[tangue]

I’m surprised that Knuth’s book isn’t in the top 5 and I’m very surprised to see Descarte’s meditation as even in France no one longer reads this ( must be related to the various posts about meditation on HN imho ) and Franck ( not Brian ) Herbert wrote Dune. I don’t trust this post and indeed I don’t trust anything published on the Internet after Llms went mainstream.

[inductive_magic]

> I don’t trust this post

The post appended the raw data provided by GPT, allowing you to verify the integrity of the data. This makes the post trustworthy from a methodological pov.

> I don’t trust anything published on the Internet after Llms went mainstream.

You always had to verify the integrity of the data and methods used in any publication, regardless of the medium. The responsibility of both authors and readers hasn't changed. If you took things for granted before LLMs, you shouldn't have, and if you don't trust trustworthy authors post LLMs, you should.

[kortilla]

> This makes the post trustworthy from a methodological pov.

A post is not trustworthy if it’s reposting trash, even if it shows the source.

> you took things for granted before LLMs, you shouldn't have, and if you don't trust trustworthy authors post LLMs, you should.

The nature of how LLMs hallucinate is different from how garbage used to appear on the internet. Before LLMs there was a relatively good inverse correlation between quality and blatant bullshit. Not enough to pass the verification rigor required for an academic publication by any means, but enough that you didn’t have to second guess every single statement on every web page listing something as simple as book authors.

[criley2]

Here's my radical take: humans hallucinate as much or more than the top LLMs. Heck, depending on the human, nearly everything they think and say is functionally a hallucination according to the metrics in use here.

When it comes to what LLM's write, I find that LLM hallucinations are like self-driving car crashes. We are hyper-aware of the machine doing something that we ourselves do every single day and consider a normal defect of biological conscious.

[Scarblac]

> Here's my radical take: humans hallucinate as much or more than the top LLMs.

I can't believe that. LLMs always talk in the same confident tone, entirely regardless of what they're saying is true or not. What is true in the real world literally doesn't come into the equation.

Whereas at least some of the time, humans will say that they're not sure and might be wrong, or otherwise sound less confident. And that's related to how true the thing they're saying is.

[pmarreck]

> humans will say that they're not sure and might be wrong

Is that so? https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-... These people were convicted by people who were 100% convinced their memory was correct. The DNA evidence, which is "harder" evidence, said otherwise, and in these cases, was exonerating. (There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of other cases like this by the way, where the imprisoned innocent is NOT yet exonerated, all based on overconfident eyewitness testimony that yet managed to convince a judge/jury.)

There is also the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect, the cognitive bias where individuals with limited knowledge or expertise in a particular area tend to overestimate their competence and confidently assert their opinions. We've literally seen this countless times just since the 2016 US election, just watch literally any Jordan Klepper interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoZ2Lt_aCo8 (honestly, this is a little too political for me to use as an example, but I ran out of time seeking out unbiased examples... Mandela Effect? Misplaced keys being common?)

I'm afraid you're a little off, here, on your faith in humans not hallucinating memories and knowledge.

[firewolf34]

Ironically, if you agree with pmarreck above, scarblac's comment can be seen as an example of a human hallucinating with confidence, precisely what they were arguing is less likely to occur in the organic side of the internet.

[zeroonetwothree]

They never did human always do it, rather that they do “some of the time”. Whereas I’ve yet to see an LLM do that.

Also experts tend to be much more accurate at evaluating how knowledgable they are (this is also part of the D-K effect). So Id much prefer to have a 130 IQ expert answer my question than an LLM

[Hedepig]

> LLMs always talk in the same confident tone,...

They do, but they are better at verifying what they've already said. So a simple prompt asking them to verify the facts they've presented often improves the accuracy. There are also other techniques like chain of thought and tree of thought that further improves accuracy.

> at least some of the time

YMMV

[Kerb_]

You sound pretty damn confident for being so wrong. Are you a language model or human? And how sure are you of your answer? ;)

[pmarreck]

> The nature of how LLMs hallucinate

oh here we go. You're one of those people conveniently restricting this accusation to a machine that scores a 130 IQ (https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/11t5bhh/i_just...), instead of also including humans, who notably will send someone to prison 1000% sure that they witnessed that person doing the thing, when in fact, later DNA evidence exonerates them (https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-...). Fucking LOL. Get out of here, doomer, the rest of us have AI-enhanced work to do.

[holden_nelson]

I miss when this forum wasn’t so vitriolic.

Of course humans also hallucinate, but we didn’t have to take that into account every single time we read a piece of information on the internet. Humans have well-documented cognitive biases. Also, usually, a human’s attempt to deceive has some motivation. With LLMs, the most basic of information they provide could be totally false.

[pmarreck]

I don't dispute this. What I chafe at is the default-dismissive attitude about any utility of these. "It emits inaccuracies, therefore useless" would invalidate literally every human.

That said, overall utility of anything plummets drastically as reliability goes below 100%. If a particular texting app or service only successfully sent 90% of your messages, or a person you depended on only answered 90% of your calls, you'd probably stop relying on those things.

(I wish I could edit out my vitriol.)

[holden_nelson]

Those are both excellent points. And I know I’m guilty of being somewhat anti-LLM just because it’s the new hotness and I’m kind of a contrarian by nature. Which is an example of bias right there! And being in academia when it blew up - I do worry about our future cohorts of computer scientists jf academia doesn’t adapt. Which it almost surely won’t. But that’s not a problem inherent to LLMs.

[kortilla]

Did you fully read the post you blew up at? I didn’t doubt the usefulness of LLMs. It was a very specific complaint about posting LLM generated content on the Internet without specifying it as the off-the-cuff trash it usually is.

[BlackCherry]

You can have a high IQ while having wrong axioms or bad facts.

Those humans who recalled incorrectly could have a 130 IQ, proving my point above and making your ad hominem reddit speak luddite insult fall flat.

[pmarreck]

My argument was that this criticism was only being applied to LLM's and not to other humans.

It is invalid if you take what an LLM says as simply what another human (who happens to have a broad knowledge reach) would say.

[Aurornis]

> If you took things for granted before LLMs, you shouldn't have, and if you don't trust trustworthy authors post LLMs, you should.

Blaming LLMs for everything is becoming the preferred excuse for people who like to reject what they read and substitute their own beliefs instead.

It’s true that LLMs hallucinate and are definitely not correct all the time, but the way people are using that as an opening to reject everything on the internet and elevate their own prior beliefs to the top is strange.

[yndoendo]

Most people don't know humans hallucinate daily. Right now your brain is removing visual information by clipping out the image of your nose and replacing it with what the scene behind it theoretically looks like.

[ChatGTP]

IMO ChatGPT 5 will just think the answer to all problems is going to be "humans hallucinate too?!?!".

Maybe it will be right, but the best part? We'll continue to be reminded of this fact.

Thanks for reminding us all.

[danparsonson]

One could argue that whereas once it was necessary to verify the source, now it is necessary to verify not just the source but also the LLM derivation of it, (which may be subtly mangled) - and the source may no longer be readily apparent.

[xarope]

I think this is a good thing. In the past you would remind people, hey, after you find your wiki article, "please" go verify. But wiki was "good" enough most of the time, that people found verification to be often time redundant.

But now with LLMs everywhere, people will realize it is necessary to verify.

[meheleventyone]

Except that isn’t what will happen and is part of the reason we tried to have majority trustworthy sources.

[phanimahesh]

I hope I can be this optimistic.

[krapp]

How do you verify when every source you could possibly refer to has also been poisoned by AI?

[TheSpiceIsLife]

You're optimistic!

[xarope]

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best!

[rsynnott]

Or just disregard any machine-generated stuff entirely, though of course it may not always be labeled as such.

[otteromkram]

I don't trust this comment.

[xhevahir]

What? Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is one of the most important books in the history of Western thought. Saying that "even in France no one longer reads this" is like saying that The Origin of Species is irrelevant because one never sees passengers reading it on the London Tube.

[chadash]

No one reads Origin of Species either. I’ll bet that there’s a 100 to 1 ratio of people who have heard of Darwin’s book versus those who have read it. Same goes for many important (or at least influential) books. Mein Kampf, Das Capital and Newton’s Principia are a few more that come to mind.

[chx]

The ratio is much, much larger. Darwin's book is not an easy read but luckily you don't need to read Darwin's book, Almost like a Whale by Steve Jones is an excellent rewrite of it. Chapter by chapter, the same arguments are presented but where Darwin could only guess, Jones could rely on genetics and other advances in sciences.

Newton’s Principia is totally and absolutely impossible to understand to the average curious person raised on Cauchy and Weierstrass. There was a course at university aimed at people with advanced math knowledge to prepare you to read it.

[spicymapotofu]

People who want a deeper understanding of the related fields do read these. Furthermore, to reiterate the GP's reaction to GGP's sentiment about few reading them, their readership or lack thereof is not a variable in the question of their value. We can speak to many technical guides that would increase people's productivity if they only read them.

Popularity is more a question of marketability, especially in the dire non-fiction category. Reading is a secondary use for most of these books, and it makes it even harder to discern which lifestyle books are resume-padding filler or truly generalizable advice.

[abecedarius]

Darwin is far more readable than any of the others you mention.

Possibly Mein Kampf could compete in short passages by a "reading difficulty" score, but it's really tedious and much longer (by a factor of 5!). Darwin could actually write. Origin of Species was intended for the educated public as well as for scientists.

[8bitsrule]

> No one reads Origin of Species either.

Hold on, hold on.

I started to read Origin of Species.

One time. But I did read it. Not all. Unconvincing.

And I did read all of Gabriel Marcel's Metaphysical Journal. So ... not a matter of Slack. If one in 100 reads Origin that's a rough approximation to the number of masochists

[guilbep]

Btw, it's wrong, it's a link to Marcus Aurelius "Meditations". not Descartes methaphysical ones.

[fsckboy]

Marcus Aurelius "Meditations" is a very popular recommendation these days, I keep seeing it around

[Scarblac]

It's extremely fragmented and repetitive, something we can't blame the author for as he never intended it as a book to be published.

It could do with being recommended less, imo. There are probably good summaries of it around.

[paperwasp42]

For me, the repetition is a feature, not a bug. It's similar to Buddhist meditation practices, which also involve a lot of repetition. It really helps my brain to fully absorb the message and walk away feeling more calm and in control. But as with any philosophical text, your mileage may vary.

[mrkstu]

It’s repetitive, but also not particularly long. Also easier to skim those parts. It is more of an issue when you’re trying to consume the audio version…

[kortilla]

Important != popular nor currently relevant.

[jamestimmins]

Knuth's work is the computer science version of "industry-specific canon that few people have actually read", much like The Powerbroker in urban planning.

I own several of his books (admittedly they were gifts), and have never read them. So them not showing up in the top five doesn't surprise me much.

[aragonite]

For many people it's more of a reference book, not to be read cover to cover. Reminds me of this bit from a corecurisve interview with Richard Hipp:

https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/

Richard: You just pick things up. People tell you these things, and that happened to some with Bloomberg. They’d come to us and say, “Hey, why aren’t you doing this optimization,” and I said “Never occurred to me.” “Well, can you do it?” “Let’s see what we can do,” and then it would go in, so, yeah, kind of figure it out as you went along. I had to invent a lot of this myself. Nobody ever taught me about a B tree. I had heard of it. When I went to write my own B tree, on the bookshelf behind me, I’ve got Don Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, so I just pulled that down, I flipped to the chapter on searching and looked up B trees and he described the algorithm. That’s what I did.

Funny thing, Don gives us details on the algorithm for searching a B tree and for inserting into a B tree. He does not provide an algorithm for deleting from the B tree. That’s an exercise at the end of the chapter, so before I wrote my own B tree I had to solve the exercise at the end. Thanks, Don. I really appreciate it.

Adam: That’s awesome. Did you pull anything else from that book?

Richard: Well, it’s an amazing volume. I can’t give you a specific example, but from my era, everybody has to have read or at least skimmed through, at least browsed through The Art of Computer Programming, and know that algorithms that are there, maybe not Don’s exact implementation. I mean, I never took the time to learn MIX, which is his assembly language, but it’s useful to flip through and look at all the algorithms he talks about. I think that just a year or two ago I needed a pseudorandom number generator, and I was, “Let’s see what Don recommends.” You pull it off. You see what he does.

[hcks]

It’s massively overrated too. It’s a detailed handbook on the engineering problems of it’s time (sorting, parsing, …) which have all been ‘solved’ since.

[laurent_du]

I don't think Knuth's work is canon in our specific industry, be it web dev, system dev, or whatever it is people around here are doing. Knuth belongs to Academia, not industry.

[smithza]

I am sorry that you feel this way. Software Engineering and Computer Science are thoroughly academic topics that every practicing IC and manager can greatly benefit from reading and digesting. Bill Gates put as an endorsement of TAOCP that he would hire (in industry) anyone who mastered the topics therein. Did you not go to university? Even if you didn't, where was the source of your education? Knuth wrote books that could belong to undergraduate level programming courses.

[laurent_du]

I have read a few chapters of TAOCP for fun but I have a PhD in Mathematics, and worked in Academia, so I am an outlier. I don't think Knuth's book are a difficult read - for me. But unlike you I don't make the mistake of believing everyone is as proficient as I am. I don't know a single person, among my friends and acquaintances working in SWE, that could read a page of TAOCP.

[hcks]

I mean Microsoft hires any college grad that can solve medium leetcodes, its not like it’s a huge endorsement.

[NhanH]

The author name is wrong for Meditations (though it links to the correct book)

It’s Meditations (by Marcus Aurelius).

[kristianp]

Author here. There are at least 2 books referred to as Meditations, so probably that item on the list should be split into Decartes [1] and Aurelius.

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

[prepend]

I think the accreditation to Descartes may be incorrect. The link goes to Marcus Aurelius.

[mberning]

Descartes wrote a book with a similar title, but I agree with you, I think Marcus is way more talked about on HN.

[AnonymousPlanet]

I can assure you that Descartes Mediations is required reading for any philosophy student at some point, also in France. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, on the other hand, is pretty much of no relevance if you study philosophy. It's very popular in the life style and esoterics section at book stores though.

[westpfelia]

Honestly the fact that Ayn Rand is so high makes me question HN entirely.

[__rito__]

I think this [0] is a better, and more (statistically) representative list.

[0]: https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news

[reducesuffering]

This list can't be more accurate with "Three Felonies A day" at #4, "Elements of Computing Systems" at #6, and "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" at #8. TFA list seems way more representative.

[__rito__]

I didn't say perfect or accurate. I said "more statistically representative". As compared to the OP. And I stand by that.

[bwb]

I love Ayn Rand, but not for the weird cult thing it grew into.

To me, it is the story of someone trying to create cool stuff and the world making that hard (felt like a celebration of human creativity). She is brutalistic in her messaging but it is an interesting story. I weirdly like her writing style, its like someone pounding a hammer against my skull. Haven't read her books in 10+ years but in my teens and twenties, I found them thought provoking and inspiring.

[thiago_fm]

Same, and I'm very progressive and completely disagree with her Objectivist philosophy, because she's obviously not a philosopher. She's a great writer though, her work can motivate people, and has for sometime made me reflect and move forward with my life.

But I believe it might be toxic for the HN crew.

Let's be frank, people don't read much on average, so they take whatever book or author you read as your own personality, when in reality people should read many books with different ideas, so you can form your own.

One can learn a lot from reading from Friedman to Marx.

This is why I also think that one should read all the classics instead of chasing book recommendations, any community you ask will give them recommendation for non-technical subjects that are from their own worldview, which in turn, will make you not smarter, but likely more stupid than you initially started before you've read those books.

[bwb]

Well said.

She had a really unique view of the world, I appreciated it, and it definitely helped me develop my own view of the world. I am about to read the Upanishads along a similar line of thought.

[Spivak]

I think this is the first time I've heard anyone talk about Rand in a way that matches my own experience. Her writing definitely affected how I saw the world and I think that makes it good. But at the same time it's like nerd sniping for philosophy, I had such a visceral reaction to how well she presents an absolutely insane way of thinking that you can't just dismiss her out of hand. It forces you to genuinely learn to be able to command the vocabulary and ideas to really explain where the cracks are.

[yawpitch]

If a list includes Ayn Rand and the title for the list doesn’t start with “[N] Worst [Writers|Artists|Philsophers|Thinkers|Economists|Women] of” then it’s a bad list.

[spicymapotofu]

This narrow perspective doesn't sit well with me. I read Shrugged while growing up poor, and I think a thoughtful take would be that she wrote, in her own way, something which could be in the running as the "Great American Novel" alongside Gatsby or Huckleberry Finn. It captures a zeitgeist, even if I don't personally want this world at large, and I think we lose an important part of literature discussions to allow a discourse as simple as "Rand bad".

[lizardking]

At some point a chunk of the Reddit hive mind detached and affixed itself to HN.

[yawpitch]

If one’s view is that Atlas Shrugged constitutes a novel at all — rather than an objectivist manifesto rattled off by “characters” with all the inherent humanity of damp toilet tissue — one’s perspective is so ludicrously narrow that all I can prescribe is anything whatsoever by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and call me once the fever breaks.

But, yes, Rand’s turds do appeal to those poor enough financially that they didn’t receive a rich and broad education and poor enough intellectually that they couldn’t give themselves one.

[zvmaz]

> I think we lose an important part of literature discussions to allow a discourse as simple as "Rand bad".

Sometimes, it is that simple: "Rand bad".

[yawpitch]

So, so bad.