MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is there a general, multi-PL programming task dataset?
by quartztz | 2025-04-24 20:07:49+00:00
Hello!

Being a student interested in PL design, I have had this idea floating around for a while: the gist is finding out what programming languages LLMs might be the most proficient in, to study their design choices and syntactic features with the goal of designing the perfect language for LLMs. This is, of course, gimmicky, but I entertained the idea for a while as a fun afterschool project.

The challenge is: what would be the best way to evaluate programming performance _in specific languages_? There are two main hypotheses here:

1. There are intrinsic syntactic/structural features that the transformer architecture is uniquely able to parse/reproduce/understand best, leading to higher quality code generated. For example: Lisp dialects make parsing code structure and blocks very easy, so one could assume an LLM can "understand their code better" 2. There is so much Python/JS out there that the question isn't even worth asking, and the performance in those will beat whatever other language you throw at it. This is probably not as much of a point thanks to newer transformer architectures but the question is still up.

I suspect the answer can be made somewhat interesting by considering performance relative to language popularity, but the ground question is: is there a general dataset containing different programming challenges, of varying difficulty, in multiple languages, with standard solutions? I couldn't find anything when I looked around, but I might have missed something obvious. It wouldn't be impossible to build a simple website to crowdsource, but I'm thinking that if I missed something obvious I'd rather find out early than late. Also, if you have any input on the project itself, I'd love to hear your ideas!
by the8472 | 2025-04-24 20:08:06+00:00
Security software can have negative value when it increases attack surface[0], shuts down infrastructure[1], impedes productivity or pushes users towards workarounds that make things overall less secure.

[0] page 11 https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/m-trends-2025-en.p... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002195
by palata | 2025-04-24 20:08:45+00:00
Spot on. There is no loyalty, it's a partnership.

You wouldn't pay 20% to Netflix to watch your shows, would you? But it doesn't mean you're a bad customer. And when Netflix raises the prices or includes ads, they won't say "oh, you've been paying us for 5 years, we won't do it to you".

If extra time is not compensated, don't do extra time. Even for startups: startups are ponzi schemes for the founders. Like for any job, you should consider what they offer now, not what they promise. Because startups generally don't meet those promises (that's the whole point of a startup).

But if the company respects you, you can respect it in return. It means meeting the expectations. If one party doesn't, the other party is free to end the contract.
by ivanmontillam | 2025-04-24 20:08:46+00:00
This is great advice.

> I've seen folks wanting big changes and we sit down and draw things up and surprisingly it looks like the old roadmap.

I've found myself doing this also. It also helps to reason through new nuances found on the same evidence, because we're more wise looking at the same data in the future, or in this case, in the present (looking from the past).
by mcintyre1994 | 2025-04-24 20:08:50+00:00
I wonder if the algorithm is affected by blocking the high profile account in these cases. Eg I blocked Musk ages ago because if you don’t then the algorithm just constantly pushes his ‘content’ at you. So does the algorithm still prioritise things he’s interacted with for me, or does it only do that for people who haven’t blocked him? I definitely get stuff recommended that I expect he might interact with, but I don’t know if that’s actually specifically why it’s being pushed at me.
by saltcured | 2025-04-24 20:09:23+00:00
I feel like you have that exactly backwards? To me it was a shift in roles in the old field of dreams storyline. I.e. "if you build it, they will come".

In Web 1.0, you posted content and an audience came. In Web 2.0, you tried to open an empty field and commenters came and played with each other.

If anything, what happened next was a sort of halfway reversion, as the platforms tried to stratify and monetize two types of user. A subset who were the Web 2.0 contributors and another tier of more passive consumers. I think a lot of the "likes" stuff was also less about self-moderating channels and more about making passive users feel like they're engaging without actually having to contribute anything substantive.
by minimaxir | 2025-04-24 20:09:43+00:00
"Image from a reference" is a bit of a rabbit hole. For traditional image generation models, in order for it to learn a reference, you have to fine-tune it (LoRA) and/or use a conditioning model to constrain the output (InstantID/ControlNet)

The interesting part of this GPT-4o API is that it doesn't need to learn them. But given the cost of `high` quality image generation, it's much cheaper to train a LoRA for Flux 1.1 Pro and generate from that.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-24 20:10:19+00:00
> I think it's interesting to talk about how "act your size" can also be wrong. Sometimes fake-it-til-you-make-it is the goal.

This is a really interesting point, I think.

In my opinion, it depends on what your larger goal is. If your goal is to eventually become a big business, that changes your approach and "fake it till you make it" gains some validity. In a sense, those sorts of businesses are less "small businesses" and more "large businesses in their infancy".
by al_borland | 2025-04-24 20:11:01+00:00
It’s only what they “want” after the various social media companies to deliberate steps to addict their users to feeds that maximize engagement.

Does an addict really want to be an addict? The Light Phone, screen time features, and various other things exist for a reason. People don’t want this, but feel helpless to break free from their addiction, which entered their life like a trojan horse.
by buzzbyjool | 2025-04-24 20:12:13+00:00
You’re absolutely right to call that out — and I appreciate the thoughtful framing.

“Leveled up” is subjective, yes. What I meant more precisely is this: the devs who stayed stopped spending time on tasks like writing boilerplate logic or tweaking form validation, and started focusing on higher-order thinking — designing agent workflows, debugging reasoning paths, writing specs that are machine-parsable, and thinking in systems rather than syntax. That shift, in terms of skill depth and adaptability, is something I genuinely view as a level-up. But I agree, it’s through the lens of our environment.

And yes — absolutely fair on the selection bias. When I say “no one wants to go back,” I don’t mean it as proof the approach is universally better. It’s just true for our current team, within the culture and processes we’ve chosen to embrace. Those who didn’t align with this way of working left early — and I don’t hold that against them.

So your comment is a valuable nuance: internal satisfaction is a necessary condition for success, but not a sufficient one. Our team’s enthusiasm is a sign that the model can work — not that it will for everyone.

Thanks for calling it out clearly.
by mrinterweb | 2025-04-24 20:12:34+00:00
I have a 2021 Toyota that I lost one of two key fobs. Toyota has a strict policy that only Toyota dealerships can program key fobs for their newer cars, so buying a key fob replacement from a 3rd party was not an option. Total out of pocket expense for getting new key fob, programming that key fob to the car, and making sure the other fob still worked; cost about $550. I feel that is an absurd amount of money to spend because of a lost fob. I appreciate people looking into and exposing weaknesses of car fobs because it might expose ways to circumvent the monopolistic costs associated with replacements. Wish there was a way to retrofit my car to use Ultra Wide Bandwidth as a key.
by ein0p | 2025-04-24 20:13:29+00:00
I went the other way around. I carry my Z8 everywhere (in the backpack or on the strap), take it with me when I travel anywhere, and lately I've been shooting quite a bit of video with it as well. I started doing that when I realized how little I remember from just 5 years ago, and how helpful apps like Immich or Google Photos are with remembering the fleeting moments of my life. Could I do it with my iPhone? Yes. But I find that having a device that _only_ takes photos and videos makes things more intentional and less distracting.
by Tireings | 2025-04-24 20:13:54+00:00
It's possible true but look at the current situation: there are people taking trump as face value.

They believe in him.

They might struggle between 'whats going on here' 'wtf' 'why is no one doing something ' to 'am I wrong? People voted for that clown'.

It's impressive to see how fast society, values and character just degress or becomes mainstream. It has to mean something
by wtallis | 2025-04-24 20:14:00+00:00
> security issue was Apple thing

Not true; basically everyone shipping laptops with Firewire ports in that era was at risk of DMA attacks. Apple was merely the most notable vendor trying to offer something better than USB 2.0.

> has nothing to do with any product segmentation

Go look at which Intel Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge processors had VT-d (IOMMU) capability enabled vs disabled. The product segmentation strategy is on plain display. They made overclocking mutually exclusive with IOMMU for several generations of processor. There's no technological basis for that, just artificial product segmentation.

Please put at least a little bit of effort into fact-checking yourself before continuing ranting. It's not that hard, and you'll be much more convincing if you don't exaggerate your complaints to the point of being obviously wrong.
by allemagne | 2025-04-24 20:14:22+00:00
>A man and his cousin are in a car crash. The man dies, but the cousin is taken to the emergency room. At the OR, the surgeon looks at the patient and says: “I cannot operate on him. He’s my son.” How is this possible?

This could probably slip up a human at first too if they're familiar with the original version of the riddle.

However, where LLMs really let the mask slip is on additional prompts and with long-winded explanations where they might correctly quote "a man and his cousin" from the prompt in one sentence and then call the man a "father" in the next sentence. Inevitably, the model concludes that the surgeon must be a woman.

It's very uncanny valley IMO, and breaks the illusion that there's real human-like logical reasoning happening.
by ghuntley | 2025-04-24 20:14:43+00:00
Thanks for the share. Yeah, building upon VSCode (MIT) is a stupid idea. Regarding OpenVSX, it was developed whilst I was at Gitpod and transferred to the Eclipse Foundation. It's been many years now, so my memory might be a little dated as to what came first, but OpenVSX/Gitpod/Thiea/Eclipse origins can all be traced back to https://www.typefox.io/.

Anyway. OpenVSX is classic XKCD https://xkcd.com/2347/ territory—run by a small crew of brilliant volunteers, but the entire world depends/freeloads upon them.
by buzzbyjool | 2025-04-24 20:15:07+00:00
Great questions — and yes, you’ve got the right intuition: we orchestrate role-specific agents using off-the-shelf LLMs (Claude 3.7, DeepSeek GPT 4.1, GPT-4 Turbo), and they “hand off” tasks between each other. But to avoid total chaos (or hallucinated collaboration), we had to build a few things around them.

The “shared context layer” is essentially a lightweight memory and coordination layer that persists project state, intermediate decisions, and validated outputs. It’s not a traditional vector store or RAG setup. Instead, we use: • A Redis-backed scratchpad with typed slots for inputs, constraints, decisions, outputs, and feedback • An MCP (Model Context Protocol) template that defines what agents should expect, expose, and inherit • Each agent works statelessly, but gets a structured payload that includes relevant validated history, filtered to reduce noise

Agents don’t have full access to each other’s output logs (too much context = hallucination risk). Instead, each one produces an “artifact” + optional feedback object. These go into the shared layer, and the orchestrator decides what the next agent should receive and in what form.

We don’t run anything locally (yet). It’s all API-based for now, with orchestration handled in a containerized layer. That will probably evolve if we scale into more sensitive verticals.

Hope that helps clarify. Happy to dig deeper if you want building something similar.
by thunky | 2025-04-24 20:16:56+00:00
I think we're agreeing. I just don't think loyalty (necessarily) implies mutual trust and support.

I've been accused of being disloyal simply for being honest and not agreeing with someone else's stance. So in my gut, loyalty implies abondoning your principals or compromising yourself in some way in order to gain or keep favor with someone else.

I suppose others may think of loyalty as a positive trait. But in the context of of a profressional relationship, I can't see any reason we should want loyalty to play a role.
by xhrpost | 2025-04-24 20:17:03+00:00
Slight tangent but I've wondered about something similar to this, has there been much initiative to make games that directly boot on modern PC hardware? So not load a full OS but just go directly to the game. Similar to older generation gaming consoles. It should be possible, granted if you want to stay simple, things like wifi, bt, GPU would be hard to utilize without modern drivers, but a keyboard and mouse should be fairly doable as they seem to have some sort of default BIOS access? (probably wrong terms there but hopefully my point is understandable)
by throwanem | 2025-04-24 20:17:16+00:00
> I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can.

There have been times in my life when I said the same. Now ask me if those experiences incline me to try saying so ever again.

I understand perfectly the motivation, and the theoretical appeal of the method. It is only that while in theory there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice this method pursued assiduously enough will see you working actively in support of atrocity before you realize that - past a surprisingly early point which large parts of the US government passed several moons ago - the method simply cannot work.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-24 20:17:19+00:00
But this is going to be in every AI's training set. I just fed ChatGPT your exact prompt and it gave back exactly what I expected:

This is a classic riddle that challenges assumptions. The answer is:

The surgeon is the boy’s mother.

The riddle plays on the common stereotype that surgeons are male, which can lead people to overlook this straightforward explanation.
by mmooss | 2025-04-24 20:17:47+00:00
I understand Shopify's tactics, but the results are the same for Mom & Pop regardless of how they came about.

> just a lie

That's just some words; how will it not affect Mom & Pop?

> Why is a mom and pop ceramics business violating consumer privacy laws?

Because they don't have a legal department to make sure they comply with the rules in 50 states and N countries.
by cogman10 | 2025-04-24 20:17:50+00:00
Harris was pretty much the only option. The primary was already over and there were real questions on who could spend campaign funds with Biden's step down.

That said, I really blame her lose on her and the biden campaign more than anything. They chased hard for disaffected republican voters at the expense of the base. They failed to win those voters and lost some of their base voters.
by vineyardmike | 2025-04-24 20:19:12+00:00
> It seems to me like this is a new hybrid product for -vibe coders- beacuse otherwise the -wrapping- of prompting/improving a prompt with an LLM before hitting the text2image model can certainly be done as you say cheaper if you just run it yourself.

In case you didn’t know, it’s not just wrapping in an LLM. The image model they’re referencing is a model that’s directly integrated into the LLM for functionality. It’s not possible to extract, because the LLM outputs tokens which are part of the image itself.

That said, they’re definitely trying to focus on building products over raw models now. They want to be a consumer subscription instead of commodity model provider.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-04-24 20:19:17+00:00
Well, I’ve come to learn the best leaders hire people who do fight them. The key is that they’re transparently open to being fought, take all sides under consideration, give deference when they don’t have to, but expect compliance when they make a decision.

I think we are in a situation where none of the above is happening, so you end up with a globally pessimal decisioning system where you push out the thought leaders and consensus builders and replace them with either people too stupid to have an opinion or just devious enough to appease their master while imposing their will. It’s the most toxic of all work places.

I feel genuine sorrow for all federal employees, contractors, and people who do business with or receive money from this government. I’ve worked in both environments, and what’s happening is going to crush a lot of human souls in what was already a pretty soul crushing environment to begin with.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-04-24 20:19:42+00:00
I asked Grok about this: "I've heard that AIs are programmed to be helpful, and that this may lead to telling users what they want to hear instead of the most accurate answer. Could you be doing this?" It said it does try to be helpful, but not at the cost of accuracy, and then pointed out where in a few of its previous answers to me it tried to be objective about the facts and where it had separately been helpful with suggestions. I had to admit it made a pretty good case.

Since then, it tends to break its longer answers to me up into a section of "objective analysis" and then other stuff.
by davidjade | 2025-04-24 20:19:55+00:00
For better or worst, Fb has become the de facto place for cruising sailors to share information about different regions of the world. Tips, alerts, advice, questions, etc. I sail the world and there is no other place for groups quite as good for finding the information we need. There’s a niche group for every area around the world full of people sharing advice and answering questions. The good groups have great moderation and quality content.
by allemagne | 2025-04-24 20:20:06+00:00
Yeah this is the issue with the prompt, it also slips up humans who gloss over "cousin".

I'm assuming that pointing this out leads you the human to reread the prompt and then go "ah ok" and adjust the way you're thinking about it. ChatGPT (and DeepSeek at least) will usually just double and triple down and repeat "this challenges gender assumptions" over and over.
by mmooss | 2025-04-24 20:20:31+00:00
> You can't even get progressives to not eat at Chick-fil-A despite their founders blantent homophobia. This incident is not going to keep people from buying Tesla in the long run.

That narrative is great at stopping people from taking action - I wonder who it comes from? In fact, companies bow to public pressure all the time. Look at those retreating from DEI or support of LGBTQ rights before Trump took office. One of the beer companies' marketing used a trans person and the transphobia, boycotts, etc. led to them firing people and dropping the trans person.
by Remnant44 | 2025-04-24 20:21:30+00:00
These days, I strongly believe that loop unrolling is a pessimization, especially with SIMD code.

Scalar code should be unrolled by the compiler to the SIMD word width to expose potential parallelism. But other than that, correctly predicted branches are free, and so is loop instruction overhead on modern wide-dispatch processors. For example, even running a maximally efficient AVX512 kernel on a zen5 machine that dispatches 4 EUs and some load/stores and calculates 2048 bits in the vector units every cycle, you still have a ton of dispatch capacity to handle the loop overhead in the scalar units.

The cost of unrolling is decreased code density and reduced effectiveness of the instruction / uOp cache. I wish Clang in particular would stop unrolling the dang vector loops.
by archon1410 | 2025-04-24 20:22:18+00:00
I've also noticed this. Google Search is vastly superior to any LLM (including their own LLM Gemini) for any "tip of my tongue" questions, even the ones that don't contain any exact-match phrase and require natural language understanding. This is surprising. What technology are they using to make Search so amazing at finding obscure stuff from descriptions, while LLMs that were supposed to be good at this badly fail?
by Exoristos | 2025-04-24 20:23:39+00:00
I've worked at large companies (a Fortune 50 for ten years), and small (current employer is six people), and in my experience the small businesses treated employees the worst. At a large organization, there is a sense of orderliness and process that sometimes works in the employee's favor; your "loyalty" is on the record and categorizes you in a specific way. In a "family"-size company, it's often the case that only family members, family friends, or family co-religionists are of value to the owners; this truth then emerges at the worst time for you.
by tough | 2025-04-24 20:23:39+00:00
I don't know about -commercial- offerings but you can try also something like SVGRender which you should be able to run on your own GPU etc https://ximinng.github.io/PyTorch-SVGRender-project/

first paper linked on prior comment is the latest one from SVGRender group, but not sure if any runnable model weights are out yet for it (SVGFusion)
by jp57 | 2025-04-24 20:24:43+00:00
True, though I'm still surprised, on a site run by a startup incubator, at the number of seriously jaded clock-punchers who chime into these threads with their cynicism and proud declarations of how they go through their careers phoning it in.

I have to wonder if those people interact with the "Who's Hiring?" and "Who Wants to be Hired?" threads and if they get any interest from employers.
by wtallis | 2025-04-24 20:26:21+00:00
Conservative rasterization is definitely an area-based square pixel technique. I'm not sure how prevalent it is now that it's been available for a few years. Multisample antialiasing patterns are also constructed with square pixels in mind, but it's relatively rare in games these days due in part to the popularity of deferred rendering.

I'm not sure how raytracing as done by video games can be construed a more area-based than point sample based. It seems to me like ray-hit testing is done in a point-sample manner, and games aren't doing multiple rays per pixel. (They're usually doing less than one ray per pixel, and averaging over several frames that sampled from different locations within a square pixel, then running it all through a blurring denoiser filter and upscaling, but the result is so bad for anything other than a static scene that I don't think it should be used to support any argument.)