MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by observationist | 2026-03-11 20:46:23+00:00
On a technical level, you can really only guard against changing your semantics and voice - if you're letting software alter the meaning, or meanings, you intend, and use words you don't normally use, it's probably too far.

This is probably ok:

>> On a technical level, you can really only guard against software that changes your semantics or voice. If you're letting it alter the meaning (or meanings) you intend, or if it starts using words you would never normally use, then it's gone too far.

This is probably too far:

>>> On a technical level, it's important to recogn1ize that the only robust guardrail we can realistically implement is one that prevents modifications to core semantics or authorial voice. If you're comfortable allowing the system to refine or rephrase the precise meanings you originally intended — or if it begins incorporating vocabulary that doesn't align with your typical linguistic patterns — then you've likely crossed a meaningful threshold where the output no longer fully represents your authentic intent.

Something to consider is that you can analyze your own stylometric patterns over a large collection of your writing, and distill that into a system of rules and patterns to follow which AI can readily handle. It is technically possible, albeit tedious, to clone your style such that it's indistinguishable from your actual human writing, and can even icnlude spelling mistakes you've made before at a rate matching your actual writing.

AI editing is weird, though. Not seeing a need, unless English isn't your native language.
by randusername | 2026-03-11 20:46:42+00:00
"If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them."
- George Orwell

I don't think it is a moral failing to use AI to generate writing or to use it to brainstorm ideas and crystalize them, but c'mon isn't it weird to insist that you need them to write _comments_ on the internet? What happens when the AI decides you're wrongthinking?
by recursive | 2026-03-11 20:46:42+00:00
> the computer lives with you.

What does this mean? The computer isn't alive. It's physically located on my person? Phones and watches have already cracked this.

If I say "Bob lives with me", that just mean that they generally reside in the same domicile as me. Desktop PCs already do that.

I just don't understand what's even intended by this.
by tavavex | 2026-03-11 20:46:48+00:00
Not just bad taste. I have yet to see a post that attributes its text to an LLM ("I asked ChatGPT and here's what it said...") that doesn't come off as patronizing. "Hey, so I don't really have any knowledge or experience of my own with this topic, but here, let me ask an LLM for you. Here, read the output, since you apparently can't figure out how to ask it yourself. Read it. Aren't you interested in what my knowledge machine has to say? Why don't you treat it like how you'd treat me if I shared my own opinion?"
by stephbook | 2026-03-11 20:46:58+00:00
My feeling has always been that there was no interest in investigating this.

The government can skirt medical help, can send the next batch of officers in without problems and doesn't need to confront an adversary that is politically.. difficult under Trump. It's certainly no coincidence that Russia would start using something like this in Cuba, a friendly state, and not say.. France. Where the local police and spy agencies could investigate and observe.

Just imagine what would have to happen if someone acknowledged Havanah syndrome is real.

Next up, burn pits cause lung damage and brain damage too.
by brainwad | 2026-03-11 20:47:04+00:00
You can solve that simply by putting all votes inside signed envelopes, and waiting to count the contents until all the envelopes can be checked for duplicate voter details. In Australia this can be forced on you if you are caught double voting, or you can opt into it if you don't want to appear on the (public) electoral roll (and hence can't be ticked off), or you're voting from outside your electorate (so they don't have a copy of your electorate's roll). But it would slow down the count a lot if you applied it to everyone.
by rayiner | 2026-03-11 20:47:06+00:00
> As noted, the number of fraudulent votes are astonishingly small, given the amount of money spent on proving otherwise

How would you even know? The fact that prosecutions for fraudulent voting are rare tells you nothing. Prosecutions for tax evasion are also rare. Does that mean nobody evades taxes? If you have a system that’s insecure, how would you even know when it’s been compromised?
by tedggh | 2026-03-11 20:47:14+00:00
If a comment sucks it gets downvoted anyway. If it’s thoughtful, the drafting tool and process is kind of beside the point.

Plenty of people already use search engines, editors, translators, etc. when writing. An LLM is just another tool in that box.

The practical approach is the one HN has always used: judge the content.

Btw, this was co written with ChatGPT. Does that make any difference to anyone?

J/K, actually it was not co written by ChatGPT.

Or maybe it was…
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-11 20:47:16+00:00
> Should I now dumb down my language or deliberately introduce errors

Language is a tool. If it wins the argument, yes. I’ve absolutely gone back through drafts to tighten up language and reduce word complexity. And if I’m typing with someone who frequently typos, I’ll sometimes reverse the autocorrect. Mostly as a joke to myself. But I imagine it helps me come across as less stuck up. (Truth: I’m a bit stuck up about language :P.)
by crooked-v | 2026-03-11 20:47:29+00:00
I got a used Sceptre TV (https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...) and I'm extremely happy with it. No "smart" features, no bullshit, no slow menus, just a set of 4K@60Hz HDMI ports (newer models do 4K@120Hz) with ARC and CEC and a comprehensive set of display options.
by altairprime | 2026-03-11 20:47:41+00:00
It’s not sarcasm. If you feel if I have misunderstood the intent of the guideline we’re discussing — “Don’t post generated/AI-edited comments”, as the title currently reads, then I’m happy to discuss further. (I often make logical negation errors that I miss in proofing, so it’s possible I slipped up, too!)
by PaulHoule | 2026-03-11 20:47:48+00:00
When it comes to politicians it is the opposite

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/10/the-polar...

And I believe that result because I’ve studied DW-NOMINATE in depth. I’ve run into problems trying to do dimensional reduction on preference data and the literature on DW-NOMINATE is distinct and geometrical being written by political scientists on the quantitative side as opposed to data science or ML.

I can very much believe that left-leaning civilians have moved left at the same time right-leaning politicians have moved right, I mean politicians don’t care what ordinary people think very much anyway, see

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Note wherever they try DW-NOMINATE there is a clear left-right axis. Once in a while when a country is in a transitional state like 1960s America where the Republicans and Democrats were changing places in the south you see a small secondary axis. You might want to believe in that Libertarian political test with two axes but it is a lot of hooey and it does not point to a position any politician could inhabit.
by error503 | 2026-03-11 20:47:54+00:00
> - Currently, the circuit where the user connects is arbitrarily decided by the demo user. In a real system with thousands of circuits, it'd be very difficult to properly assess which circuit the customer might connect to. When adding a new customer to a service, how does the operator decide, based on customer's location, which circuit to provide the service to ?

I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, but port allocation is, depending on the ISP's deployment model, either going to be fixed at the time the infrastructure was built, or whoever is doing the last metre install will choose a random available port on the switch. The subscriber will be assigned to that port in the RADIUS or equivalent database, and the BNG will query the subscriber based on DHCP Option 82 port information added by the switch. You could also map the subscriber based on MAC address, but this doesn't really work unless you don't support customer provided equipment on their end.
by orbital-decay | 2026-03-11 20:48:06+00:00
Yeah. For comparison, Novichok makes total sense, it's just a multi-component poison designed to avoid detection and used on spies and dissidents, and there were multiple insider leaks, starting with its creator literally giving interviews and other scientists publishing the research in the open. It's chemically sound, it's not something extraordinary, it's a known quantity. This story, on the other hand, says that for 30 years (including completely different times, the 90's) they arbitrarily targeted the CIA in particular with a weapon of unknown and pretty dubious nature, which was never replicated or even possibility investigated, in what could be described as James Bond-level operations (hilarious given their level of competence), CIA themselves helping cover it, and this incredibly secret clandestine weapon of unknown nature is casually sold in the black market. This is an extraordinary amount of extraordinary things that need to be true at the same time, and the story suddenly re-emerges in a pretty convenient moment.
by danebalia | 2026-03-11 20:48:23+00:00
What Is This?
Born from a Reddit thread and months of iteration, The Agency is a growing collection of meticulously crafted AI agent personalities. Each agent is:

Specialized: Deep expertise in their domain (not generic prompt templates)
Personality-Driven: Unique voice, communication style, and approach
Deliverable-Focused: Real code, processes, and measurable outcomes
Production-Ready: Battle-tested workflows and success metrics
Think of it as: Assembling your dream team, except they're AI specialists who never sleep, never complain, and always deliver.
by cromka | 2026-03-11 20:48:27+00:00
I thought about it , but cloud is getting way more expensive since they don't own the infrastructure, while they themselves have long term components contracts that actually help to increase their margin on their hardware. So they're most likely gonna make more money off of hardware going forward. And nothing stops them from offering integration with other devices, effectively all they lose is potential income from AppStore on macOS, which doesn't sell much anyway. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me!
by zimpenfish | 2026-03-11 20:48:30+00:00
> people don't rave about [macOS] anymore

I don't rave about macOS any more because I've been here for decades and, barring the occasional fight with Windows when I want to play something, I've largely forgotten how awful all the other options are[1].

I've gone "OS blind", I guess, and now macOS, for me, is the "bare minimum of competence" - hence I won't rave about it (but I absolutely will moan about the stupid things it does[2].)

[1] I spent decades using various Unix GUIs (on Suns, SGIs, Linux, OpenBSD for a while); I have absolutely zero desire to explore them again.

[2] My current favourite is being able to notice when it's about to flip into "red battery, plug me in" mode because, for whatever godforsaken reason, the load average will rocket up into the 400s and everything turns to sludge for a couple of minutes. Oh how I laugh every time.
by surround | 2026-03-11 20:48:31+00:00
Trust your own style, even if you aren't a native English speaker. Here's an example where a non-native speaker used an LLM to polish his post. The general consensus was that his own writing was preferable to the LLM's edited version.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591707

For dyslexia, use a spell-checker. For grammar, use a basic grammar checker, like the kind of grammar checker that has come with MS word since the 1990s. But don't let a style-checker or an LLM rob you of your own voice.
by rincebrain | 2026-03-11 20:48:33+00:00
I would, I think, probably argue that the problem is less that they're gambling and more that they involve actual money.

I think exposing people to addictive mechanics with guard rails is probably useful for teaching you how you respond to them, before you go to Vegas and blow far more than you budgeted.

In particular, I don't think you're going to ban addictive things faster than people can build them, and I know you can't rely on parents having conversations with kids, so I feel like all you can do is try to remove the whirring buzzsaw of real money incentives and let people learn that it's sharp, but foam sword sharp, where you can't ruin your life permanently (easily) with it.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-03-11 20:48:34+00:00
I wish more people would filter their comments through AI. It has so many benefits. If you're being emotional, it can detect that and rewrite your comment to be less confrontational and more constructive. If you're positing a position out of ignorance or as an armchair expert, it can verify your claims before posting. Most of the mod's problems would be solved if every comment were filtered through the HN guidelines before posting.

AI is a tool. You can use it constructively, like Grammarly, or spellcheck. You don't need to be afraid of it.
by chrisandchris | 2026-03-11 20:48:45+00:00
> you walk up to a desk

I think the day I _must_ walk go a desk to vote is the day I'll give up. Voting by mail is one of the best things occuring here (in Switzerland). You get the voting stuff by mail, make your crosses, put it back into the postal box and it's delivered for free (as in beer) to the government.
by Sajarin | 2026-03-11 20:48:51+00:00
People aren't good at detecting AI generated/edited comments, so unsure how effective this policy will be. Though I guess there are still some obvious signs of AI speak like emdashes and sycophantic (it's not X, it's Y!) speech.

Bit of a shameless plug but I wrote a HN AI comment detector game[0] with AI and most of my friends and fellow HN users who tried it out couldn't detect them.

[0]: https://psychosis.hn/

[1]: https://sajarin.com/blog/psychosis/
by Willish42 | 2026-03-11 20:48:57+00:00
This is an angle for people who default to AI-edited written speech that I've tried to be more empathetic to. I think it depends on your audience, but in professional writing that isn't published publicly (i.e. communication with your colleagues, design docs, etc.), or even the "rough draft" form of something that will be published, I think starting with your own words comes across as way more authentic.

I've seen enough GPT-generated slop that I find its style of writing very off-putting, and find it hurts the perceived competence or effort of the author when applied in the wrong context. I'm not sure if direct translation tools serve a better purpose here, but along with the other commenters, I personally find imperfect speech that was actually written "by hand" by the author easier and more straightforward to communicate with despite the imperfections. Also, non-ESL speakers make plenty of mistakes with grammar, spelling, etc. that humans are used to associating with "style" as authentic speech.

It can also become a crutch for language learners of any age / regardless of their primary language, that inhibits learning or finding one's own "style" of speech
by PLMUV9A4UP27D | 2026-03-11 20:49:13+00:00
I put my bet on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness
If the authorities have made the same conclusion, it would be very difficult to tell the affected individuals that.
This is since there is a misconception that mass psychosis A) only happens to mentally "weak" persons. B) Symptoms are made up/"just in your imagination"

But the symptoms are very much real, and it's not something that is easily treated.

For that reason it might appear as a cover up, when authorities avoid giving answers.
by Terr_ | 2026-03-11 20:49:19+00:00
To rationalize my gut-feelings on this, I think it comes down to the spectrum between:

1. A system that suggests words, the child learns the word, determines whether it matches their intent, and proceeds if they like the result.

2. A system that suggests words, and the child almost-blindly accepts them to get the task over with ASAP.

The end-results may look the same for any single short document, but in the long run...
by jrockway | 2026-03-11 20:49:21+00:00
Back in 2000 I got the M1 Air with 8G of RAM (needed the cheapest Mac to test some arm64 stuff) and that laptop served me very well. I never felt RAM-limited. I was always expecting to run out of memory during a big Bazel build or something, but never did.

It isn't the most powerful computer in the world but I never ran into any problems... so it's probably an OK compromise for most people, especially in the world where RAM is scarce because of AI datacenter buildouts.
by tines | 2026-03-11 20:49:35+00:00
I think it's a symptom of being terminally online to think that most other people are also terminally online. The internet has a way of convincing you that most of the [interesting] events in the world happen on the internet. But I think this isn't the case; most stuff happens in the real world, most people live in the real world most of the time, and a tiny fraction of trite drama happens online.
by IshKebab | 2026-03-11 20:49:40+00:00
In fairness although "the industry" learns best practices like using SQL prepared statements, not sanitising via blacklists, CSFR, etc. there's a constant new stream of new programmers who just never heard of these things. It doesn't help that often when these things are realised the only way we prevent it in future is by talking about it, which doesn't work for newbies. Nobody goes and fixes SQL APIs so that you can only pass compile-time constant strings as the statement or whatever. Newbies just have to magically know to do that.
by theshrike79 | 2026-03-11 20:49:47+00:00
Locking behavior with tests isn't the same as comprehensive and foolproof tests. They might not cover every edge case, but will fail if the happy path starts failing for some reason.

And yes, copy-pasting is a horrendous way to write code, but everyone does it.

When you're adding the 1600th CRUD endpoint of your career to an enterprise Java/C# application, can you with all honesty say you will type every single character with the same thought and consideration every time?

Or do you just make one, copy-paste that one and modify accordingly?

Or if you write 20 unit tests with slight alterations you masterfully craft every single character to perfection?

I have a limited amount of energy to use every day, I choose to use it in places that matter. The hard bits that LLMs and copy-pasting can't speed up.
by mrguyorama | 2026-03-11 20:49:55+00:00
It was more nuanced than that and importantly, "Anti-masker" as a derogatory statement was about "This person is literally unwilling to do anything at all that doesn't pay off for them personally" because a goddamn mask is such a simple thing to do, and they just couldn't handle it, because it was someone else telling them to do something and some people just cannot function when that happens.

People lost their damn minds because "Hey could you maybe take a single small step to ensure you don't sneeze on produce" was protest worthy.

I do not believe someone saying "Masks made out of T-Shirts don't work well" or "Surgical masks aren't as effective as real N95 masks" are an "Anti-masker".

It was about vice-signalling. All the people who get pissy about masks do plenty of things for their "health" that have zero science behind them.

These people often did other things like hiding or downplaying any symptoms, and choosing to go to events while sick, and were often basically superspreaders.

This was all well understood like 25 years ago when WoW did that blood plague thing and people put effort into spreading it as much as possible. We've seen this with other diseases including ones that have no real controversy or political angle. Some people are just that insistent about doing everything they can to make the world a worse place.

It just sucks so much.
by fragmede | 2026-03-11 20:50:09+00:00
I disagree. HN is going to bury my raw unedited tirade of a comment about those fucking morons that couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. If I send a comment to ChatGPT and open up the prompt with "this poster is a fucking dumbass, how do I tell them this" and use that to get to a well reasoned response because that's the tool we have available today, we're all better off.

The guidelines state:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse
> Edit out swipes.
> Don't be curmudgeonly.

On the best of days I manage to follow the rules, but I'm only human. If I run my comment through ChatGPT to try and help me edit out swipes on the bad days, that's not ok?

I'm not using ChatGPT to generate comments, but I've got the -4 comments to show that my "thoughts exactly as they have written them" isn't a winning move.
by kubb | 2026-03-11 20:50:24+00:00
As someone who learned English as a second language, I would encourage people to use LLMs and any other resources to practice, and then use what they've learned to communicate with others.

Telling an LLM to "refine" your writing is just lazy and it doesn't help you learn to express yourself better. Asking it for various ways of conveying something, and picking one that suits you when writing a comment is OK in my book.

The way I see it, people will repeat the same grammar and pronunciation mistakes, and use restricted vocabulary their whole lives, just because learning requires effort, and they can't be bothered.

I can accept that nobody is perfect, as long as they have the will to improve.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-11 20:50:34+00:00
There's lots of literature on quantizing weights (including trits and binary) going back 15+ years. Nothing to hand right now but it's all on arxiv.

The relevant trit arithmetic should be on display in the linked repo (I haven't checked). Or try working it out for the uncompressed 2 bit form with a pen and paper. It's quite trivial. Try starting with a couple bitfields (inputs and weights), a couple masks, and see if you can figure it out without any help.
by ticulatedspline | 2026-03-11 20:50:49+00:00
Kinda been dead a while, also not dead there's still good stuff out there. Lots of it, but it's in the corners and under the carpets. Things created in the original spirit of the "let me show you my interests" that the older web was built on.

While back was toying with the idea of building out a new web on a new protocol (not http based). Thus no existing browser would understand it. Deliberately obscure to force a "Reset" button of sorts.

Though would be short lived, over time we've learned to ruin stuff faster and faster. I'm not sure there's any network so alien that it could hold on to that golden era of innocence from the past, it would be found then expediently and expertly exploited.
by IX-103 | 2026-03-11 20:50:58+00:00
Depends on what qualifies as an ID and how hard it is to get one. But unless you're actively providing them to people that need them with no extra work or travel on their part then you're going to be discriminating against people with less money or time.

In the case where disproportionately more poor people are of a certain race then it can be seen as racist (as it affects the population of that race differently). If the reason that disproportionately more poor people are of a certain race is because of racism, then a policy that disenfranchised the poor would effectively extend economic discrimination into political discrimination.

Though I tend to think that even if we remove the economic effects of racism such that disenfranchising the poor couldn't be called racist, they would still be classist and should be avoided where possible.