MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nonameiguess | 2026-03-11 22:15:27+00:00
I get that it's possibly contrary to the point if people are looking to truly have conversations here, but at least 99% of the time, I post a comment and never come back. I said what I had to say and don't particularly feel like getting sucked into an argument if someone disagrees, and frankly, if I'm wrong I think I'll realize it eventually anyway. I'm more likely to dig in my heels and ossify in a wrong position if someone shits on me and I immediately feel the need to defend myself. It can mesmerize you into believing things you might not have if it didn't hit your ego. I could be deluded but think I'm good at making arguments, but that at least means I'm good at making arguments that convince myself, which can be dangerous because you can convince yourself of things that are wrong. The upside is if anyone is out there accusing me of being an LLM, I don't even know so it can't insult me.

It is amusing to witness this happening to others when it's someone like you who is a semi-public figure who should probably be well known on Reddit of all places.
by cogman10 | 2026-03-11 22:15:35+00:00
Oh interesting.

In java land the fact that you effectively don't have pointers but rather everything is an object reference, this ends up not being an issue.

I wonder if the WASM limitation is related to the fact that JavaScript has pretty similar semantics with no real concept of a "pointer". It means to get that interior pointer, you'd need to also introduce that concept into the GC of browsers which might be a bit harder since it'd only be for WASM.
by GMoromisato | 2026-03-11 22:15:57+00:00
But what if it turns out that human+LLM can produce more "thoughtful, curious discussion" than human alone?

That's the dichotomy: Do we prefer text with the right "provenance" over higher quality text?

[Perhaps you'll say that human+LLM text will never be as high-quality as human alone. But I'm pretty sure we've seen that movie before and we know how it ends.]

That said, you're right that because human+LLM is so much more efficient, we'll be drowning in material--and the average quality might even go down, even if the absolute quantity of high-quality content goes up.

I think, in the long term, we will have to come up with more sophisticated criteria for posting rather than just "must be unenhanced human".
by al_borland | 2026-03-11 22:16:14+00:00
I don’t know why this needs to be a class issue. Using auto-correct as a scapegoat for spelling and grammar issues has now made them socially acceptable to the point that most people don’t call it out anymore, or use it as a means to discredit someone’s underlying argument.

As auto-correct has become seemingly worse, I think a lot of people have just given up fighting it all the time.
by theodric | 2026-03-11 22:16:18+00:00
The point of the hereditary peerage was the same as the point of having a non-elected Senate. Now both will have been lost in the name of "democracy" - a system of government that constantly fails to do either what is the desire of the people OR what is truly in their interests. From here on out it'll just be whoever manages to connive their way into power through connections, payola, corruption, island meetups, and so on. I strongly suspect this will lead to a worse government, not a better one.
by notabee | 2026-03-11 22:17:04+00:00
The problem with this becoming the only reasonable tactic writ large is that it creates social bubbles just like social media. You wind up with very insular cultures and I think at least some of the hype addiction problems seen in tech can be attributed to these echo chambers. It's a hard problem to solve, especially now with LLMs being force amplifiers to low effort hiring and job seeking attempts. But to not solve this problem will, I think, continue to make increasingly unwell companies and unwell industries as the "meme pool" gets very shallow.
by pixl97 | 2026-03-11 22:17:13+00:00
It's becoming rarer and rarer for people to have friends that are physically close to them unless they've stayed in the town they were born in.

Modern technology kind of broke friendship in the sense that not very long ago maintaining friendships over any distance was expensive. That is it costs long distance fees, gas, or letter writing. Because of those expenses it was very common to make friends locally pretty quickly.

But the internet broke that, especially modern social media. Wherever you moved your friends were a free website away, and long distance calling was gone. At first this seemed fine because sites connected you to your friends, but as the lock in happened it became a contest of getting you pissed off and showing you ads.

Going to take a long time to socially fix this problem. Especially as some large number of people are going to talk to AI instead.
by joquarky | 2026-03-11 22:17:21+00:00
I miss having the completion models like davinci-003 since it gained in performance where it lacked simplicity to get what you want out.

It was fun to come up with creative ways to get it to answer your question or generate data by setting up a completion scenario.

I guess "chat" became the universal completion scenario. But I still feel like it could be "smarter" without the RLHF layer of distortion.
by xpe | 2026-03-11 22:17:22+00:00
> Taking the time to write something, and read over it is a better skill than asking an LLM to do it for you.

Yes, this is a great skill to have: no argument from me. This wasn't my point, and I hope you can see than upon reflection.

> All those points you mention in your first paragraph are excuses, trying to make it seem like there was some sort of effort to get an LLM to write a post.

Consider that a reader of the word 'excuses' would often perceive an escalation of sorts. A dismissal.

> Quality comes from your ability to think and reason through a topic.

That's part of it. Since the quote above is a bit ambiguous to me, I will rephrase it as "What are the factors that influence the quality of a comment posted on Hacker News?" and then answer the question. I would then split apart that question into sub-questions of the form "To what extent does a comment ..."

- address the context? Pay attention to the conversational history?

- follow the guidelines of the forum?

- communicate something useful to at least some of the readers?

- use good reasoning?

One thing that all of the four bullet points require is intelligence. Until roughly ~2 years ago, most people would have said the above demand human intelligence; AI can't come close. But the gap is narrowing. Anyhow, I would very much like to see more intelligence (of all kinds, via various methods, including LLM-assisted brainstorming) in the service of better comments here. But intelligence isn't enough; there are also shared values. Shared values of empathy and charity.

In case you are wondering about my "agenda"... it is something along the lines of "I want everyone to think a lot harder about these issues, because we ain't seen NOTHING yet". I also strive try to promote and model the kind of community I want to see here.
by ZekiAI2026 | 2026-03-11 22:17:27+00:00
Interesting gap to explore: Sentrial catches drift and anomalies -- failures that happen by accident. What's the defense against failures that happen by design?

Prompt injection is the clearest example: an attacker embeds instructions in content your agent processes. The agent does exactly what it's told. No wrong tool invocations, no hallucinations in the traditional sense -- just an agent successfully executing injected instructions. From a monitoring perspective it looks like normal operation.

Same with adversarial inputs crafted to stay inside your learned "correct" patterns: tool calls are right, arguments are plausible, outputs pass quality checks. The manipulation is in what the agent was pointed at, not in how it behaved.

Curious whether your anomaly detection has a layer for adversarial intent vs. operational drift, or whether that's explicitly out of scope for now.
by famouswaffles | 2026-03-11 22:18:09+00:00
>With only instructional materials (a 500-page reference grammar, a dictionary, and ≈400 extra parallel sentences) all provided in context, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash are capable of learning to translate from English to Kalamang— a Papuan language with fewer than 200 speakers and therefore almost no online presence—with quality similar to a person who learned from the same materials

https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05530
by kace91 | 2026-03-11 22:18:12+00:00
Honestly, having a common language that offers access to most knowledge and people in the western world at once is already amazing. If it happens to be the native language of most Americans, all the better for them.

A century ago it was French or Latin, and a century from now it might be Mandarin or something else. The existence of a standard is what matters.

The only complain I have about Americans and language is that most tech companies fail spectacularly at supporting multilingualism, from keyboards struggling with completion to youtube and reddit forcing translations on users.
by two_tasty | 2026-03-11 22:18:13+00:00
I previously worked at BCGX, their tech arm. It's not quite as bad as you point out here, but tech workers are very much second-class-citizens. There's a "jock" vs. "nerd" dynamic between BCG business consultants and BCGX tech folks, even at senior levels. I think it's changing, but it will take a long time and many technical folks being admitted to the partnership.
by kelnos | 2026-03-11 22:18:17+00:00
Sure, I agree that getting something you want (top post) out of an LLM isn't zero-effort.

But this isn't about effort. This is about genuine humanity. I want to read comments that, in their entirety, came out of the brain of a human. Not something that a human and LLM collaboratively wrote together.

I think the one exception I would make (where maybe the guidelines go too far) is that case of a language barrier. I wouldn't object to someone who isn't confident with their English running a comment by an LLM to help fix errors that might make a comment harder to understand for readers. (Or worse, mean something that the commenter doesn't intend!) It's a privilege that I'm a native English speaker and that so much online discourse happens in English. Not everyone has that privilege.
by bonoboTP | 2026-03-11 22:18:46+00:00
Any system that grows too fast has these kinds of problems. When it's a small intimate circle where everyone knows everyone, reputation alone can keep people in check. Once it's larger you need to invent rules and bureaucracies and structures and you will have loopholes that bad actors can more easily exploit, hiding in the crowd, than in the small version. It's the same with the Internet or computing. Security was much less of a topic when it was mostly honest academic nerds using the Internet, and the protocol designs often didn't even assume adversarial participants. Science also still runs on this assumed honesty system that worked well when it was small.
by shagie | 2026-03-11 22:18:48+00:00
(I was replying to a now deleted response)

> Slop has an upside?

Not exactly. Rather its is that places where one does want to find pictures of people's cute cats and dogs is now having additional moderation / administration burdens to try to keep the AI generated content out of those places.

It's not a "cute pictures of cats overrunning some place" but rather "even in the places where it was appropriate to post pictures of one's pets in #mypets or /r/cuteCatPics because such pictures are appropriate there (so they don't overrun other places), now people are starting fights over AI generated content."

An example that I recently encountered was someone who did an AI replacement of a cat that was "loafing" of a loaf of bread that looked like a cat. The cat picture would have been fine (with a dozen "aww" and "cute" comments in reply)... the AI cat loaf picture required moderation actions and some comment defusing over the use of AI.
by tzs | 2026-03-11 22:19:04+00:00
States do however issue the documents that you might need to present to the Social Security Administration. Maybe he had trouble getting those?

Speaking of documents, here's a tip. Use your name as it appears on your birth certificate on any government forms even if nobody ever calls you by that name. Also probably a good idea to use it when you sign up for utilities, on rental and lease agreements, property deeds, and medical records.

The SSA is real picky about names. Even if no one ever in your entire life has called you anything other than "Rob", if your birth certificate says "Robert" and that is what was on the form when you got your SSN assigned shortly after your birth if you ever need a replacement card they are not going to be happy with documents that say "Rob".
by lotsofpulp | 2026-03-11 22:19:22+00:00
> MacBook Neo, $599. Great but maybe I want Touch ID & more storage, ok $699. Well at this point now it's "only" $300 to get the air which is much better.

Yes

>Well, now that you're already spending $1000, might as well just do the extra $500 and get the pro..."

Disagree. The Air offers additional utility and longevity for the price, the Pro offers nothing that 90% of people will ever perceive.

I know a ton of people for whom the $500 would be nothing, but still get an Air rather than a Pro. Obviously, that’s not great data, but I feel like the jump from Air to Pro just doesn’t happen or won’t happen compared to jumps from Neo to Air.
by SimianSci | 2026-03-11 22:19:23+00:00
You're right, but neglect to mention that infrastructure necessary to enrich uranium is not something so easily squirrled away and hidden while also dealing with radioactive isotopes.

It was a treaty, many concessions existed to ensure both parties were comfortable with the arrangement. But that does not at all suggest that the agreement didnt account for foul play on either side.

It was an incredibly solid diplomatic option employed for several years, during which the perpetual "months away from nuclear weapons" rhetoric never proved well-founded.
Iran's existance is perpetually an existential threat when the only alternative to diplomacy is its total destruction at the expense of American and Iranian lives.
by nitwit005 | 2026-03-11 22:19:31+00:00
Push the idea past a single comment. Someone decides they have a great method for getting summaries, and adds it as a comment to every post they look at. Other people have similar ideas. Is that fine? It doesn't take a lot for the whole site to feel like useless spam.

It'd be far better to just have a thread about the best way to get good summaries.
by skibble | 2026-03-11 22:19:33+00:00
I'm not from the U.S. but as my country's elections work the same way, I feel compelled to weigh in on this. Here in the UK, you go to your local polling station, you give your name, they check it against the list, then cross you out and hand you a ballot. (This was tweaked in the last few years to require government ID, but the process remains the same. More on that later).

While it's true you could in theory say you were anyone on the list, you'd have to first know you were picking a name that wasn't going to be used, or hadn't already. This is already something of a reach. If someone uses a name that had already been used, or someone turns up later to vote and finds their name crossed out, it's going to set off alarm bells.

On top of the logistical challenges, this is a high-effort endeavour. A single person going to multiple polling stations repeatedly doesn't scale super well. Obviously you can try and do this en masse but the more people are involved the harder it would be to keep secret. If you're trying to rig a local council election with low turnout, it might make a meaningful difference. Does it work if you're trying to swing a congressional race or higher? I see the mentions of carousel voting, and am aware of the likes of Tammany Hall, but these are more of an open secret. What the likes of the GOP are alleging is that there's an invisible epidemic of voter fraud to engineer distrust of the system generally.

Sadly in the UK our long-established voting system was tampered with by the government of the time, who took a leaf from GOP voter intimidation and suppression tactics and mandated government-issued ID at the polls to solve a an almost non-existent issue, leading to tens of thousands of eligible voters being turned away at the polls. Thankfully this moronic and clear abuse of process is likely to be reverse before our next major election, however.
by justinnk | 2026-03-11 22:19:35+00:00
I think it really depends on the how. Engaging with it in a socratic debate-style argument [1] if no fellow human is available might very much support your thought process. On the other hand, just obtaining the solution to one‘s homework/problem/task/… won‘t be very beneficial for one’s development. The latter is sadly much more convenient and probably accounts for most of the usage. I remember a saying about the mind being a muscle: in order to keep it in good shape, you have to use it actively.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method
by MegaByteMark | 2026-03-11 22:19:36+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this after getting incredibly frustrated with how LLMs handle UI scaffolding in tools like Cursor and Copilot.

If you ask an agent to "build a dashboard," you get a different result every time. If you write a massive, descriptive prompt detailing every padding and flex-box property, you waste time. Figma screenshots work sometimes (with vision models), but they are token-heavy, slow, and impossible to git commit as text.

I wanted a deterministic Intermediate Representation (IR) for UI that both humans and LLMs could read effortlessly. So, I built a lightweight Markdown DSL.

Instead of a paragraph of vague text, you just give your workspace a .ui.md file that looks like this:

```markdown
---
framework: React + Tailwind CSS
theme: ./design-system.md
component: src/components/LoginForm.tsx
---

||| COLUMN |||
::: CARD :::
# Welcome Back
[ text: Email Address ]
[ text: Password ]
[ Login ](#login)
--- END ---
--- END ---
```

Why this works better:

It's deterministic: LLMs inherently understand tree mapping and markdown. ||| COLUMN ||| maps to standard flex-col logic every single time without hallucinating.

Two-Way Code Sync: Because of the component: frontmatter, the AI knows exactly which file this wireframe maps to. If a PM or dev updates the text in the .ui.md file (e.g., adding a checkbox), you just hit Cmd+I / Copilot Chat and say "Sync changes", and it automatically hunts down the React/Vue file and reconstructs the component.

True separation of concerns: The structural wireframe is entirely isolated from the design system/styling rules.

It's essentially Spec-Driven Development taking advantage of native LLM text-parsing strengths.

It’s just a set of instructions/skills you can drop into your .github/copilot-instructions.md or .cursorrules.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this approach, or if any of you have found better ways to enforce strict layout constraints on coding agents!
by ninjagoo | 2026-03-11 22:19:51+00:00
This is a great point. In the past and present, sites like slashdot and HN depend on the users to achieve that moderation to surface useful comments and keep 'spam' down.

Now, there are tools to achieve that kind of moderation automagically, and even better, consistently. This is an opportunity to build out a community that is useful for everyone. The first platform that guarantees anonymity supported by human-independent moderation will likely attract significant and persistent user support.

There is still the issue of cost - how does the community pay for such a platform? Perhaps like the Google of yore - very limited ads? Avoiding enshittification can be done through the Wikipedia model - non-profit to manage the whole thing?
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-11 22:20:03+00:00
It's not at all obvious because there's more than one way to go about it. Obviously entirely outsourcing is bad. Whereas working cooperatively seems highly beneficial to me.

Google search has been getting progressively worse for technical topics for at least the past decade. Now suddenly they started providing a free tutor capable of custom tailoring graduate level explanations of technical topics for me on demand. The difference is night and day.
by amadeuspagel | 2026-03-11 22:20:04+00:00
> The case of Peter Mandelson, who resigned from the Lords in February after revelations about his friendship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, drew renewed attention to the upper chamber and the problem of lords behaving badly.

But Mandelson wasn't a hereditary noble. His example is an argument for abolishing the House of Lords entirely (which I agree with in any case) but not specifically for ejecting hereditary nobles.

> Labour remains committed to eventually replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that is “more representative of the U.K.” If past experience is anything to go by, change will come slowly.

Why does the House of Lords need to be replaced at all? Most countries are gridlocked enough with one chamber of parliament.
by thefounder | 2026-03-11 22:20:10+00:00
It’s not only about the precision of the munition. When you put military installations in residential areas you get this kind of result regardless of how precise the weapons are.

The maps could be outdated, intelligence may be flawed etc. In a hot war collateral casualties are secondary to the military objective. You try to avoid civilian deaths but that should be on best effort basis.
by jjk166 | 2026-03-11 22:20:21+00:00
> It's better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems "better." Language is an incredibly nuanced thing, it's best for people's own thoughts to come through exactly as they have written them.

This is the opposite of how language works. You want people to understand the idea you're trying to communicate, not fixate on the semantics of how you communicated. Language is like fashion - you only want to break the rules deliberately. If AI or an editor or whatever changes your writing to be more clear and correct, and you don't look at it and say "no, I chose that phrasing for a reason" then the editor's version is much more likely to be understood correctly by the recipient.
by zamadatix | 2026-03-11 22:20:44+00:00
Sure, despite another guideline saying:

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

the title being the changelog is still probably the better choice because the discussion here and linked are about guidelines in the page rather than absolute rules or a discussion about the title alone.

Many of the other guidelines have exceptions too, and various strengths. E.g. "Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information..." is a pretty weak guideline in practice while "If the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective..." is often over-enforced by automatic tooling and stuff like "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis..." CAN sometimes just make sense where a use of italics might easily get missed WHILE OTHER TIMES BEING THE REASON THE GUIDELINE WAS ADDED.

Edit: Well I wasted my time writing that as dang said it better anyways https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-03-11 22:20:45+00:00
> Someone using an LLM is craft a reply is not a problem on it's own.

No, someone using an LLM to craft a reply is a problem in its own. I want to hear what a human has to say, not a human filtered through a computer program. No grammar editing, nothing. Give me your actual writing or I'm not interested.