MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-22 15:53:45+00:00
Kinda gives the whole game away, doesn’t it? “It doesn’t actually matter if the citations are hallucinated.”

In fairness, NeurIPS is just saying out loud what everyone already knows. Most citations in published science are useless junk: it’s either mutual back-scratching to juice h-index, or it’s the embedded and pointless practice of overcitation, like “Human beings need clean water to survive (Franz, 2002)”.

Really, hallucinated citations are just forcing a reckoning which has been overdue for a while now.
by apercu | 2026-01-22 15:54:08+00:00
I have a lot of opinions about LLMs, and most are not positive due to the error rate, the security nightmare, the IP issues, the ecological impact and the hype, hype, hype that stands in direct opposition from my years of experiments (starting in 2019).

But, I have to admit that a few years ago LLMs became part of my daily workflow for low-risk repetitive tasks, and sometimes even "sound boarding".
by Der_Einzige | 2026-01-22 15:54:36+00:00
IEEE might as well be a predatory publisher. None of their journals are serious anymore.

Hell, CVPR is now the top conference/journal in the world, beating out every medical journal, Nature, etc. NeurIPS I think is also beating out every medical journal ever.

If you're not targeting a top 20 listed conference/journal in your field as ranked by google scholar (i.e shows up on the leaderboards at all), you might as well not even publish, as those papers at worse venues act as a black stain on your academic career.

These folks should instead target workshops at prestigious venues.
by less_less | 2026-01-22 15:54:56+00:00
This thread is pretty weird.

My phrase "how economists expect you to set it" is probably wrong here, since I'm not an economist, I've just read the most basic theory about how to use this tool, and also used it myself (on eBay, you know, years ago when the site was mostly auctions). So I don't really know what "economists expect", but rather the basic guidelines for using this tool. You got me there.

> I think this is the problem. When most sciences observe reality diverge from the model, they see that as a flaw in the model. When economists (at least you HN "economists") observe reality diverge from the model, they seem to see that as a flaw in reality.

But like, to double-check here: "reality" means your imagined use of a tool that you do not in fact use, right? Like you say you "don't do auctions" and I'm trying to explain what that option is for, and you're countering that the basic "how to use this tool" explanation is a wrong model of reality?
by haspok | 2026-01-22 15:55:29+00:00
What position? If you let it pass, you encourage this kind of behaviour.

If they are working for a western company, they should adjust their behaviour, not the company. Just imagine working for an Indian company (or manager), and expecting them to tolerate your individualist behaviour and audacious questions. You would be punished immediately.

If it's a peer-to-peer relationship, all the more reason to be firm. If you don't speak up you will never be respected. And don't think that just because you keep quiet the shitty types of people won't stab you in your back at their first opportunity (ask me how I know).
by RiverCrochet | 2026-01-22 15:55:32+00:00
In the fourth paragraph:

"... Its Beijing-based owner, ByteDance, is duly creating a new American version of the app and reducing its stake in it to 19.9%. Oracle, a tech giant, and Silver Lake, an investment company—both American—will each take 15%, as will MGX, an Emirati sovereign-wealth fund. The remainder will be owned by 'affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance', which probably means the company’s American shareholders. Users’ data will continue to be held in America by Oracle, which will also retrain TikTok’s algorithm on American data to prevent foreign manipulation."

So the U.S. gets its own version of the app, and there's this algorithm retraining to remove foreign influence. It's a win for those who thought Tiktok was a tool of foreign manipulation, but still want to keep it as a viable product.

Various groups in the U.S. wanted Tiktok divested from China, but the ones who were making money (or were hoping to eventually make money) with it did not want to destroy a short-form video app that has hundreds of millions of daily users and is the number one platform in the U.S. I think a lot of the delays are an attempt to keep the ownership transfer out of the public eye and prevent things like "the government is taking over Tiktok it's cooked" type stuff to keep the platform valuable to investors.

If China is developing a separate version for the U.S., and the algorithm is being retrained on it as this article says, then the behavior and vibe of the app might change. Young people will pick up on that pretty quick. I wonder if it will keep its popularity.

I was very much into Tiktok up and decided to quit the night it got shut down for a day. Leading up to that date, many of those who I would follow started telling everyone the other networks they were on, and/or joining other networks. Most went to Instagram. Instagram is just not the same, but I feel like Tiktok was on its way to becoming something different regardless of the outcome of the ban.
by alt187 | 2026-01-22 15:55:37+00:00
It's more complex than that. The three pillars of learning are theory (finding out about the thing), practice (doing the thing) and metacognition (being right, or more importantly, wrong. And correcting yourself.). Each of those steps reinforce neural pathways. They're all essential in some form or another.

Literacy, books, saving your knowledge somewhere else removes the burden of remembering everything in your head. But they don't come into effect into any of those processes. So it's an immensely bad metaphor. A more apt one is the GPS, that only leaves you with practice.

That's where LLMs come in, and obliterate every single one of those pillars on any mental skill. You never have to learn a thing deeply, because it's doing the knowing for you. You never have to practice, because the LLM does all the writing for you. And of course, when it's wrong, you're not wrong. So nothing you learn.

There are ways to exploit LLMs to make your brain grow, instead of shrink. You could make them into personalized teachers, catering to each student at their own rhythm. Make them give you problems, instead of ready-made solutions. Only employ them for tasks you already know how to make perfectly. Don't depend on them.

But this isn't the future OpenAI or Anthropic are gonna gift us. Not today, and not in a hundred years, because it's always gonna be more profitable to run a sycophant.

If we want LLMs to be the "better" instead of the "worse", we'll have to fight for it.

Yes, I wrote this comment under someone else's comment before, but it seems to apply to yours even better.
by Zambyte | 2026-01-22 15:55:40+00:00
Both are mentioned in the thread, but lately I have been thinking that Zig and Scheme feel like the Yin and Yang of programming languages. Learning both of these languages won't teach you everything there is to know about programming, but it will teach you a complimentary set of foundational information that will make it easy to pick up any other programming language.

You will learn

- programming with manual and automatic memory management

- static typing and dynamic typing

- compile time execution and runtime compilation

- imperative programming and functional programming (neither language enforces imperative or functional programming, but their ecosystems strongly encourage one style or the other)

- errors as values and errors as exceptions

- SIMD programming and programming with the numeric tower

- various concurrency primitives

- what interfaces fundamentally are

- textual code editing vs structural code editing

Probably lots of other complimentary concepts too. But what's also interesting, is that it's completely reasonable for any person to learn the whole language for both of these. I've read both all of the R7RS small paper (which includes the entire definition of the language and the standard library), as well as the entire Zig language reference (which does not include the standard library, but I have also read a large portion of the Zig standard library, sans a lot of the std.os.* syscall wrappers).

It's really hard to think of high level languages that you can't easily pick up after learning these two. Prolog? You can learn logic programming in Scheme before switching over. Fortran? C? You learn most of the interesting concepts required to program in these languages from learning Zig. Erlang? Go? You can learn their concurrency models in Scheme and Zig.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-22 15:56:44+00:00
So there seems to be an shared underestanding how difficult "measure your results" would be in this case, so could we also agree that asking someone:

> I wonder if they have measured their results? [...] Can you provide data that objects this view, based on these (celebrity) developers or otherwise?

isn't really fair? Because not even you or I really know how to do so in a fair and reasonable manner, unless we start to involve trials with multiple developers and so on.
by Tyriar | 2026-01-22 15:57:02+00:00
Didn't mean to come off that way, I know a lot of the decisions that were made. One thing I've got from this is we should probably open `/tmp/`, `C:\`, ~/`, etc. in restricted mode without asking the user. But a lot of the solutions proposed like opening everything in restricted mode I highly doubt would ever happen as it would further confusion, be a big change to UX and so on.

With AI the warning needs to appear somewhere, the user would ignore it when opening the folder, or ignore the warning when engaging with agent mode.
by jayknight | 2026-01-22 15:57:09+00:00
My state uses a system that I think is the best of most worlds. You check in at one table, they give you a "receipt" that you give to another table who trades that for a little card. The card isn't linked to you at all and it gives you access to a voting machine. You enter your choices into the machine, which prints out a paper ballot that you can review and verify before putting it into the box as you leave. So, your vote is recorded by the voting machine for quick tallying, but your vote is also recorded on paper that is human and machine readable for verifiable re-counts if needed.
by bwfan123 | 2026-01-22 15:57:16+00:00
There needs to be a larger reorientation to quality in academic publications. Right now it is a numbers game. It should change somehow to measuring the quality of those publications, as the numbers-game is gamed faster with AI. Perhaps an h-index or page-rank can be introduced as a metric in academia to dis-incentivise garbage/incremental publications.
by shermantanktop | 2026-01-22 15:57:57+00:00
But how could we possibly evaluate faculty and researcher quality without counting widgets on an assembly line? /s

It’s a problem. The previous regime prior to publishing-mania was essentially a clubby game of reputation amongst peers based on cocktail party socialization.

The publication metrics came out of the harder sciences, I believe, and then spread to the softest of humanities. It was always easy to game a bit if you wanted to try, but now it’s trivial to defeat.
by hebejebelus | 2026-01-22 15:58:15+00:00
Appreciate that. I skimmed it and put it on my reading list for when I have a little more brainpower. I think it will go quite well with a few related In Our Time episodes. I’ve started with one about Authenticity, Heidegger and St Augustine. If you take the view that high-level LLMs can be seen as a novel kind of being, there are a lot of very interesting thoughts to be had. I’m not saying that’s actually - or genuinely - the case, before people start to flame me. But I do think it’s a fruitful thing to think about.
by emmaviolet | 2026-01-22 15:58:15+00:00
GitHub PM here. From what we've seen, you're right about the motivation; I've also seen plenty of job ads where "significant contribution to open source" is something that's called out explicitly as a valid substitute for professional experience in the area. While that's always well-intentioned and creates many benefits for the OSS community, the flip side is that it can also lead to the kind of problems you're seeing. Many new users are also motivated by learning and community, and not familiar enough with the community expectations to know how to seek that differently.

We have tried a lot here in the past (good first issues, more community support for new users), but haven't found a perfect solution yet. Internally, we're looking at options for admins to disable PRs on repos, or limit PRs to collaborators only, for example. From your comment, it seems like part of the challenge you're experiencing as a user is around Issues specifically. We've also been looking at options to delete PRs and Issues individually and in bulk, which could help after the event. Would welcome any feedback on other paths we could take here.
by mytailorisrich | 2026-01-22 15:58:32+00:00
I don't think that mainland China needs any sort of precedent over Taiwan should they decide on military action. The situation is completely different from Ukraine. The South China Sea is also on long-running dispute that predates the PRC and what has been happening is more a policy of "fait accompli" by occupying unoccupied disputed islands first rather than an "invasion".

I don't know what is the thinking on Ukraine now in Beijing, but they were massively pissed off when Russia invaded because it has caused a lot of disruption to belt and road and to East-West relations in general.
by demetris | 2026-01-22 15:58:59+00:00
Hey, tasty_freeze!

The motivation behind the benchmarks was to understand what are the options today for optimizing the types of image we use PNG for, so I used the same set of images I had used previously in a comparison of PNG optimizers.

The reason the set does not have photographs: PNG is not good at photographs. It was not designed for that type of image.

Even so, the set could do with a bit more variety, so I want to add a few more images.
by gcr | 2026-01-22 15:59:02+00:00
Academic venues don't have enough reviewers. This problem isn't new, and as publication volumes increase, it's getting sharply worse.

Consider the unit economics. Suppose NeurIPS gets 20,000 papers in one year. Suppose each author should expect three good reviews, so area chairs assign five reviewers per paper. In total, 100,000 reviews need to be written. It's a lot of work, even before factoring emergency reviewers in.

NeurIPS is one venue alongside CVPR, [IE]CCV, COLM, ICML, EMNLP, and so on. Not all of these conferences are as large as NeurIPS, but the field is smaller than you'd expect. I'd guess there are 300k-1m people in the world who are qualified to review AI papers.
by ricardo81 | 2026-01-22 15:59:23+00:00
Canada is blessed with cheap energy, the abundance of hydro surely helps to bridge any intermittency other renewables have. I lived there 10 years back, your energy is less than half the cost of mine in Scotland. In Scotland's case we're part of the UK and the rest of the UK is less blessed with the geography for hydro. The incumbent Scottish government also has an anti stance to nuclear.

I hope the incentives for cleaner energy continue to stack up. With the surge in demand from AI surely productivity will be more tightly coupled with energy usage and cost.
by gosub100 | 2026-01-22 15:59:24+00:00
I want to extend this idea to email. Use encryption, but for proof that the email can't be read, instead of for security/privacy (not that I'm against either of those).

Update the email protocol so that all messages must be encrypted. Not "by default", but by necessity. The server rejects them if they aren't encrypted and signed in a way that proves the decryption key is on a block chain.

The only way to put the key in the chain is to submit a micro payment. By "courtesy" , but completely subject to the recipient, the users client will refund the payment 48 hrs after it has been decrypted/read. Only if they click "spam" then the payment stays on their ledger. This would kill spam overnight.

The two downsides I see so far are that the chain is a single point of failure for everyone, and it would cost people a few bucks and some friction to get the clients set up. Plus the coin would have to be very low transaction cost, and still fully redeemable for actual value somewhere.
by haritha-j | 2026-01-22 15:59:26+00:00
Or probably even wrose, it actually shifts the attention and the wandering. That phase will happen inside the LLM, where the LLM decides which link to suggest, i.e. whoever pays the LLM the most. And worse yet, that will apply not just for products, but for platforms, so if amazon pays chatgpt more than ebay does, there goes your sale.
by labcomputer | 2026-01-22 15:59:28+00:00
> Despite all this farmers will continue to vote republican this year, and in future years. I presume they have reasons, but I confess they are hard to understand.

All farmers are rich. You have to understand that "farmer" doesn't mean "someone who works on a farm". It means "someone who owns a farm".

If you own a farm today (meaning, you didn't go bankrupt sometime in the last 150 years and move on to something else), it is because you were successful at the business of farming.

Farming is a business that doesn't scale down. To be successful at farming in the last century, you need a lot of land. You also need a lot of equipment. Thus, the net worth of your "average small farmer" is 10's of millions of dollars.

When Republicans talk about tax cuts (especially the estate tax), who do you think they're talking to? Farmers.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-22 15:59:30+00:00
That’s nice, but ICE still has to follow laws. Here is an annotated analysis of each significant frame of the video, showing Jonathan Ross was standing to the SIDE of the car when he fired the first shot, and that the car was steering away from him:

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-TRUMP/MINNESOTA-RECONST...

Murder is murder. And let’s not forget, ICE is detaining citizens daily, kidnapping children off the streets, and unconstitutionally entering homes without warrants. It’s a Gestapo army.

“Terrible things are happening outside ... poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart, men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared." - Anne Frank
by mikailk | 2026-01-22 15:59:51+00:00
Object-level rule: “Stealing is illegal.”
Meta rule: “Laws vary by jurisdiction.”

If the meta claim is itself a law, what jurisdiction has the law containg the meta law? Who enforces it?

Object: "This sentence is grammatically correct."
Meta: "English grammar can change over time."

What grammar textbook has the rule of the meta claim above? Where can you apply that rule in a sentence?

Object: "X is morally wrong."
Meta: "There are no objective moral truths."

The meta claim is a statement about moral systems. It is not a moral prescription like "thou shalt not kill".

If you say "this stop sign is made of metal", you are making a meta claim. If you say "stop" you are giving a directive. It does not follow that if you can obey a directive, you can obey the composition of the directive.

All to say that a meta-claim of morals is not itself a moral claim.
by apercu | 2026-01-22 16:00:22+00:00
"Back then, the minor inconvenience of seeing a few ads seemed worth all the benefits of access all the internet had to offer"

Yes and no. I complained about ads to a partner back in 1999. He seemed surprised, and said something to the effect of "well that's how the content you are consuming is paid for".

My argument (25 years ago now) was that it wasn't the ads as much as it was the ads blocking content, slowing the page load, being intrusive, etc.

So, even "Back Then" it was an issue. Now, it's on steroids with all the aforementioned behaviours being even worse now (e.g., reload an entire page on mobile in order to load a new ad, pages jumping around as new ads are loaded, more pop-ups, etc.) but exacerbated by the privacy nightmare of weaponized data collection.

I'm not disagreeing with you, I just think the underlying issues were evident very early in the "www" environment.
Show HN: Bible translated using LLMs from source Greek and Hebrew
by epsteingpt | 2026-01-22 16:00:24+00:00
Built an auditable AI (Bible) translation pipeline: Hebrew/Greek source packets -> verse JSON with notes rolling up to chapters, books, and testaments. Final texts compiled with metrics (TTR, n-grams).

This is the first full-text example as far as I know (Gen Z bible doesn't count).

There are hallucinations and issues, but the overall quality surprised me.

LLMs have a lot of promise translating and rendering 'accessible' more ancient texts.

The technology has a lot of benefit for the faithful, that I think is only beginning to be explored.
Show HN: Open-source-ish chart pattern detection using Gemini Vision API
by rvnx_exe | 2026-01-22 16:01:00+00:00
I built an AI that detects chart patterns to fight my own confirmation bias I kept losing money on trades because I'd "see" patterns that weren't there. Classic confirmation bias — when you're already in a position, your brain lies to you.

So I built a tool: upload any chart screenshot, get pattern detection in seconds.

Why Gemini over GPT-4V?
Tested both. Gemini 1.5 Flash is: - Faster (~2s vs ~5s) - Cheaper (~$0.0001 per analysis) - More consistent structured outputs for this specific task GPT-4V sometimes gave me essays. Gemini stayed focused.

Stack: Next.js 14, Supabase (auth + postgres), Stripe, Vercel

The hard parts weren't the AI: - Auth edge cases (email confirmation flows, session refresh) - Credit system (what happens when API fails mid-request? refund?) - Making it not look like a hackathon project (I'm a backend guy, CSS is pain)

Is it always right? No. TA itself is debatable. But it's a second opinion that doesn't care what positions I'm holding. That's the value.

https://trinith-ai.vercel.app

Would love feedback from:
- Traders who can tell me if the output format is useful
- Anyone who's built with vision APIs (optimization tips?)
- Skeptics who think this is dumb (genuinely want to hear why)
by ACCount37 | 2026-01-22 16:01:09+00:00
Do you have a known-good, rigorously validated consciousness-meter that you can point at an LLM to confirm that it reads "NO CONSCIOUSNESS DETECTED"?

No? You don't?

Then where exactly is that overconfidence of yours coming from?

We don't know what "consciousness" is - let alone whether it can happen in arrays of matrix math. The leading theories, for all the good they do, are conflicting on whether LLM consciousness can be ruled out - and we, of course, don't know which theory of consciousness is correct. Or if any of them is.
by robomartin | 2026-01-22 16:01:17+00:00
Not a problem. We should pay for them to get proper identification. This is likely an infinitesimally small percentage of the population qualified to vote. As the other commenter said, you need identification for most important things in life. Yet, again, if someone does not have ID and they want to vote, it should be easy and free. If they can't drive, we pay for an Uber. If they don't understand the process, we pay for a coach. Etc. This is the kind of process that reduces to zero over time. If you process 100K people on year one, there might only be a couple of thousand people the following year...and down to zero it goes.