MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tombert | 2026-03-11 22:45:35+00:00
About 9 months ago I was working on building an Icecast server from scratch, with the gimmick being that between songs there would be AI-generated DJs that would give the normal corny banter you hear on the regular radio. I was initially using OpenAI for everything, but TTS from OpenAI ended up being kind of pricey.

So I started looking into models I could self-host for this stuff.

I can't remember which model it was, but one of them was kind of amusing because it would be two DJs signing off endlessly

DJ1: "Thanks for listening to WTOM, this has been Greg, signing off for tonight"

DJ2: "You said it Greg, it's been a great night, this is Bill, signing out"

DJ1: "Absolutely Bill, playing you out on a July evening this has been Greg from WTOM"

DJ2: "You better believe it, have a great night everyone! From WTOM this is Bill, wishing you a lovely Wednesday"

And it just kept going. Out of morbid curiosity I just let it keep going for an hour one day and they never stopped "signing out". I found it endlessly amusing.
by lokar | 2026-03-11 22:45:49+00:00
Are you referring to:

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

If so, that seems different. If not, can you clarify?
by wvenable | 2026-03-11 22:46:11+00:00
I think all your examples are all perfectly fine.

As for expansion, that might just be the risk we take. I been downvoted on reddit for being "too verbose" in my replies and I'm a human. And perhaps just reading the prompt in that case wouldn't give you more information; the LLM might actually have some insight that is relevant to the conversation. What's the difference between that and googling for something and pasting it in?
by awesome_dude | 2026-03-11 22:46:30+00:00
To be fair, almost every society portrays itself as the defender of whatever is right/good.

And, to be equally as fair, the only genuinely good guys are the ones that are too small to enforce their will upon others directly - small countries without arms who are forced to find other ways to engage with others in order to achieve whatever goals they have (resource acquisition)

The Americans have been extremely adept at dominating the discourse via non-government pathways (Hollywood)
by kpcyrd | 2026-03-11 22:46:32+00:00
Obfuscated javascript could still import a WebAssembly polyfill, if there really was any advantage in doing so: https://github.com/evanw/polywasm

Since WebAssembly instructions are much easier to reason about, you could probably auto-optimize away a lot of the obfuscation, like "this is a silly way to do X, so we can just do X directly".
by horsawlarway | 2026-03-11 22:46:56+00:00
Personally - yes.

They may not come after all the niche companies, but they definitely come after the most successful markets, especially those with low effort moats.

Same goes for relying on the Apple/Google app stores (ex - Apple literally got slapped in court for copying successful apps and then pushing their offering to the top of their stores... talk about wildly abusive behavior).

I may still choose to use AWS/GCP/Azure while trying to find product-market fit as an immature startup, but I'd look real, REAL hard at ditching them as soon as possible afterwards.

Unless you have particularly bursty workloads, they aren't even a good cost saving measure anymore.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-03-11 22:47:15+00:00
As much as I dislike Trump, I can't imagine that the military, under ANY administration, would hesitate to seize any technology that they thought was critical and was being withheld from them, especially if they can claim we're at war when special provisions apply.

I remember thinking about this - basically AGI - decades ago, and it was always obvious to me that if you created such a thing there'd come a day when the MIB would be ringing the doorbell.
by s_dev | 2026-03-11 22:47:29+00:00
If cool means interesting then yes, it is cool because it's archaic and different but it's not effective. It's the equivalent of a verbal contract. It's simply not as clear or coherent as a written one.

Irish democracy in contrast uses STV voting and a written constitution and is modeled between the best of what the UK, the US and France had to offer when it was drafted and is a very representative democracy with many political parties compared to the duopolies in the US and the UK. It's also why Ireland is largely immune to hard shifts to the left or right relative to the UK and US.
by jmyeet | 2026-03-11 22:47:30+00:00
Which "millions"? There's a lot to choose from. Oh, for context, John Mearscheimer puts the estimate on those killed by US sanctions (across all countries we've done this to) at 38 million [1].

I always have to bring up the sanctions on Iraq after Saddam was no longer our puppet. A Un report in the mid-1990s claimed US sanctions had killed 500,000 Iraqi children. Then UN ambassador and later Secretary of State Madeline Albright responded by saying "the price was wroth it" [2].

As for the Iran-Iraq war, there are many estimates of the total deaths (across both sides) exceeding a million eg [3].

[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@trtworld/video/7615994489991122194

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1T5JRVR53Eo

[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/23/iran-iraq-war-...
by nickjj | 2026-03-11 22:47:30+00:00
Thanks, I tried both and the results were not good IMO.

I gave them the same prompts. Both failed to give a working solution. I lost track of how many times it said "This is the guaranteed to work final solution" which still had the same problem as the 5 previous failures.

I gave up after around 40 failed prompts in a row where it was "Absolutely certain" it will work and is the "final boss" of the solution.
by TZubiri | 2026-03-11 22:47:42+00:00
For the record, I'm 100% in favour of talking about the present, and I'm fatigued about futuristic conversations, and don't find them usually productive.

So with that cleared, this is something that is happening NOW. A couple of years ago, the cutoff date meant that astroturfing like this had a return over months or years. Now with search tools, models can be updated in less than a day with astroturfed comments.
by nomel | 2026-03-11 22:47:44+00:00
Good news, it doesn't block! It just puts a red mark next to their name, so you can put less effort into that comment, if you choose.

And, it's social. If someone you've marked green is also using this, and they marks someone green that you have marked red, then you'll see a contested red-green next to them, which is a good "you should probably reconsider" indicator.
by Avicebron | 2026-03-11 22:48:25+00:00
> 3. I spend a week with creating a test language with a different trade-off for multiple-inheritance. Then I ask an LLM to summarize the unique features of the language into a couple of paragraphs, and then I post that into HN

I think where you are getting hung up is the idea of "better results". We as a community don't need to strive for "better results" we can easily say, hey we just want HN to be between people, if you have the LLM generate this hypothetical test, just tell people in your own words. Maybe forcing yourself to go through that exercise is better in the long run for your own understanding.
by GMoromisato | 2026-03-11 22:48:44+00:00
I read HN both because I want to read what humans think, and because I want to read insightful discussion.

The tension is that as insightful discussion becomes easier/better with LLMs, there is less need to read HN. All I'm left with is provenance: reading because a human wrote it, not because it is uniquely insightful.
by charcircuit | 2026-03-11 22:48:47+00:00
>obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens.

I do not think it is that straightforward. Making it more accessible makes it possible for people with less skin in the game able to vote. Imagine how invested someone who owns several properties and businesses in a city is and how much they care about the success of the city compared to some other person who is just renting an apartment and has not even a job in that city meaning they could move at any time. The vote of the first person is much more important than the second. Trying to make voting overly accessible may make more people from the second category start voting which could result in bad decisions being made because people can easily move away if things go wrong.
by r2vcap | 2026-03-11 22:48:54+00:00
The strength—and also the weakness—lies in how WASM is consumed in the browser. During instantiation, JavaScript engines validate the module and reject it if it uses unsupported instructions or features. In practice, due to browser compatibility differences, WASM modules often need to be built in multiple variants, such as a baseline version, a SIMD version, a SIMD+threads version, and so on. This is a significant pain compared to native binaries, which can rely on runtime feature detection and dynamic dispatch.
by bonoboTP | 2026-03-11 22:48:59+00:00
It's interesting how people never even learn about any upsides to that. Even if the balance comes out on the side of elected officials, it's good to at least have some idea of why so many societies have worked like that (other than "they were dumb and evil I guess").

The main thing is long-term stability and limits on backstabbing and ruthless competition. Sure it doesn't bring it to zero, plenty of bloody examples from history. But when someone gets close to power for the first time and might be out of there quite soon, and have to watch out for being replaced quickly, they will behave quite differently than someone who plans ahead in decades and generations (if all things go well). If you have a short time under the sun, you better extract all you can while it lasts.

It's kind of like a lifetime appointment or like tenure, except also across generations. Tenure allows professors to ignore short-term ups and downs and allows them some resilience and slack (though funding is still an issue). Similarly a nobleman can "relax" and take a longer-term view on things. The failure mode is that they stop caring and become lazy and just enjoy their position.
by wesselbindt | 2026-03-11 22:49:15+00:00
> Assuming this isn’t an LLM bot, I don’t see how you ship that bug multiple times

I don't know about the guy you're replying to, but I've made many mistakes in my coding life, and some of them more than once. The Date API is written in a way to obfuscate the real complexities of date and time management, so I find it quite easy to imagine someone stepping in the same footgun more than once.

EDIT: oh ew, grandparent comment is a bot. How did you recognize it?
by spudlyo | 2026-03-11 22:49:17+00:00
That is indeed a problem. If one must complain about it, I think it would help to at least try elevate these type of tangential remarks beyond hurled accusations. A focus on the the specifics (where arguments are poorly made, banal observations are gussied up with flowery language, points are needlessly reiterated, etc) would at least make for slightly more interesting meta commentary.
by mikewarot | 2026-03-11 22:49:21+00:00
My radical opinion is there shouldn't be 2 flags, there should be N flags, user defined, so that we can flag humor/satire/factuality/insight/political and a bunch of other things. I fully realize that's not going to fly any time soon.

Adding AI in addition to the standard up/downvote and flag seems a reasonable thing.
by BeetleB | 2026-03-11 22:49:26+00:00
Anything I post here is always in my own voice - even when I use an LLM. 95% of the times grammar/spelling is fixed, it's because my brain lapsed while typing, not because I don't know the grammar well and am using LLM to shape my voice.

I would wager that this use case is much more prevalent than ones where the LLM changed the comment significantly enough to change one's voice.

I never copy/paste from an LLM into HN. Everything is typed by myself (and I never "manually" copy LLM content). I don't have any automatic tools for inserting LLM content here.[1]

Always, always, always keep in mind that you don't notice these positive use cases, because they are not noticeable by design. So the problematic "clearly LLM" comments you see may well be a small minority of LLM-assisted comments. Don't punish the (majority) "good" folks to limit the few "bad" ones.

Lastly, I often wish we had a rule for not calling out others' comments as "AI slop" or the like.[2] It just leads to pointless debates on whether an LLM was used and distracts far more than the comment under question. I'm sure plenty of 100% human written comments have been labeled as LLM generated.

[1] The dictation one is a slight exception, and I use it only occasionally when health issues arise.

[2] Probably OK for submissions, but not comments.
by hardwaresofton | 2026-03-11 22:49:59+00:00
If you’d like to get acquainted with modern WebAssembly, check out the component model book:

https://component-model.bytecodealliance.org/

It includes high level concepts, practical code samples and more that introduce the really powerful parts of WebAssembly.

With regards to the JS ecosystem specifically there are 3 projects to know:

https://github.com/bytecodealliance/StarlingMonkey

https://github.com/bytecodealliance/ComponentizeJS

https://github.com/bytecodealliance/jco

The most mature tool chain right now is Rust, but there is good support for most things with LLVM underneath (C/C++ via clang). Golang, python and support for other languages is getting better and better (tinygo and big go) and there’s even more to come.

One of the goals of WebAssembly is to melt right into your local $TOOLCHAIN as a compilation target, and we are getting closer every week.
by computomatic | 2026-03-11 22:50:42+00:00
> I though of pasting in Perplexity's summary, saying it was from Perplexity but that I had checked and it was a good summary.

> Would that be OK or would that count as an AI written comment?

The rule seems written to answer this directly.

Absolutely nobody cares what Perplexity has to say about the case - summary or otherwise. If you mention what the case is, I can ask claude myself if I’m interested.

Better yet, post a link to an authoritative source on the case (helpful but not required).

At minimum, verify your info via another source. The community deserves that much at least.

An AI-generated summary adds nothing positive and actually detracts from the conversation.
by _wire_ | 2026-03-11 22:51:10+00:00
Interesting that lack of engineering discipline in LLM design has industry vernacular veering into medically pathologized forensics and remediation.

From a C.A.R. Hoare perspective, this looks like a horrible development: Human bias in training of LLMs produces effects that convince credulous users that automata are alive, credulous users think that as we don't understand why living organisms do what they do, then as an LLM seems like a living organism there's no expectation of understanding why LLMs do what they do...

We put our own ghost in a machine, confuse the machine with our ghost, then rely on dark arts to cope with our lack of understanding of the machine.

So expect LLMs to be further mystified, treated as specimens for study and symptoms to cure, then categorized behaviorally by medically appropriated syndromes.

We can already see the burgeoning new high priest career-track Doctor of AI, with all the attendant quackery, patent cures, leaching and horse-whispering.
by bell-cot | 2026-03-11 22:51:30+00:00
Yeah, from the Pentagon's or CNN's PoV.

Though if I was a hacking group with little interest in Iran, hitting a US-based target...I might make some pro-Iran noises, trying to confuse the attribution. Or to curry favor with China, Russia, NK, ...

(And I'm not ruling out a nation-state actor being directly behind this.)
by quietsegfault | 2026-03-11 22:51:35+00:00
Much like not dumping motor oil down the drain, it’s probably near impossible to catch skilled AI-users. I think we all want to have a nice space to chat, just like we don’t want a polluted planet, so we’ll just have to be on the honor system.

I don’t think there’s a lot to AI generated stuff on here that really bothered me to the point I wanted to call someone out.
by ang_cire | 2026-03-11 22:52:12+00:00
> You spent the rest of your comment making the case that it is not good for the US to win. Implying, though not directly saying, we would be better off with China.

This is you putting words in my mouth. It's bad if either wins.

You seem to be operating under an unspoken personal belief that an AI race "win" inevitably spills out into global dominance.

I don't know that it won't, but you likewise don't know that it will, and I'm not beholden to debate things from your chosen premise.

I think AI will be bad for whoever is being targeted by it's controllers, but I don't think it will intrinsically disrupt the military spheres that exist now as a result of nuclear weaponry.

China will use its AI to hurt the people it's hurting now.

The US will use its AI to hurt the people it's hurting now.

Imho, the idea of an AI arms race "winner" is just the new face of the securitization rhetoric that we used to justify our military excursionism during the Cold War.
by jarjoura | 2026-03-11 22:52:34+00:00
Ah, sorry, I guess I'm not sure what it is you're actually debating needs to be fixed. Are children being born today with more birth defects and we (society) now want to concern ourselves with the issue that if parents want to have children, they need to plan for it and start earlier? Is that what a supposed objective policy would try to address?

Men also have a clock and birth defects are known to go up the older they are. So this can't be limited to women regardless of policy decisions.

I'm also not sure there could be any actual conversative government policy that could fix what is ultimately a financial incentives problem. Lots of parents would start earlier if they were able to have things like home ownership and space to raise kids in, and education systems that don't skew towards needing upper middle class levels of access to. Any potential new idea with any realistic long term fix would end up looking quite progressive and in our current hostile environment become a no-go for any conservative political appointee.
by DoctorOetker | 2026-03-11 22:52:39+00:00
In the human brain most synapses are indeed excitatory, while a minority is inhibitory.

No concise HN comment will give you a complete picture of whats currently known about the human brain, so a platitude necessarily follows:

We call the nearly touching interfaces between neurons synapses, small packets / droplets of neurotransmitter are sent across this interface from the source to the target neuron. Such signals can be excitatory (promote the probability of excitation of the target firing soon) or inhibitory (inhibits the probability of the target firing soon). There are 2 types of sensitive areas on your average neuron: the dendrites (long branching tentacles, that receive excitatory signals) and the cell body where all the signals are accumulated to a local instantaneous "sum" is also sensitive to synaptic activation, but the synapses on the cell body are inhibitory, when sufficiently inhibited the neuron will refuse to fire its axons, so the inhibitory synapses on the cell body can gate the cumulative signal and prevent it from triggering this neuron temporarily. If the neuron does fire, this propagates along the axons (another type of branching tentacles, which lead to yet other neurons, sometimes touching them excitatorily at their dendrite, sometimes touching a neuron inhibitorily at their cell body.

I hope that helped?
by jychang | 2026-03-11 22:52:52+00:00
Well, for one, Anthropic mostly uses Google TPUs and Amazon Inferentia2 chips, not Nvidia NVL72s. That's because... Google and Amazon are major investors in Anthropic.

Secondly, you missed out the entire AI industry trend in 2024-2025, where the failure of the GPT-4.5 pretrain run and the pullback from GPT-4 to GPT-4 Turbo to GPT-4o (each of which are smaller in parameter count). GPT-4 is 1.6T, GPT-4 Turbo is generally considered 1/2 to 1/4 that, and GPT-4o is even smaller (details below)

Thirdly, we KNOW that GPT-4o runs on Microsoft Maia 100 hardware with 64GB each chip, which gives a hard limit on the size of GPT-4o and tells us that it's a much smaller distilled version of GPT-4. GPT-4 cannot fit on Maia 100 servers without huge clusters that kill performance below what we see on Azure, and we know Microsoft uses Maia 100s to serve GPT-4o!

Fourthly, it is not publicly KNOWN, but leaks say that GPT-4o is 200b-300b in size, which also tells us that running GPT-4 sized models is nonsense.

Fifthly, OpenAI Head of Research has since confirmed that o1, o3, GPT-5 use the same pretrain run as 4o, so they would be the same size.[1] That means GPT-5 is not some 1T+ model! Semianalysis confirms that the only pretrain run since 4o is 4.5, which is a 10T model but everyone knows is a failed run.

Sixthly, Anthropic distilled Opus 4/4.1 to 4.5, which is why it runs ~3x faster than Opus 4 while costing 1/3 the price in terms of API fees.

Seventhly, Amazon Bedrock and Google Vertex serves models at approximately similar memory bandwidths when calculating tokens/sec, giving 4900GB/sec for Google Vertex. Opus aligns very well with 80GB of active params. There's calculations for Amazon Bedrock on the Opus 4.5 launch thread that compares it to gpt-oss-120b with similar conclusions.

Eightly, no respectable model has a sparsity below 3% these days- ridiculously low sparsity gives you Llama 4. Every single cutting edge model are around 3-5% sparsity. Knowing the active param count for Opus 4.5 gives you a very good estimate of total param count.

The entire AI industry is moving AWAY from multi-trillion-parameter models. Everything is about increasing efficiency with the amount of parameters you have, not hyperscaling like GPT-4.5 which was shown to be a bad way forward.

Nobody thinks Opus 4.5 is bigger than around 2T in size (so not 10T). Opus 4/4.1 may have been ~6T, but that's it. Any guess of 10T or above is patently ridiculous for both Opus 4/4.1 and Opus 4.5.

[1] https://x.com/petergostev/status/1995744289079656834
by amiantos | 2026-03-11 22:53:16+00:00
Every single one of your comments in this thread is some slippery slope stuff where you think corporations and federal government are going to work together to kill off the (public?) internet. It's okay that you feel that way, even if it's just a big ol' fallacy, but you don't need to repeat it in six different places. You made your point, you think the internet is doomed no matter what happens, great, let's move on.
by thot_experiment | 2026-03-11 22:53:30+00:00
Lego is still the best toy, but man, I really miss the old style Technic sets where most of the pieces were very generic vs today's sets which are less versatile. 8480 and 8250 as examples (my two favorite sets growing up, though I didn't manage to get my hands on 8480 until I got my first job)
by Sean-Der | 2026-03-11 22:54:42+00:00
If anyone is using/testing WebRTC I would love to hear how it is working for them :) I am hoping Simulcast makes a impact with smaller streamers/site operators.

* Cheaper servers. More competition and I want to see people running their own servers.

* Better video quality. Encoding from source is going to be better then transcoding.

* No more bad servers. Send video to your audience and server isn't able to do modification/surveillance with E2E Encryption via WebRTC

* Better Latency. No more time lost transcoding. I love low latency streaming where people are connected to community. Not just blasting one-way video.