Top all-time · #3301
Kevin Lacker
Personal blog · lacker.io · on HN as lackeraiprogramming
Kevin Lacker's personal blog at lacker.io covers ai and programming. Since 2015, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 41 times, most often “Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test (2020)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-05-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Kevin Lacker's blog mainly for "Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test", which tests GPT-3's factual answers and its failure to recognise when it is wrong. Also cited: a 2017 essay on whiteboard coding.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
TODO: insert description here
Most-linked posts?
- Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test (2020)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-07-23
- Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-07-06
- Why Uber Culture2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-04-04
- Paul Graham’s “Same Way”2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-27
- Why You Can't Say2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-04-06
- The Random Number Generator Hypothesis2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-11-08
What Hacker News says?
http://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.ht... Q: Which colorless green ideas sleep furiously? A: Ideas that are colorless, green, and sleep furiously are the ideas of a sleep furiously. Q: Who was president of the United States in 1600? A: Queen Elizabeth I was president of the United States in 1600. Q: How many Super Bowls do the Cincinnati Bengals win in the 2030s? A: The Cincinnati Bengals win t…
Comment linking /ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html
on “OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin”Submitted Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test as a story · 453 points
HN discussionYes, if you want answers, you need to frame it as a Q&A session: https://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.h...
Comment linking /ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html
on “GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about”Submitted Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in Bash as a story · 189 points
HN discussion>There is much structural regularity in a large text corpus that is descriptive of relationships in the world. Sure, there is a lot. But let's say we want to learn what apples are. So we look at occurrences of "apple" in the text corpus, and learn that apples can be eaten, they can be sweet, sometimes they are sour, red, sometimes green, and so on. Can apples spontaneously change size? Hmm, no idea, no mention of th…
Comment linking /ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html
on “Pathways Language Model (PaLM): Scaling to 540B parameters”Submitted Why You Can't Say as a story · 68 points
HN discussionLanguage models can take input and figure out a response. They're designed to predict words - you just set it up so they predict the response. In fact I think that's the only thing their API lets you do at the moment. https://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.h...
Comment linking /ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html
on “Thoughts on Voice Interfaces”Submitted Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test as a story · 32 points
HN discussionThis essay, which touches on the subject of whiteboard coding, has some good food for thought on the subject: http://lacker.io/tech/2017/04/05/why-you-cant-say.html .
Comment linking /tech/2017/04/05/why-you-cant-say.html
on “How to Get Hired at CircleCI”Submitted Straussian Reading (2017) as a story · 25 points
HN discussionI found the blog post that inspired the short story more interesting: https://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.h...
Comment linking /ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html
on “Short Story on AI: Forward Pass”Submitted Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThe search isn't on hold, we just do it differently nowadays. SETI@home was great for its time, but distributing data to lots of end user machines just isn't the right architecture any more. Modern radio telescopes produce so much data, you have to process it onsite - these are pretty remote facilities, and the bandwidth out is much less than the bandwidth the radio telescope can produce. Arecibo is also a couple ge…
Comment linking /physics/2022/01/21/looking-for-aliens.html
on “SETI@home Is in Hibernation”Submitted How to Get Promoted: A Counterargument as a story · 4 points
HN discussionBeing the author of The Program, a fiction podcast described by fans as "a love child of Black Mirror and NPR", I've been following news around GPT-3 very closely. So I decided to make an episode depicting a fictionalized origin story of GPT-3. The twist is that I incorporated actual text generated by GPT-3 to tell the narrative (even the episode title has been generated by it!) To this end, I used four excellent ar…
Comment linking /ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html
on “Show HN: My fiction podcast about GPT-3 incorporating HN discussions”Submitted How to 51% Attack Bitcoin as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAgree. It may happen soon, but GPT-3 isn’t it. One of the biggest problems is that it doesn’t have any idea when it is wrong. This is a big problem, even in the human domain, but especially with AI https://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.h...
Comment linking /ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html
on “AI writing code will make software engineers more valuable”Submitted Conversation with GPT-3 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIts a game changer if you are into trivia or generating nonsense. http://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.ht...
Comment linking /ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html
on “Ask HN: What are the Implications of GPT-3?”Submitted Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSay "I don't know." Back when GPT-3 was all the rage on the internet, I remember Kevin Lacker's "Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test" left a real impression on me [1]. Short read, but gets to the crux of the issue. GPT-3 is a (really sophisticated) statistical model, GPT-4 will be no different. Maybe it will showcase new emergent properties of LLMs, like GPT-3's in-prompt few-shot learning did. But the fundamental constraint…
Comment linking /ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html
on “What's the Least Impressive Thing GPT-4 Won't Be Able to Do”Submitted Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIs it? I remember reading [1] back in the day, which showed some limitations of GPT3, but ChatGPT actually answers all of those perfectly. [1] https://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.h...
Comment linking /ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html
on “Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence”Submitted Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted On the Impossibility of AI Alignment as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Random Number Generator Hypothesis as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Random Number Generator Hypothesis as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Giving GPT-3 a Turing test as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Uber Culture as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Uber Culture as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
