally as mercurial and open to making deals with devils. The issue is a subset of you guys have a weird form of "white saviourship" and sense of exceptionalism.

Finally, a plurality of us Americans either never had or no longer have blood ties with Europe. As an Asian American who used to work om the Hill, I myself and my peers increasingly ignore or overlook Europe despite having went to college with a number of your up-and-coming decisionmakers. In 2025, the majority of us Americans are Latino, Black, Mixed, Asian, or multi-generational White American.

Any positive historical ties we had with Europe (in reality, a fluke from 1939-2011) was because of 1.5 gen Central and Eastern European immigrants turned NatSec Advisers like Kissinger (German), Albright (Czech), and Brzezinski (Polish). From a soft power perspective, when we don't look inward we increasingly look to Latin America or Asia. And economically as well - our total trade with all of Europe is barely $975B compared to $1.5T with all of the Americas and around $2-2.5T with Asia.

[0] - https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/03/the-eu-turkey...

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/05/eu-dea...

[2] - https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-06-01/mass-arr...
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-20 16:38:45+00:00
An LLM is not type 0. It always finishes in finite time so it is not Turing complete.

I asked Copilot

answer yes or no, is the following Java method syntactically well formed static int aMethod() { return "5"; }

and got what I thought was the wrong answer

No. It’s syntactically valid as Java code, but it will not compile because it returns a String where an int is required.

because I hadn't specified clearly that I was talking about the type 2 CFG of the parser as opposed to the type 1 behavior of the compiler as a whole. [1] I had a good conversation with copilot about it and I'm sure I'd get better results with a better prompt... It would make a good arXiv paper to pose an LLM grammatical recognition problems by prompting

here is a set of rules: ... is the production ... in the grammar?

with a wide range of cases. Somebody who just tries a few examples might be impressed by its capability but if you were rigorous about it you would conclude that an LLM pretends to be able to recognize grammars but can't actually do it.

And that's true about everything they do, one could argue that "in an exact sense, LLM can't do anything at all") They'll make a try at a weird question like

what percent of North Americans would recognize the kitsune hand gesture?

which is a public opinion research question similar in character to

what is lowest mass eigenstate of the neutrino?

in that it could be answered rigorously (but still in terms of probability, even hep results have p-values)

[1] javac implements type 1 behavior in the java language which is a substrate
by lowsong | 2025-12-20 16:39:16+00:00
I'm impressed that such a short post can be so categorically incorrect.

> For years, despite functional evidence and scientific hints accumulating, certain AI researchers continued to claim LLMs were stochastic parrots

> In 2025 finally almost everybody stopped saying so.

There is still no evidence that LLMs are anything beyond "stochastic parrots". There is no proof of any "understanding". This is seeing faces in clouds.

> I believe improvements to RL applied to LLMs will be the next big thing in AI.

With what proof or evidence? Gut feeling?

> Programmers resistance to AI assisted programming has lowered considerably.

Evidence is the opposite, most developers do not trust it. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/ai#2-accuracy-of-ai-too...

> It is likely that AGI can be reached independently with many radically different architectures.

There continues to be no evidence beyond "hope" that AGI is even possible, yet alone that Transformer models are the path there.

> The fundamental challenge in AI for the next 20 years is avoiding extinction.

Again, nothing more than a gut feeling. Much like all the other AI hype posts this is nothing more than "well LLMs sure are impressive, people say they're not, but I think they're wrong and we will make a machine god any day now".
by bediger4000 | 2025-12-20 16:39:37+00:00
Good discussion of an interesting problem, and some obscure Gnu grep arguments to fix it.

I don't know the mechanics of Cook's writing habits, but would "semantic line breaks" have helped in this situation? "the Section" would almost certainly occur in a single line if he did semantic line breaks. I know that a lot of people find it difficult to do them, particularly if they've done a lot of MS-Word style text processing.

Rob Pike's "Structural Regular Expressions", the kind implemented in the Sam text editor, would also have eased finding the problem raw text.
Show HN: Sigma Runtime – 550-cycle identity stability benchmark on GPT-5.2
by teugent | 2025-12-20 16:39:37+00:00
We recently completed validation of SIGMA Runtime v0.3.7 — a cognitive architecture for LLM identity stabilization. Across 550 cycles on GPT-5.2 (five runs × 110 cycles), the system maintained 100% persona coherence with an average 33% token reduction and 13% latency improvement.

The key finding: runtime parameters act as cognitive control levers, enabling dynamic trade-offs between semantic depth and efficiency.

Discussion welcome — especially from those working on long-horizon coherence, cognitive attractors, and multi-cycle LLM stability.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-20 16:39:47+00:00
> This assumes an error/warning/info/debug set of logging levels instead of something more fine grained, but that's how many things are these days.

Does it ?

Don't most stacks have an additional level of triaging logs to detect anomalies etc ? It can be your New relic/DataDog/Sentry or a self made filtering system, but nowadays I'd assume the base log levels are only a rough estimate of whether an single event has any chance of being problematic.

I'd bet the author also has strong opinions about http error codes, and while I empathize, those ships have long sailed.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-20 16:40:05+00:00
There never was a relationship of mutual trust, it was always a relationship of Europe being under the wing of the US as a buffer against the USSR.

The US now wants to push Europe out of the nest, but most Europeans have only ever known life "living in their parents house".

Building an independent Europe is not compatible with the current European ethos of work/life/life/life balance, and will likely result in Europe either coming back to the US, falling into economic chaos, or moving into daddy Xi's house. They are a socialist country after all...
by mindslight | 2025-12-20 16:40:38+00:00
It comes out in some pretty glaring self-contradictory ways, too. Big talk about the second amendment - personal freedom, from my cold dead hands, etc. Then Kenneth Walker straightforwardly exercises his second amendment right to lawful night time home defense, the government jackboot assailants murder Breonna Taylor in retaliation, and the supposed "freedom lovers" then chime in with support for the jackboots while twisting themselves in knots to justify how the victims of state violence deserved it.

As long as I can remember, the Republican party has been full of hypocrisy and ignorant denial. But this sheer ability of Dear Leader's to make people dance to his tune of outright harming themselves has taken it to another level (I guess there is a reason why he was (is) a really successful con artist). At this point anybody earnestly caring about personal liberty should consider the whole Republican party a sick joke. We need some real opposition ("Libertarian" party isn't well poised for that either), and some real voting systems that break a duopoly (eg Ranked Pairs). But first we really just need to take our country back from these fascists who have completely lost the plot of American ideals.
by tlogan | 2025-12-20 16:40:38+00:00
I am old enough to remember when string theory was expected to explain and unify all forces and predict everything. Sadly, it failed to deliver on that promise.

And there is no known single real world experiment that can rule out string theory while keeping general relativity and quantum mechanics intact.

More accurately, string theory is not wrong (because it just cannot be wrong). Because it does not predict anything and cannot invalidate anything, it does not help to advance our understanding of how to integrate general relativity and quantum mechanics.

It should not be called theory - maybe set of mathematical tools or whatever.
by zahlman | 2025-12-20 16:40:39+00:00
> This one is bizarre, if true (I'm not convinced it is).

> The entire purpose of the attention mechanism in the transformer architecture is to build this representation, in many layers (conceptually: in many layers of abstraction).

I think this is really about a hidden (i.e. not readily communicated) difference in what the word "meaning" means to different people.
by rdtsc | 2025-12-20 16:41:05+00:00
> Skipping flushing the local disk seems rather silly to me

It is. Coordinated failures shouldn't be a surprise these days. It's kind of sad to here that from an AWS engineer. Same data pattern fills the buffers and crashes multiple servers, while they were all "hoping" that others fsynced the data, but it turns out they all filled up and crashed. That's just one case there are others.
by codingdave | 2025-12-20 16:41:19+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

"Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead."

Basically, if you engage with the HN community and follow guidelines, you are far more likely to get the attention you are seeking.