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Difftastic: A structural diff that understands syntax

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic
1•gurjeet•2m ago•0 comments

Who Up?

https://walzr.com/who-up/
1•walz•5m ago•0 comments

Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves brain health

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/2/pgaf017/8016017?login=false
1•handfuloflight•5m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Good non tech companies to work at

1•nzmkk•8m ago•0 comments

The struggle for control of the Arctic is accelerating – and riskier

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-f92bc043-3893-4688-8937-fd9cad8b0d5b
1•andsoitis•9m ago•0 comments

Competitor's Influencer List Finder

https://trace.impulze.ai/
1•rashmisingh_s26•12m ago•0 comments

Do we need deterministic AI?

1•createdbymason•13m ago•1 comments

Show HN: I rebuilt few years old project and now it covers my expenses

https://www.hextaui.com/
1•preetsuthar17•22m ago•0 comments

The Secret Group Chats Where the Rich Score Seats on Private Jets

https://www.wsj.com/style/private-jet-group-chats-whatsapp-f2785468
2•edward•26m ago•0 comments

Free YouTube Thumbnail Tester

https://www.thumbnailtester.app/
2•willy158•28m ago•0 comments

PLDI 2025 coverage released: over 200 talks

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwG9512Wm7jSS6Iqshz4Dpg
1•matt_d•29m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What techniques do you use to remember complex concepts and theories?

3•anonymzz•31m ago•1 comments

SEO Is Dead. Long Live Geo

https://substack.gauravvohra.com/p/search-is-dead-long-live-llms-winning-in-the-era-of-llms-ai-overviews-and-geo
2•gauravvohra•45m ago•0 comments

The day someone created 184 billion Bitcoin (2020)

https://decrypt.co/39750/184-billion-bitcoin-anonymous-creator
3•lawrenceyan•51m ago•0 comments

Mill Build Tool v1.0.0 Release Highlights

https://mill-build.org/blog/13-mill-build-tool-v1-0-0.html
2•lihaoyi•57m ago•0 comments

Pufferlib: Simplifying reinforcement learning for complex game environments

https://github.com/PufferAI/PufferLib
1•anjneymidha•58m ago•0 comments

Energy costs are rising. This state says tech companies must pay more

4•1vuio0pswjnm7•59m ago•1 comments

Giant, flightless bird is next target for de-extinction company Biosciences

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/09/science/giant-moa-colossal-biosciences
2•lastdong•1h ago•1 comments

Kira (Short AI-Assisted Film on Human Cloning)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx8rMzlG29Q
2•quantisan•1h ago•1 comments

America's fastest-growing suburbs are about to get expensive

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/417892/suburbs-sunbelt-housing-affordability-yimby
10•littlexsparkee•1h ago•9 comments

Longform text has become iconic — almost like an emoji

https://www.monarchwadia.com/pages/LlmsAreTelepathy.html
2•monarchwadia•1h ago•1 comments

Bitcoin Mining Costs Soar as Hashrate Hits Records: TheMinerMag

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/06/16/bitcoin-mining-costs-soar-as-hashrate-hits-records-theminermag
1•PaulHoule•1h ago•0 comments

The Cost of AI Reliance

https://codebytom.blog/2025/07/09/the-hidden-cost-of-ai-reliance/
1•gpi•1h ago•0 comments

Phishing for Gemini: Google Gemini G-Suite Prompt Injection Vulnerability

https://0din.ai/blog/phishing-for-gemini
1•GenAIbughunter•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Keep up with the world without information overload

https://www.a01ai.com/
2•vincentyyy•1h ago•2 comments

Bitwarden MCP server secures AI access to your passwords

https://nerds.xyz/2025/07/bitwarden-mcp-server-secure-ai/
2•thunderbong•1h ago•1 comments

ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database (2009)

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5206848
1•sandwichsphinx•1h ago•0 comments

We should have more billionaires

https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1942992514954224025
3•hliyan•1h ago•12 comments

Realbasic (2000)

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/12/realbasic/
2•geuis•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Built an agent to keep up with research

https://www.usebyline.com/
1•luhemarora•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/
70•simonw•5h ago

Comments

rasengan•5h ago
In the future, there will need to be a lot of transparency on data corpi and whatnot used when building these LLMs lest we enter an era where 'authoritative' LLMs carry the bias of their owners moving control of the narrative into said owners' hands.
mingus88•4h ago
Not much different than today’s media, tbh.
rideontime•4h ago
One interesting detail about the "Mecha-Hitler" fiasco that I noticed the other day - usually, Grok would happily provide its sources when requested, but when asked to cite its evidence for a "pattern" of behavior from people with Ashkenazi Jewish surnames, it would remain silent.
xnx•5h ago
> It’s worth noting that LLMs are non-deterministic,

This is probably better phrased as "LLMs may not provide consistent answers due to changing data and built-in randomness."

Barring rare(?) GPU race conditions, LLMs produce the same output given the same inputs.

msgodel•5h ago
I run my local LLMs with a seed of one. If I re-run my "ai" command (which starts a conversation with its parameters as a prompt) I get exactly the same output every single time.
xnx•5h ago
Yes. This is what I was trying to say. Saying "It’s worth noting that LLMs are non-deterministic" is wrong and should be changed in the blog post.
boroboro4•4h ago
You’re correct in batch size 1 (local is one), but not in production use case when multiple requests get batched together (and that’s how all the providers do this).

With batching matrix shapes/request position in them aren’t deterministic and this leads to non deterministic results, regardless of sampling temperature/seed.

unsnap_biceps•4h ago
Isn't that true only if the batches are different? If you run exactly the same batch, you're back to a deterministic result.

If I had a black box api, just because you don't know how it's calculated doesn't mean that it's non-deterministic. It's the underlaying algorithm that determines that and a LLM is deterministic.

boroboro4•4h ago
Providers never run same batches because they mix requests between different clients, otherwise GPUs are gonna be severely underutilized.

It’s inherently non deterministic because it reflects the reality of having different requests coming to the servers at the same time. And I don’t believe there are any realistic workarounds if you want to keep costs reasonable.

Edit: there might be workarounds if matmul algorithms will give stronger guarantees then they are today (invariance on rows/columns swap). Not an expert to say how feasible it is, especially in quantized scenario.

lgessler•4h ago
In my (poor) understanding, this can depend on hardware details. What are you running your models on? I haven't paid close attention to this with LLMs, but I've tried very hard to get non-deterministic behavior out of my training runs for other kinds of transformer models and was never able to on my 2080, 4090, or an A100. PyTorch docs have a note saying that in general it's impossible: https://docs.pytorch.org/docs/stable/notes/randomness.html

Inference on a generic LLM may not be subject to these non-determinisms even on a GPU though, idk

simonw•4h ago
I don't think those race conditions are rare. None of the big hosted LLMs provide a temperature=0 plus fixed seed feature which they guarantee won't return different results, despite clear demand for that from developers.
xnx•4h ago
Fair. I dislike "non-deterministic" as a blanket llm descriptor for all llms since it implies some type of magic or quantum effect.
dekhn•3h ago
I see LLM inference as sampling from a distribution. Multiple details go into that sampling - everything from parameters like temperature to numerical imprecision to batch mixing effects as well as the next-token-selection approach (always pick max, sample from the posterior distribution, etc). But ultimately, if it was truly important to get stable outputs, everything I listed above can be engineered (temp=0, very good numerical control, not batching, and always picking the max probability next token).

dekhn from a decade ago cared a lot about stable outputs. dekhn today thinks sampling from a distribution is a far more practical approach for nearly all use cases. I could see it mattering when the false negative rate of a medical diagnostic exceeded a reasonable threshold.

basch•30m ago
I agree its phrased poorly.

Better said would be: LLM's are designed to act as if they were non-deterministic.

tanewishly•9m ago
Errr... that word implies some type of non-deterministic effect. Like using a randomizer without specifying the seed (ie. sampling from a distribution). I mean, stuff like NFAs (non-deterministic finite automata) isn't magic.
kcb•4h ago
FP multiplication is non-commutative.
boroboro4•4h ago
It doesn’t mean it’s non-deterministic though.

But it does when coupled with non-deterministic requests batching, which is the case.

labrador•4h ago
Musk has a good understanding of what people expect from AI from a science, tech and engineering perspective, but it seems to me he has little understanding of what people expect from AI from a social, cultural, political or personal perspective. He seems to have trouble with empathy, which is necessary to understand the feelings of other people.

If he did have a sense of what people expect, he would know nobody wants Grok to give his personal opinion on issues. They want Grok to explain the emotional landscape of controversial issues, explaining the passion people feel on both sides and the reasons for their feelings. Asked to pick a side with one word, the expected response is "As an AI, I don't have an opinion on the matter."

He may be tuning Grok based on a specific ideological framework that prioritizes contrarian or ‘anti-woke’ narratives to instruct Grok's tuning. That's turning out to be disastrous. He needs someone like Amanda Askell at Anthropic to help guide the tuning.

alfalfasprout•4h ago
> Musk has a good understanding of what people expect from AI from a science, tech and engineering perspective, but it seems to me he has little understanding of what people expect from AI from a social, cultural, political or personal perspective. He seems to have trouble with empathy, which is necessary to understand the feelings of other people.

Absolutely. That said, I'm not sure Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and others are notably empathetic either.

labrador•4h ago
Dario Amodei has Amanda Askell and her team. Sam has a Model Behavior Team. Musk appears to be directing model behavior himself, with predictable outcomes.
dankai•4h ago
This is so in character for Musk and shocking because he's incompetent across so many topics he likes to give his opinion on. Crazy he would nerf the model of his AI company like that.
sorcerer-mar•4h ago
Megalomania is a hell of a drug
simonw•4h ago
I think the wildest thing about the story may be that it's possible this is entirely accidental.

LLM bugs are weird.

mac-attack•4h ago
Curious if there is a threshold/sign that would convince you that the last week of Grok snafus are features instead of a bugs, or warrant Elon no longer getting the benefit of the doubt.

Ignoring the context of the past month where he has repeatedly said he plans on 'fixing' the bot to align with his perspective feels like the LLM world's equivalent of "to me it looked he was waving awkwardly", no?

simonw•3h ago
He's definitely trying to make it less "woke". The way he's going about it reminds me of Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes.
wredcoll•2h ago
What do you mean, the way he's going about it? He wanted it to be less woke, it started praising hitler, that's literally the definition of less woke.
bix6•4h ago
[flagged]
bananalychee•4h ago
[flagged]
philistine•3h ago
[flagged]
wredcoll•2h ago
[flagged]
marcusb•4h ago
This reminds me in a way of the old Noam Chomsky/Tucker Carlson exchange where Chomsky says to Carlson:

  "I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting."
Simon may well be right - xAI might not have directly instructed Grok to check what the boss thinks before responding - but that's not to say xAI wouldn't be more likely to release a model that does agree with the boss a lot and privileges what he has said when reasoning.
chatmasta•8m ago
I'm confused why we need a model here when this is just standard Lucene search syntax supported by Twitter for years... is the issue that its owner doesn't realize this exists?

Not only that, but I can even link you directly [0] to it! No agent required...

[0] https://x.com/search?q=from%3Aelonmusk%20(Israel%20OR%20Pale...

Kapura•7m ago
How is "i have been incentivised to agree with the boss, so I'll just google his opinion" reasoning? Feels like the model is broken to me :/
dupsik•5m ago
That quote was not from a conversation with Tucker Carlson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nBx-37c3c8
lr0•2h ago
Why is that flagged? The post does not show any concerns about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, it's purely analyzing the LLM response in a technical perspective.
MallocVoidstar•1h ago
It makes Musk/X look bad, so it gets flagged.
chambo622•2h ago
Not sure why this is flagged. Relevant analysis.
ramblerman•24m ago
@dang why is this flagged?

Simonw is a long term member with a good track record, good faith posts.

And this post in particular is pretty incredible. The notion that Grok literally searches for "from: musk" to align itself with his viewpoints before answering.

That's the kind of nugget I'll go to the 3rd page for.

tomhow•15m ago
Users flagged it but we've turned off the flags and restored it to the front page.