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This suffers from a common pitfall of LLM's, context taint. You can see it is obviously the front page from today with slight "future" variation, the result end
by lagniappe 11mo ago
This suffers from a common pitfall of LLM's, context taint. You can see it is obviously the front page from today with slight "future" variation, the result ends up being very formulaic.
- keepamovin 11mo agoI agree. What is a good update prompt I can give it to create a better variant?
- ehsankia 11mo agoYou could try passing it 10-20 front pages across a much wider time range. You can use: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2025-12-04 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2025-12-04 to get the frontpage on a given date.
- lagniappe 11mo agoThis wont change anything it will just make it less evident to those who missed a day of checking HN.
- wasabi991011 11mo agoIf you do an update prompt, I hope you still keep this one around! It's formulaic yeah, but that's what puts it into the realm of hilarious parody.
- keepamovin 10mo agoThank you. It was a great one-shot and I didn't end up doing any updates. Thrilled to see how it inspired work from: Thomas Morford (CSE @ UC Merced, thomasm6m6) who did the amazing article/thread generation (in < 100 lines of PY!): https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/news.html https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/news.html ; and also from Andrej Karpathy (ex-OpenAI, now Eureak Labs, karpathy) who did an interesting analysis of prescience quality of threads/commenters inspired by a reply linking the page of 10 years past to compare: https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/auto-grade-hn/ https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/auto-grade-hn/ This was wonderful. 3000 points? I mean, fuck. Among the biggest posts of all time, and definitely of Show HN. Funny for me is that all the work I've done in the last 10 years, probably 100 Show HN's all different, this was by far the hugest. Could be months of work, no interest. And this thing, which dropped into my mind, probably 30 minutes, demolished them all. It's hilarious that it even beat out legitimate AI posts, and contaminated search results with future stories. One of the funniest things for me was hearing how people tabbed away from the page, only to come back and momentarily feel it was the actual HN page. Hahahahaha! :) All I can say is, I love you all. Watching it stay at the top for 24 hours...it felt like it wasn't something I made at first. But it was. Cool
- teekert 11mo agoYeah that’s very true, but I still think it’s pretty funny and original.
- latexr 11mo ago> > the result ends up being very formulaic. > Yeah that’s very true, but I still think it’s pretty funny and original. Either it’s formulaic or it’s original, it can’t be both.
- teekert 11mo agoAccording to an original formula hehe
- glenstein 11mo agoThe problem is not that it fails to be cheeky, but that "its funny" is depressing in a context where there was a live question of whether it's a sincere attempt at prediction. When I see "yeah but it's funny" it feels like a retrofitted repair job, patching up a first pass mental impression that accepted it at face value and wants to preserve a kind of sense of psychological endorsement of the creative product.
- jacobr1 11mo agoHonestly it feels like what I, or many of my colleagues would do if given the assignment. Take the current front page, or a summary of the top tropes or recurring topics, revise them for 1 or 2 steps of technical progress and call it a day. It isn't assignment to predict the future, it is an assignment to predict HN, which is a narrower thing.
- glenstein 11mo agoRight, because you would read the teacher and realize they don't want you to actually complete the assignment to the letter. So you would do jokes in response to a request for prediction.
- jonas21 11mo agoThat's what makes it fun. Apparently, Gemini has a better sense of humor than HN.
- allisdust 11mo agoThis seem to woosh right over everyone's heads :)
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- whimsicalism 11mo agoI would find it even more fun if it were more speculative, misapplied uses of 'woosh' aside.
- hyperbovine 11mo agoThe bar is low.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- lucianbr 11mo agoBut there's no mention of fun or humor in the prompt.
- auxiliarymoose 11mo agoFun will be prohibited until morale improves.
- lucianbr 11mo agoI mean it's very funny. Just I'm laughing at the AI, not with it.
- dgritsko 11mo agoSurely there's gotta be a better term for this. Recency bias?
- lagniappe 11mo agoIt's called context taint.
- da_grift_shift 11mo agoYou'll love taint checking then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking https://semgrep.dev/docs/writing-rules/data-flow/taint-mode/overview https://semgrep.dev/docs/writing-rules/data-flow/taint-mode/...
- IncreasePosts 11mo agoIsn't that a common pitfall of humans too? In numerous shows these days AI is the big bad thing. Before that it was crypto. In the 1980s every bad guy was Russian, etc.
- farazbabar 11mo agoUs middle eastern/brown guys have been making a come back?
- whimsicalism 11mo agoIn numerous TV shows before AI, crypto was the big bad thing?
- IncreasePosts 11mo agoNot a bad thing necessarily, but some part of the plot, and usually with things going awry or emphasizing the scammy nature of blockchain. Examples: Shameless season 11, The Simpsons S31E13, Superstore season 5, the good wife S3E13, greys anatomy S14E8, big bang theory S11E9, Billions season 5, some later seasons of Mr Robot, etc
- saintfire 11mo agoAlgodrill is copied verbatim, as far as I can tell.
- tanseydavid 11mo agoI found the repetition (10 years later) to be quite humorous.
- sallveburrpi 11mo agoTime is a flat circle
- tsunamifury 11mo agoFYI, this quote was meant to be the ramblings of a drunk who says something that sounds deep but is actually meaningless.
- sallveburrpi 11mo agoIt’s actually referencing Nietzsche referencing Empedocles, but your point works as well I guess
- tsunamifury 10mo agohaha thats both not true, and still works as drunk nonsense. But good job googling this and getting fooled by an LLM
- sallveburrpi 10mo agoI guess you got fooled by an LLM my friend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return
- niam 11mo agoIt fits in nicely imo. It's plausible (services re-appear on hn often enough), and hilarious because it implies the protracted importance of Leetcode. Though I agree that the LLM perhaps didn't "intend" that.
- adastra22 11mo agoThat’s the joke…
- lagniappe 11mo agoReally? What's the punchline? I like jokes.
- thomastjeffery 11mo agoI think the most absurd thing to come from the statistical AI boom is how incredibly often people describe a model doing precisely what it should be expected to do as a "pitfall" or a "limitation". It amazes me that even with first-hand experience, so many people are convinced that "hallucination" exclusively describes what happens when the model generates something undesirable, and "bias" exclusively describes a tendency to generate fallacious reasoning. These are not pitfalls. They are core features! An LLM is not sometimes biased, it is bias. An LLM does not sometimes hallucinate, it only hallucinates. An LLM is a statistical model that uses bias to hallucinate. No more, no less.
- tempestn 11mo agoThat's what the OP asked for, essentially. They copied today's homepage into the prompt and asked it for a version 10 years in the future.
- HarHarVeryFunny 11mo agoI think that's what makes it funny - the future turns out to be just as dismal and predictable as we expect it to be. Google kills Gemini, etc. Humor isn't exactly a strong point of LLMs, but here it's tapped into the formulaic hive mind of HN, and it works as humor!
- kccqzy 11mo agoBut it would otherwise be not fun at all. Anthropic didn’t exist ten years ago, and yet today an announcement by them would land on the front page. Would it be fun if this hypothetical front page showed an announcement made by a future startup that hasn’t been founded yet? Of course not.
- tempestn 10mo agoI don't know, I would have enjoyed a "Floopzy launches with $10B seed round" or something.