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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

Lol just yesterday I saw an eight year old answer on SO neatly solving my problem, except the API was hallucinated. Humans have been hallucinating APIs for far longer.

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The first time I read this I thought it meant it was an eight year old person answering your question.

Lol same

> the API was hallucinated

If the answer is from 8 years ago, did the API change between then and now? Or was the answer for the same version that you are using?

It didn’t change, the functionality was never there. The API only ever existed in that answer, otherwise a Microsoft API would have left traces elsewhere on the Internet.

Why would someone make up an API in an SO answer?

Maybe mistook Java for being C# or PHP and replied with another language and framework in mind. Just guessing, I am. Or wrote pseudo code, but forgot to mention this?

This is the fundamental problem and shortsightedness of the ChatGPT ban on Stack Overflow - it doesn't go far enough.

There is some imagined distinction between a hallucinated answer from a LLM and one from a person posting "try {random code}" that are both equally wrong - but only the LLM is deleted (because deleting the wrong answers are an attempt by a human to answer(?) or would hurt feelings / engagement (?)).

Did you fix it?

You need a lot of karma to edit other peoples answers, don’t you?

And for the edit queue not to be full. So yes, basically the stars have to align :p

No, I scoured the API surface and the functionality simply isn’t exposed, so the question has no answer. There was already a comment pointing out the answer’s wrong.

Could you post the link here, thats really curious.

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