Top all-time · #13197
Sean Trott
Personal blog · seantrott.substack.comscienceaidata
Sean Trott writes The Counterfactual, a personal blog at seantrott.substack.com about science, ai and data. Since 2023, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Sean Trott's Substack posts on why negation is hard for LLMs, on perceptrons, XOR and the 1970s AI winter, and on decoding thoughts with neuro-imaging and language models. The comments are citations or bare links.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Cognitive Science, statistics, AI.
What Hacker News says?
Negation is a hard problem for AI and mainly unsolved: - https://seantrott.substack.com/p/llms-and-the-not-problem - https://github.com/elsamuko/Shirt-without-Stripes
Comment linking /p/llms-and-the-not-problem
on “Why LLMs can't really build software”Submitted Who's Afraid of the Null Hypothesis? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHaven't read the page but a promising-looking search result is here: https://seantrott.substack.com/p/perceptrons-xor-and-the-fir... I'm sure it's an oversimplification to blame the entire 1970s AI winter on Minsky, considering they couldn't have gotten much further than the proof-of-concept stage due to lack of hardware. But his voice was a loud, widely-respected one in academia, and it did have a negative effect o…
Comment linking /p/perceptrons-xor-and-the-first-ai
on “There Will Be a Scientific Theory of Deep Learning”Submitted Tokenization in Large Language Models as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNice, then we can combine that with the recent research on decoding thoughts ( https://seantrott.substack.com/p/using-neuro-imaging-and-lan... ) and maybe a couple of decades from now we can have parolees released only on condition that they're fulfilling their law compliance monitoring hours quota (LCMH quota) per day, or police interrogations where they can make you wear a helmet and know what you're thinking inte…
Comment linking /p/using-neuro-imaging-and-language
on “Ask HN: Room temperature superconductor: what to expect?”Submitted Evaluating empirical claims: practical advice as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted "Mechanistic Interpretability" for LLMs as a story · 1 points
HN discussion