Hacker News

Top stories

Live mirror
30 storiesupdated just nowView source snapshot
  1. Linux support is coming to Snapdragon X2 Series(qualcomm.com)
    87comments
  2. Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats(anthropic.com)
    559comments
  3. Feds Target AI Critics as "Foreign Agents"(kenklippenstein.com)
    37comments
  4. Meta VR Glasses(meta.com)
    231comments
  5. ArXiv receives multiyear commitments to support it as an independent nonprofit(arxiv.org)
    11comments
  6. VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025)(fly.io)
    93comments
  7. Virtio-nvgpu: Near-native Nvidia GPU access inside a KVM guest(github.com/nestrilabs)
    12comments
  8. The "Windows XP Box" (2003)(mini-itx.com)
    10comments
  9. Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock(pointinthecloud.com)
    90comments
  10. Mercury 2.5 LLM hits 770 tokens per second(artificialanalysis.ai)
    28comments
  11. We just shipped support for the ugliest part of HTTP: Vary(cloudflare.com)
    15comments
  12. Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy(apnews.com)
    396comments
  13. FLAWED's Flaws and What This Means for Industry Research(suhacker.ai)
    1comments
  14. The mystery animal on an ancient god's head(signoregalilei.com)
    19comments
  15. LensVLM: Compressing long context as images, expanding only relevant pages(huggingface.co)
    7comments
  16. Making Tailscale Faster(tailscale.com)
    40comments
  17. A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts(devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing)
    52comments
  18. Show HN: Combinators in Array Languages(softwarewrighter.com)
    discuss
  19. Australia says OpenAI agent hacked into government website(channelnewsasia.com)
    14comments
  20. Show HN: An open-source manufacturing ERP/MES/QMS(carbon.ms)
    7comments
  21. Solving for faster SHA-1 collision detection(sam.dev)
    discuss
  22. Tokens too cheap to meter(jyn.dev)
    183comments
  23. Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech(blog.google)
    124comments
  24. Radicle: Disclosure of Vulnerability in the Network Protocol(radicle.dev)
    50comments
  25. The Curious Power of Punctuation(newyorker.com)
    5comments
  26. Augustofaces: Pareidolia Fine Art(augusto.at)
    1comments
  27. Swap, ZRAM, Zswap and Hibernate on NixOS(matthewbrunelle.com)
    12comments
  28. I don't want the details(michaelheap.com)
    200comments
  29. A refined phylochronology of the second plague pandemic in Western Eurasia(pnas.org)
    discuss
  30. Z80 REPL (2018)(abagames.github.io)
    18comments

Why Does A.I. Write Like That?

15 pointsby 9mo agonytimes.com
5 comments
9mo agoHN ↗

I wish they’d, dare I say, delved deeper into the bit about Nigerian English. My understanding is that’s where a lot of labeling happens. Now I wonder if that explains the idiosyncrasies not the size of the Nigerian English corpus online as the article suggests. If it was the latter I’d expect more “do the needful” and other Indian English idiosyncrasies.

9mo agoHN ↗

You’ll notice, for instance, that A.I.s are absolutely obsessed with ghosts. [...] It knows that good writing involves subtlety: things that are said quietly or not at all, things that are halfway present and left for the reader to draw out themselves. So to reproduce the effect, it screams at the top of its voice about how absolutely everything in sight is shadowy, subtle and quiet. Good writing is complex. A tapestry is also complex, so A.I. tends to describe everything as a kind of highly elaborate textile. Everything that isn’t a ghost is usually woven.

I like this theory.

9mo agoHN ↗

Unfortunately, TFA is yet another article promising an answer to a "Why" question it never delivers. It documents the issue with many examples and thoroughly explores the variations yet never answers why current LLMs write as they do. It mentions some ideas in passing which might be causes but provides no justification or expert input.

Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure there are LLM researchers exploring this problem not only because it's annoying but because it's also interesting. If anyone knows of papers on this topic, I'd be interested...

9mo agoHN ↗

I don't know papers but I figure the main reason why it's odd is humans have a picture or idea in their heads and want the reader get the picture or get the idea. LLMs don't and just string words together so it starts reading normally and then kind of wanders off.

Like for me the first paragraph reads normally up to "whisper woven from the algorithm" but then "a construct of code. A.I.-generated writing..." is just kind of muddying the picture with excess waffle.