TomasBM

I don't do research that requires fieldwork, but even in office and industrial settings, I notice that there's less need and interest in visits.

Of course, in-person exchanges still happen, but there's something of a default to do most things remotely because it's more efficient (and honestly, easier for all parties involved). The result is that you don't get to see cool or unusual machines/setups that often, and some flair of doing research is lost.

I can imagine that that's especially painful for new ecologists, because fieldwork is also a way to experience things that you otherwise wouldn't. Hopefully, we can bring some of it back with edge devices and models.

Somewhat tangential to the article, but why is SQL considered a programming language?

I understand that's the convention according to the IEEE and Wikipedia [1], but the name itself - Structured Query Language - reveals that its purpose is limited by design. It's a computer language [2] for sure, but why programming?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_language

While I agree that we need a word for this type of behavior, hallucinate is a wrong choice IMO.

Hallucinations are already associated with a type of behavior, which is (roughly defined) "subjectively seeing/hearing things which aren't there". This is an input-level error, not the right umbrella term for the majority of errors happening with LLMs, many if which are at output-level.

I don't know what would be a better term, but we should distinguish between different semantic errors, such as:

- confabulating, i.e., recalling distorted or misinterpreted memories;

- lying, i.e., intentionally misrepresenting an event or memory;

- bullshitting, i.e., presenting a version without regard for the truth or provenance; etc.

I'm sure someone already made a better taxonomy, and hallucination is OK for normal public discussions, but I'm not sure why the distinctions aren't made in supposedly more serious works.

Your experience sounds rough.

My experience: I often thought that I didn't have the time to learn (hard) things, only to find out sooner or later that I actually did, and still do.

At work, this usually meant that I was giving myself tighter deadlines than they needed to be, or that I was putting too much effort into tasks nobody cared that much about. Over time, I learned that it's OK not to put 100% of energy into the assigned task. Sometimes, it's even encouraged to use that extra energy to learn.

Arguably, I did have the privilege of starting out in salaried European office jobs, where there are more robust boundaries and opportunities. It's obvious how precarious physical work discourages this kind of learning. And reading comments like yours, it's clear how lucky I was to have managers and environments that didn't exploit my eagerness to put pressure on myself.

But if you do have an opportunity to make adjustments, I'd suggest putting less pressure on performing like an athlete, and channeling that energy into learning opportunities instead. Rarely will anyone carve out time for your learning, but they may be responsive to your request or boundaries.

Small correction to your point: they perhaps provide a reason for peer review to happen, but it's scientists themselves who coordinate and provide the actual peer review.

That is, unless ACM and Nature have a different approach to organizing peer review, in which case my correction is wrong. But I believe my point stands for many conferences and journals.

I agree. OpenReview is a good initiative, and while it has its own flaws, it's definitely a step in the right direction.

The arXiv and the derivative preprint repositories (e.g., bioRxiv) are other good initiatives.

However, I don't think it's enough to leave the content review completely to the community. There's are known issues with researchers using arXiv, for example, to stake claims on novel things, or readers jumping on the claims made by well-known institutions in preprints, which may turn out to be overconfident or bogus.

I believe that a number of checks (beyond plagiarism) need to happen before the paper is endorsed by a journal or a conference. Some of these can and should be done in a peer review-like format, but it needs to be heavily redesigned to support review quality without sacrificing speed. Also, there are things that we have good tools for (e.g., checking citation formatting), so this part should be integrated.

Plus, time may be one of the bottlenecks, but that's partly because publishers take money from academic institutions, yet expect voluntary service. There's no reason for this asymmetry, IMO.

It's a fair point. In the ideal setting, peer review can really be a very informative and important gate. And who better to be the gatekeeper than someone who understands the context?

However, there are still big issues with how these peers perform reviews today [1].

For example, if there's a scientifically arbitrary cutoff (e.g., the 25% acceptance rate at top conferences), reviewers will be mildly incentivized to reject (what they consider to be) "borderline-accept" submissions. If the scores are still "too high", the associate editors will overrule the decision of the reviewers, sometimes for completely arbitrary reasons [2].

There's also a whole number of things reviewers should look out for, but for which they neither have the time, space, tools, nor incentives to do. For example, reviewers are meant to check if the claims fit what is cited, but I can't know how many actually take the time to look at the cited content. There's also checking for plagiarism, GenAI and hallucinated content, does the evidence support the claims, how were charts generated, "novelty", etc. There are also things that reviewers shouldn't check, but that pop up occasionally [3].

However, you would be right to point out that none of this has to do with peers doing the gatekeeping, but with how the process is structured. But I'd argue that this structure is so common that it's basically synonymous with peer review. If it results in bad experiences often enough, we really need to push for the introduction of more tools and honesty into the process [4].

[1] This is based on my experience as a submitter and a reviewer. From what I see/hear online and in my community, it's not an uncommon experience, but it could be a skewed sample.

[2] See, for example: https://forum.cspaper.org/topic/140/when-acceptance-isn-t-en...

[3] Example things reviewers shouldn't check for or use as arguments: did you cite my work; did you cite a paper from the conference; can I read the diagram without glasses if I print out the PDF; do you have room to appeal if I say I can't access publicly available supplementary material; etc.

[4] Admittedly, I also don't know what would be the solution. Still, some mechanisms come to mind: open but guaranteed double-blind anonymous review; removal of arbitrary cutoffs for digital publications; (responsible, gradual) introduction of tools like LLMs and replication checks before it gets to the review stage; actually monitoring reviewers and acting on bad behavior.

I can't know for sure. For me, it's just the "eyeball method" of comparing HN and different subreddits on Reddit.

As to how I (or anyone) could show this, here are a few example questions:

1. How many examples of stealthy but otherwise blatant promotion do you see in the comments? Not every astroturfing campaign will be successful or original, so you'd be able to notice some patterns. Plus, HN is already commercially oriented, and there's the "Show HN" option, so it reduces the incentives for astroturfing.

2. Alternatively, how much controversy is there around the specific type of forum? For some subreddits, for example, you'd be able to see counter-subreddits popping up when participants feel the mods are abusing their power to promote one type of opinion.

3. Is a certain type of political/brand-related opinion or interpretation always at the top of your comment feed? For example, if upvotes determine the order of the comments, do you consistently see fewer critical comments on things that you'd expect the community to react to in different ways.

4. Do you consistently see some contributors having more power in discussions over others? Other than the mods, obviously. If this is the case, karma (i.e., number of upvotes) often has more value.

Still, I could be wrong.

The reasons listed in TFA - "confidentiality, sensitive data and compromising authors’ intellectual property" - make sense to discourage reviewers from using cloud-based LLMs.

There are also reasons for discouraging the use LLMs in peer review at all: it defeats the purpose of peer in the peer review; hallucinations; criticism not relevant to the community; and so on.

However, I think it's high time to reconsider what scientific review is supposed to be. Is it really important to have so-called peers as gatekeepers? Are there automated checks we can introduce to verify claims or ensure quality (like CI/CD for scientific articles), and leave content interpretation to the humans?

Let's make the benefits and costs explicit: what would we be gaining or losing if we just switched to LLM-based review, and left the interpretation of content to the community? The journal and conference organizers certainly have the data to do that study; and if not, tool providers like EasyChair do.

First two sentences are key. The reason why HN is so much better than other fora (IMO) is that the mods don't allow lever-pulling and astroturfing to overtake regular contributions. Yet it's also popular, so you're bound to get some activity on most posts.

Sure, it can be frustrating if you're trying to promote a product or farm karma on posts. But the fact that mostly nobody cares about karma means that you can post something and have it be evaluated on its technical, economic, social merits.

Obviously, there are caveats to this - i.e., anything US- and FAANG-related is bound to get much more activity than otherwise - but the overall atmosphere of HN is refreshing compared to Reddit.

I think that's all true, plus, from my experience:

- it's now more difficult to identify a truly unexplored area of work within a relatively short amount of time (e.g., the first 2 explorative years of a PhD lasting 4-6 years).

- even if you find a niche where you could make a completely original contribution, you're disincentivized by how hard it is to convince your supervisor and peer reviewers - unless it's painfully obvious or you invest a lot of upfront effort to prove its worth.

- media promotes a fetishized version of original contributions (e.g., theory of relativity that led to a paradigm shift), whereas scientists are taught to always justify their contribution with respect to the existing work; this inevitably prunes many paths and ideas.

- although interdisciplinarity is promoted in opinion pieces, interdisciplinary contributions are often discouraged by the discipline-related communities.

None of this is an excuse, but they're certainly filters and pressure chambers.

Pretty nice. I've been using LLMs to generate different Python and JS tools for wrangling data for ontology engineering purposes.

More recently, I've found a lot of benefit from using the extended thinking mode in GPT-5 and -5.1. It tends to provide a fully functional and complete result from a zero-shot prompt. It's as close as I've gotten to pair programming with a (significantly) more experienced coder.

One functional example of that (with 30-50% of my own coding, reprompting and reviews) is my OntoGSN [1] research prototype. After a couple of weeks of work, it can handle different integration, reasoning and extension needs of people working in assurance, at least based on how I understood them. It's an example of a human-AI collab that I'm particularly proud of.

[1] Playground at w3id.org/OntoGSN/

I looked at the original study [1], and it seems to be a very well-supported piece of research. All the necessary pieces are there, as you would expect from a Nature publication. And overall, I am convinced there's an effect.

However, I'm still skeptical of the effects or size of the change. First, a point that applies to the Massachusetts ballot on psychedelics in particular, putting views into percentages, and getting accurate results from political polls are notoriously difficult tasks [2]. Therefore, the size of any effect is faced with whatever confounding variables make those tasks difficult.

Second, there could be some level Hawthorne effect [3] at play here, such that participants may report being (more) convinced because that's what (they think) is expected of them. I'm not familiar with the recruiting platforms they used, but if they're specialized in paid or otherwise professional surveys, I wonder if participants feel an obligation to perform well.

Third, and somewhat related to the above, participants could state they'd vote Y after initially reporting X preference, because they know it's a low-cost no-commitment claim. In other words, they can claim they'd now vote for Y without fear of judgement because it's a lab environment and an anonymous activity, but they can always go back to their original position once the actual vote happens. To show the size of the effect with respect to other things, researchers will have to make the stakes higher, or follow-up with participants after the vote and find out if/why they changed their mind (again).

Fourth, if one 6-minute-average conversation with a chatbot could convince an average voter, I wonder how much did they know about the issue/candidate being voted on. More cynically for the study, there may be much more at play with actual vote preference than a single dialectic presentation of facts. For example: salient events that happen in the period up to the election; emotional connection with the issue/candidate; personal experiences.

Still, this does not make the study flawed for not covering everything. We can learn a lot from this work, and kudos to the authors for publishing it.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09771-9

[2] For example: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/polling-public-opinion-th...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

It probably is impossible, but you could cover a lot of cases with more deliberate design. For the rest, you can leave it up to the judges to decide.

Then again, that might be exactly how (some) lawmakers think, but I'm not aware of it.

I guess vibe coding is fun as a meme, but it hides the power of (what someone else on HN) called language user interfaces (LUIs).

The author's point is correct IMO. If you have direct mappings between assembly and natural language, there's no functional need for these intermediate abstractions to act as pseudo-LUIs. If you could implement it, you would just need two layers above assembly: an LLM OS [1], and a LUI-GUI combo.

However, I think there's a non-functional, quality need for intermediate abstractions - particularly to make the mappings auditable, maintainable [2], understandable, etc. For most mappings, there won't be a 1:1 representation between a word and an assembly string.

It's already difficult for software devs to balance technical constraints and possibilities with vague user requirements. I wonder how an LLM OS would handle this, and why we would trust that its mappings are correct without wanting to dig deeper.

[1] Coincidentally, just like "vibe coding", this term was apparently also coined by Andrej Karpathy.

[2] For example, good luck trying to version control vectors.

Yes.

The pre-LLM equivalent would be: "I googled this, and here's what the first result says," and copying the text without providing any additional commentary.

Everyone should be free to read, interpret and formulate their comments however they'd like.

But if a person outsources their entire thinking to an LLM/AI, they don't have anything to contribute to the conversation themselves.

And if the HN community wanted pure LLM/AI comments, they'd introduce such bots in the threads.

Right, but if laws were developed in regulatory sandboxes, you'd also have the opportunity to red-team them.

Might be a design idea for future lawmakers.

The abuse of claims and citations is a legitimate and common problem.

However, I think hallucinated citations pose a bigger problem, because they're fundamentally a lie by commission instead of omission, misinterpretation or misrepresentation of facts.

At the same time, it may be an accidental lie, insofar authors mistakenly used LLMs as search engines, just to support a claim that's commonly known, or that they remember well but can't find the origin of.

So, unless we reduce the pressure on publication speed, and increase the pressure for quality, we'll need to introduce more robust quality checks into peer review.

Really? Which industries wouldn't hire you if you had a non-American degree?

And is this about the content of the degree(s), or just brand name recognition?

It's crazy how an affordable degree still means $40k.

I haven't come across any reviews that I could recognize as having been blatantly LLM-generated.

However, almost every peer review I was a part of, pre- and post-LLM, had one reviewer who provided a questionable review. Sometimes I'd wonder if they'd even read the submission, and sometimes, there were borderline unethical practices like trying to farm citations through my submission. Luckily, at least one other diligent reviewer would provide a counterweight.

Safe to say that I don't find it surprising, and hearing / reading others' experiences tells me it's yet another symptom of a barely functioning mechanism that is peer review today.

Sadly, it's the best mechanism that institutions are willing to support.

Yeah. It's also painful to look at something that you know is worse than the alternative, but no one agrees with you or cares.

I agree it's often difficult, but I think it's possible to balance honesty with humility and being a so-called team player.

For example, if you see something that's sloppy [1], your honest assessment will likely help both the coder and the manager. But you do have to temper your language, and sandwich the criticism in something that won't make the person interpret it as "you're sloppy/stupid" or "you don't deserve to work here".

The additional problem is: you have to test it with baby steps. If a coder/manager can't take any feedback [2], not even the friendliest suggestion, you have to pick whether to (1) slowly train each other to communicate better, or (2) leave (it alone).

But ultimately (IMO), it's not worth training yourself to be less honest or dishonest. You risk losing the ability to do your best among other smart, honest and feedback-accepting people, or being an honest and feedback-accepting manager/employer yourself [3].

[1] Like many blocks of copy-pasted code, or massive scripts with no separation of concerns, which can really grind my gears.

[2] I've personally had a few discussions with peers and leads in teams who would get defensive, or interpret my feedback as politicking, even in a cooperative environment, and I didn't love that. But I also didn't love getting (what seemed as) "holier than thou" evals in (what I saw as) more competitive environments. So, maybe my cooperative is another's competitive, and vice versa.

[3] Because you can easily get used to a skewed or toxic environment, and accidentally spread that toxicity to others, or unintentionally be seen as toxic yourself.

> pointless brand advertisement

I understand what you mean, but I disagree it's mostly or pure branding.

I'd argue that even watered down versions can be useful as a bridge to more advanced courses and material, provided you have access to both.

Personally, I benefited from that ML course by Andrew Ng, because I got the vocabulary and introductory math knowledge to proceed to courses and textbooks on linear algebra. It wasn't the only thing that helped, sure, but it helped.

There were also other STEM and non-STEM MOOCs which brought me free knowledge I probably would've never pursued or paid for otherwise.

It is doxxing, but whatever floats your boat. I'm not going to post the names of anyone, so if you don't believe me, up to you. Like I said, I can't know if you're genuine or not either. But if you are, there's some chance you could rethink these views, or at least be open about your conclusions.

But yes, these are discussions you can have when you meet people offline. If you live anywhere professionally attractive - like Germany - you'll get to talk with a lot of people. They're mostly not long in-depth discussions, but when you ask or express genuine concern about the situation, you get some responses. It could be a lie, or well-hidden hatred, or a skewed sample, up to you to decide.

If you're happy to spread this narrative - which you seem to be - then I think you fit the bill of a geopolitical warrior. You think it's right to treat all members of an adversarial country as adversaries before they did anything, and I think it's wrong/counterproductive/bad to do so, especially if you're not a member of your country's military or security apparatus or have a personal grievance which explains it. Currently it's Russians for you, tomorrow it'll be the Chinese, Americans, whomever, based on where you live and who now is the adversary.

Serbia has had plenty of experience with "undue Russian influence" and conquerors of similar profiles, but sure, it's not the same. I think the Russian government isn't very different from other imperial powers, which are notoriously not representative of their people, and problematic for neighboring states and their people. If this wasn't the case, Russians wouldn't be on your radar. Simple as that. You don't have to equivocate cultures to notice a general pattern in geopolitics, and you don't have to tolerate adversaries to treat normal people normally.

As far as those other examples go, ask an LLM of your choice, preferably in Incognito mode: "What has $COUNTRY done that would explain why others hate $COUNTRY_MEMBERS?" See what comes out.

> It does not. You are allowed to pick and choose.

Of course. You're allowed to choose your narrative and favorite scapegoat. That doesn't make it correct, or useful, or good. But it is useful to your government, I'll give you that.

The Baltic and Ukrainian friends and colleagues I talked to seemed to understand the difference between 1) what the Russian government says and does, and 2) what role their friends, colleagues or family of Russian origin have in that. The Russian and Belarusian friends and colleagues I talked to say they don't support their government's actions. Same with Israelis and Palestinians. So, unless they're all lying, or I'm imagining things, they seem to understand the nuance, even when it's painful or difficult.

I have much more in common with them than I do with any geopolitical warrior, whether they come from the government or just believe in that.

> that doesn't mean I appreciate getting members from an openly hostile society (to say the least)

Aside from the fact that this is a company, not a country, and there's no discussion of hiring let alone getting anyone:

If that's true, why wouldn't these apparently openly hostile Russians join their preferred army? Or do you think they are a fifth column in your country?

Be open about your conclusions. If all or most people of Russian origin are problematic because they come from an openly hostile society, what is your conclusion?

Do you think they should be kicked out? Should they be required to declare and prove allegiance to their host country? If they're as hostile as you say, why would you hire them?

What if they claim they're against their government's actions - are they lying, or should they have to prove it? What if they (falsely) believe in the propaganda of the Russian government - how would you ban this?

How do you feel about people from Saudi Arabia, Israel, Venezuela, the US for that matter? What about the Austrians, Germans, English or Japanese? Kurds, Palestinians, Cherokee? Their governments and/or minority groups have certainly been controversial in various countries and centuries, to say the least.

It's not an abstract subject, it's a question of principles and nuance.

> I bet you are from a country that has not been under Russian rule in the past

My country has been subject to plenty foreign conquerors, adversaries (real or not) and undue influence, including that of various Russian governments. Yet I don't see how the members of those other countries are guilty for that, nor how my hatred for them gets any justice for the pain of my ancestors (or the pain that my ancestors caused). And you don't seem like you have personal grievances that would at least explain your views.

But who knows, maybe scapegoating is more fun, and I'm missing out.

I'd definitely support that.

On the flip side, that'd require many professors and other participants in universities to rethink the role of a university degree, which proves to be much more difficult.

They're still around and offering new online courses. I hope they don't have any problems to keep afloat, because they do offer useful material at the very least.

I agree it's hard, but I think it's because initially the lecturers were involved in the online community, which can be tiring and unrewarding even if you don't have other obligations.

I think the courses should have purely standalone material that lecturers can publish, earn extra money, and refresh the content when it makes sense. Maybe platform moderators could help with some questions or grading, but it's even easier to have chatbot support for that nowadays. Also, platforms really need to improve.

So, I think the problem with MOOCs has been the execution, not the concept itself.

The first point about documentation really has to do with the question: whom are you willing to support?

Instead of seeing it as "users of X platform", I think it's more useful to divide user groups into:

1. Completely non-technical users who, at worst, wouldn't know how to download anything, and at best only know how to install from an ".exe" file;

2. Middle-ground users who, at worst, are not willing to learn your preferred way of installation, or at best, are new to non-common installation methods;

3. Technically proficient users who, at worst, have arbitrary reasons for disliking your preferred way of installation, or at best, have legitimate reasons for disliking it;

4. Your ideal technically proficient users.

FOSS is often geared towards the fourth category, and for good reason. But if you want your tool to be adopted more widely, you have to learn more about those other user groups, and how to support them beyond documentation.

And here I'd say it's also fair to look for good reasons or funding for that extra support, because if it's not rewarding work, it doesn't have to stay free as in free beer (even if it's FOSS).

If you genuinely hold those views, and aren't just trolling, then I certainly hope you're not responsible for any hiring or people management decisions. If you do interact with people, I'd suggest talking to those you consider adversarial by default, in person. Things seem much more adversarial online.

"Enough of them" really applies to any minority, so if you think Russians are a problem-ethnicity today, there will be plenty more to choose from tomorrow. If you find it difficult to distinguish between manipulation of ethnic conflict, propaganda, and the role of an individual in a society, there's plenty of literature online. It's not blind tolerance or "self-sabotaging liberalism" to maintain a secular state and non-discriminatory employment policies, and to require your employees to leave politics outside the business.

Regarding your interpretation of the parent comment:

1. HQ in Serbia =/= HQ in Russia

2. Controversial use of Yandex =/= Russian influence or support of imperialist policies

3. Hiring of Russian devs =/= Hiring of devs exercising adversarial or imperialist views

And again, I still suggest you do the exercise: find another ethnicity others find controversial and adversarial (but you don't), and switch the terms in your comments. If that fails, at least be open about your views in public, so others can avoid you and your company.

I don't like nor support what the Russian government does, but I don't conflate those actions with those of Russian individuals or the people.