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Exactly half of these HN usernames actually exist. So either there are enough people on HN that follow common conventions for Gemini to guess from a more genera
by icyfox 11mo ago
Exactly half of these HN usernames actually exist. So either there are enough people on HN that follow common conventions for Gemini to guess from a more general distribution, or Gemini has memorized some of the more popular posters. The ones that are missing:
- aphyr_bot
- bio_hacker
- concerned_grandson
- cyborg_sec
- dang_fan
- edge_compute
- founder_jane
- glasshole2
- monad_lover
- muskwatch
- net_hacker
- oldtimer99
- persistence_is_key
- physics_lover
- policy_wonk
- pure_coder
- qemu_fan
- retro_fix
- skeptic_ai
- stock_watcher
Huge opportunity for someone to become the actual dang fan.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- dang_fan 11mo ago[dead]
- atrus 11mo agoSo many underscores for usernames, and yet, other than a newly created account, there was 1 other username with an underscore.
- WorldPeas 11mo agomy hypothesis is they trained it to snake case for lower case and that obsession carried over from programming to other spheres. It can't bring itself to make a lowercaseunseparatedname
- computably 11mo agoMost LLMs, including Gemini (AFAIK), operate on tokens. lowercaseunseparatedname would be literally impossible for them to generate, unless they went out of their way to enhance the tokenizer. E.g. the LLM would need a special invisible separator token that it could output, and when preprocessing the training data the input would then be tokenized as "lowercase unseparated name" but with those invisible separators. edit: It looks like it probably is a thing given it does sometimes output names like that. So the pattern is probably just too rare in the training data that the LLM almost always prefers to use actual separators like underscore.
- fooofw 11mo agoThe tokenization can represent uncommon words with multiple tokens. Inputting your example on https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer (GPT-4o) gives me (tokens separated by "|"): lower|case|un|se|parated|name
- robocat 11mo agoIn 2032 new HN usernames must use underscores. It was part of the grandfathering process to help with moderating accounts generated after the AI singlarity spammed too many new accounts.
- giancarlostoro 11mo agoBefore the AI stuff Google had those pop up quick answers when googling. So I googled something like three years ago, saw the answer, realized it was sourced from HN. Clicked the link, and lo and behold, I answered my own question. Look mah! Im on google! So I am not surprised at all that Google crawls HN enough to have it in their LLM. I did chuckle at the 100% Rust Linux kernel. I like Rust, but that felt like a clever joke by the AI.
- vidarh 11mo agoI've run into my own comments or blog posts more often than I care to admit...
- james_marks 11mo agoSeveral decades into this, I assume all documentation I write is for my future self. Beautifully self-serving while being a benefit to others. Same thing with picking nails up in the road to prevent my/everyone’s flat tire.
- dotancohen 11mo agoI laughed at the SQLite 4.0 release notes. They're on 3.51.x now. Another major release a decade from now sounds just about right.
- joaogui1 11mo agoHN has been used to train LLMs for a while now, I think it was in the Pile even
- morkalork 11mo agoI may die but my quips shall live forever
- never_inline 11mo agoIt has also fetched the current page in background. Because the jepsen post was recently on front page.
- hurturue 11mo agoeither you only notice the xxx_yyy frequent posters or it's quite interesting that so many have this username format
- QuantumNomad_ 11mo agoziggy42 is both a submitter of a story on the actual front page at the moment, and also in the AI generated future one. See other comment where OP shared the prompt. They included a current copy of the front page for context. So it’s not so surprising that ziggy42 for example is in the generated page. And for other usernames that are real but not currently on the home page, the LLM definitely has plenty occurrences of HN comments and stories in its training data so it’s not really surprising that it is able to include real usernames of people that post a lot. Their names will be occurring over and over in the training data.
- NooneAtAll3 11mo agoone more reason to doubt that it's Ai-generated
- never_inline 11mo agoThis is definitely based on a search or page fetch, because there are these which are all today's topics - IBM to acquire OpenAI (Rumor) (bloomberg.com) - Jepsen: NATS 4.2 (Still losing messages?) (jepsen.io) - AI progress is stalling. Human equivalence was a mirage (garymarcus.com)
- tempestn 11mo agoThe OP mentioned pasting the current frontpage into the prompt.
- skywhopper 11mo agoThat’s a lot more underscores than the actual distribution (I counted three users with underscores in their usernames among the first five pages of links atm).
- DANmode 11mo agoWhat % of today’s front page submissions are from users that have existed 5-10 years+? (Especially in datasets before this year?) I’d bet half or more - but I’m not checking.
- AceJohnny2 11mo agoAw, I was actually a bit disappointed how much on the nose the usernames were, relative to their postings. Like the "Rust Linux Kernel" by rust_evangelist, "Fixing Lactose Intolerance" by bio_hacker, fixing an 2024 Framework by retro_fix, etc...
- maxglute 11mo agoYou can straight up ask Google to look for reddit, hackernews users post history. Some of it is probably just via search because it's very recent, as in last few days. Some of the older corpus includes deleted comments so they must be scraping from reddit archive apis too or using that deprecated google history cache.
- vitorgrs 11mo agoIt does memorize. But that's not actually very news.... I remember ChatGPT 3.5 or old 4.0 to remember some users on some reddit subreddts and all. Saying even the top users for each subreddit.. The thing is, most of the models were heavily post-trained to limit this...
- bio_hacker 11mo ago[dead]
- dang_fan0 11mo agoI was here first