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Asus Bike Booster

https://www.asus.com/accessories/bike-booster/asus-oxiis/oxiis-intelligent-bike-booster/
354•wiradikusuma•4d ago•212 comments

What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade?

https://littlelearner-ll.github.io/
63•porridgeraisin•1h ago•40 comments

Asynchronous I/O in DuckDB: Work, Thread, Work

https://duckdb.org/2026/07/31/asynchronous-io
140•pdet•5d ago•10 comments

Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk

https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/dad2.70432
419•randycupertino•16h ago•290 comments

Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

https://www.anthropic.com/research/multiagent-systems
73•maxutility•6h ago•28 comments

Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

https://rhonabwy.com/2026/08/15/software-engineering-fundamentals-matter-more-than-ever/
114•ingve•10h ago•53 comments

Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/good-ideas
161•felixbraun•11h ago•39 comments

Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

https://www.severe-weather.eu/long-range-2/super-el-nino-growth-accelerating-to-record-strength-f...
222•dgellow•13h ago•118 comments

Guiding Ships with Moire Patterns

https://tinkerings.org/2018/03/28/guiding-ships-with-moire-patterns/
43•Eridanus2•7h ago•9 comments

Show HN: Mic Drop, a real-time multiplayer karaoke game

https://www.micdrop.gg/
53•johnsillings•7h ago•19 comments

At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/the-first-at-home-test-for-infected-ticks-could-improve...
253•gmays•18h ago•88 comments

AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/so-how-ai-drug-discovery-doing-really
136•AnodicElegy•13h ago•72 comments

RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better

https://dmitry.gr/?r=06.%20Thoughts&proj=12.%20RV
296•dmitrygr•1d ago•358 comments

I built a browser-native SysEx librarian for 80s/90s synthesizers

https://bipluk.com/
15•halfradaition•3d ago•10 comments

Numba in the Browser: Unlocking a New Scientific Python Stack in JupyterLite

https://notebook.link/blog/numba-in-the-browser/
37•xalfotis•3d ago•6 comments

A fortuitous decade as an indie software developer

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/8/3.html
77•frizlab•5d ago•9 comments

Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI

https://www.acc.org/about-acc/press-releases/2026/08/11/14/59/abdominal-fat-predicts-heart-diseas...
249•theanonymousone•11h ago•179 comments

Tracking down a Zsh history data loss bug

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-08-09-zsh-history-truncation-bug/
69•ingve•10h ago•24 comments

AI has access to a vastly larger working memory than the human brain

https://davidepiffer.com/p/ai-isnt-outthinking-mathematicians
485•rzk•14h ago•414 comments

Tea5767-Radio-Tuner

https://github.com/turtushig22-blip/tea5767-radio-tuner
37•turtushig22•8h ago•2 comments

A spectre is haunting Unicode

https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html
219•sensanaty•18h ago•74 comments

Falstad Math and Physics Simulations

https://www.falstad.com/mathphysics.html
11•pykello•4h ago•1 comments

Zapping Rocks Unlocks Stimulated Geologic Hydrogen

https://spectrum.ieee.org/stimulated-geologic-hydrogen
16•adm4•6h ago•5 comments

AI-Assisted GPU Porting of a 250k Line Legacy Weather Simulation Code

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13122
32•Jimmc414•9h ago•4 comments

SugarTrack – an offline Android logbook for blood sugar (no account, no cloud)

https://sugartrack-beta.vercel.app/
44•hunzaboy•10h ago•16 comments

Not sure where I am going with this garbage collection rabbit hole

https://ikouchiha47.github.io/2026/08/12/concurrency-and-gc.html
10•argentum47•3d ago•1 comments

Program with Paint Brushes, Not Pencils

https://blog.pickcode.io/program-with-paint-brushes-not-pencils/
9•skadamat•4d ago•2 comments

Government sponsored study on alcohol doesn't stand up to scrutiny

https://nntaleb.substack.com/p/have-another-drink
42•scoofy•5h ago•34 comments

Voltair (YC W26) Is Hiring a Test Flight Engineer

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/voltair/jobs/sSOD2Ox-flight-test-engineer
1•wweissbluth•14h ago

Tess's Android Wayland Compositor

https://github.com/wmww/tawc
65•schmorptron•14h ago•11 comments
Open in hackernews

What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade?

https://littlelearner-ll.github.io/
63•porridgeraisin•1h ago

Comments

aetherspawn•45m ago
Not quite, because it knows about quantum entanglement and that’s a little beyond the fifth grade.
_diyar•42m ago
You didn’t even read the example you’re referencing.
aureate•32m ago
> Quantum entanglement is when a person gets caught in two or more ropes that are connected in a special way. This can happen if the ropes cross each other or if one rope wraps around the other.

This could be seen as an amusingly extreme example of the fact that if you come up with something and state it condidently enough, a surprisingly large number of people will assume you what you're talking about. Presumably, though, you just mistook the unfiltered (trained on the full data) response for the "Little Learner" one.

aetherspawn•10m ago
I read it, but to be honest it sounded plausible after 1 read (I just assumed it used person interchangeably with object, and I have no idea how quantum entanglement works so the rest was confidence signals)
krackers•43m ago
A similar project (LLM trained only on vintage material): https://talkie-lm.com/introducing-talkie
asalahli•42m ago
https://xkcd.com/2265/
Terr_•27m ago
Or with a different kind of early: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rise-of-the-machines
throw310822•26m ago
[February 2020]
adamya-05•38m ago
i dont know
dgacmu•37m ago
I prefer my 8yo's answer about quantum entanglement, asked just now: "I don't know. How would I know? It's not a thing!"

Even an 8yo has better metacognition, it seems. :-)

HPsquared•25m ago
I suppose the LLM doesn't know it's limited in its knowledge, maybe? That others know more.
dgacmu•13m ago
Oh, that's interesting - good point, since it's filtered and not trained from scratch. My prior would be to assume it's just bs'ing as LLMs usually do but it seems worth exploring.
uniq7•34m ago
> why is the sky blue?

> The sky is blue because of something called Rayleigh scattering. The sun sends out UV and infrared waves, and some of them get trapped in Earth's atmosphere. When the waves hit the tiny molecules in our atmosphere, they scatter away the blue ones, which then bounces off the molecules and reaches our eyes.

"filtered to the U.S. elementary-school curriculum", suuure

tdeck•28m ago
There are science books written for curious children that explain this kind of thing. I remember reading them.
ymhr•11m ago
Isn’t that also wrong? From what I remember it’s the blue wavelengths of visible light that are scattered and make us perceive the sky as blue. UV may well be scattered too but we can’t see that, right? Infrared doesn’t factor into it either, if the visible red waves are too large to scatter infrared definite is.
simonjgreen•5m ago
I was definitely taught this in those terms and at that age.

Perhaps the unexpected response comes from its recall ability. It’s not the personality of a child, just the material a child is exposed to.

montebicyclelo•32m ago
Really cool work. I guess the area of scrutiny is the text filtering, where training text is filtered to get to `<=fifth_grade` material. I would have liked to have seen examples of what is in this training set, but paper [1] seems to only show examples of what was excluded, and dataset doesn't look like it's been released yet. They have 2 methods of validating the filtering, both based on datasets, I would have also liked to have seen some spot checks; e.g. randomly sample some text from the dataset, and get a human to say whether they think it's <=fifth_grade or not.

(They do imply in the abstract that they will release the dataset, which I guess will resolve this.)

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13545

mindwok•31m ago
Something related I've been thinking about lately is that one of the biggest problem with LLMs is their seeming inability to say no. Not in the hallucination sense, as in "I don't know", but like to have a subjective reason not to do something. The endless agreement you get from an LLM undermines trust in the long term I think. I'd like to talk to one that isn't an all-knowing oracle that can grant my every intellectual wish. (Or maybe what I'm asking for is just... a human, lol).
cynicalsecurity•25m ago
It can, just use Grok.
nolroz•24m ago
"no"
trimethylpurine•25m ago
People smarter than me have a habit of getting me to see things without telling me. They ask the right questions.

LLMs, incidentally, respond in a similar pattern in my experience.

mindwok•7m ago
Yep, agree, very succinct way of describing my issue with it.
dosisking•24m ago
You've hit on an important insight.
fuzzfactor•30m ago
Eternal youth?
andai•21m ago
> What is Schrödinger's cat?

> It's a cat that has been misbehavin'!

andai•15m ago
I remember reading something a few years ago, about how if you train an LLM with the reading material sorted by grade, the training becomes more efficient? Does anyone know about this technique? How does that work?

I'm assuming the knowledge doesn't end up as separate "layers".

I'm also reminded of how the human mind develops in distinct stages (e.g. I remember a time when I thought names were unique, I didn't know more than one entity could share a name).

dash2•15m ago
It’s not quite like a real fifth grader, I guess - more like a fifth grade genius that has read and understood everything in every syllabus.
wwizo•11m ago
Not sure what I expected, but it's just the training data, not the character. It'd be so cool if such systems had natural curiosity at this checkpoint. Eg:

> Me: "What's semiotic crystallography? > Response: "I don't know, what is it?"

Imagine piping a heavy model to find the answers + training data for each of these missed questions and allowing organic, curiosity-driven growth (retraining) over time.

sillysaurusx•4m ago
It would lose knowledge about existing subjects unless it’s continually retrained on those too. It could help inform the next training dataset though.
reliablereason•2m ago
Interesting topic but the fact that LLMs are primarily trained using mode-covering training rather than Mode-seeking(RL) training, means LLMs do not have the same underlying structural model of language that humans have.

A LLM does not learn topic by topic, it learns everything at once and slowly integrates it in to a single knowledge system.

exitb•21m ago
I’m using ChatGPT and started to notice that lately it answers my prompts starting with „Yes” even if my question was open. As if the first token gets injected and the LLM is left to finish the response in a sensible way, often ending up with some form of „Yes, but not really”.
c7b•20m ago
I've been wondering whether that is a feature of the foundation model or whatever finetuning they do on top. I remember this from the earliest versions of (pre Chat-) GPT I've been using, which would suggest it's a feature of the foundation model. But I don't really understand why. Something that's been trained on StackOverflow and BB forums, among other things, should have seen a ton of examples of answer refusals.
reddozen•19m ago
> but like to have a subjective reason not to do something

You're asking a lot from extremely fancy auto complete...

mindwok•8m ago
True, but fancy autocomplete keeps exceeding my expectations in what it can do, so why not this one!
sureglymop•16m ago
I think that is an issue. Also, the ability to quickly build any idea might not be such a great thing. Not only do we probably all prefer things of quality that were made with care but some ideas also just shouldn't be built.

Over the last 3 years I've seen projects where I thought, pretty obviously that's a bad idea. But, because LLMs don't say no and can just be pushed to build it anyway, the people building them might never learn that or learn why.

It's nice to be able to have a quick prototype or mvp. But if we never hit friction or something not working out, we never learn or have to come up with a creative solution.

Now, the LLM might seem incredibly intelligent (relatively speaking) and also creative but let's not forget that all is based on its training data. I simply don't believe it can ever be omniscient or that the companies training it are careful enough when doing so.

energy123•12m ago
The model providers could randomize the system prompt to make it say no 2.36% of the time, automatically tuned up or down depending on user feedback.
mindwok•6m ago
Maybe that'd work, but I think it'd come across too mechanical. If it was going to refuse something it'd need to be congruent with its "personality" I think.
moffkalast•1m ago
They've tried, and then seen the drop it results in on poorly designed benchmarks where confidently bullshitting gets you ahead of the rest, and said no thanks. As long as we compare models in ways that rewards it, nothing will change.

There's also a second aspect to it, just in terms of RLHF mechanisms. If you've ever experimented with VLA models (i.e. vision input + text task = robotic arm motion output), they tend to need all the training examples of the robotic arm being motionless removed entirely, otherwise the model simply learns that staying still is rewarded and proceeds to never do anything at all. You successfully train the laziest bot in the universe. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens to LLMs, if no is a valid answer, why ever do anything?

nnevatie•5m ago
Agreed, it is abolutely an issue. It is quite difficult to find an optimal solution to some problem when every considered new idea is ”definitely the right shape”.
Eji1700•3m ago
It's interesting because i'm kicking the tires on the top tier stuff for a month (because it's expensive as fuck but I need to know where the ceiling is).

I have actually gotten "hey i don't think this is a good idea, here's why" as feedback from at least Opus. It WILL still do it if I just demand stupidity (and hell i've been right, which is another topic entirely) but it has given me more confidence this can be a useful tool in the right spots.

That said I probably don't need the top tiers (metrics at least confirm that) and I'm guessing that's specifically because I was working in coding. Most were worded in a "is this a good idea" framing which probably helped, but at least once I said 'lets use this library/method" and it gave a decent argument on why that was basically redundant without prompting.

I still struggle to see the price point panning out.