MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jackson12t | 2025-06-09 15:37:36+00:00
This feels a bit like a weird way to test 'thinking' in models, and reminds me of the old story of Gauss[1] and his classmates being assigned the task of adding up the numbers from 1-100.

I think the way the paper lays out the performance regimes is pretty interesting, but I don't think they achieved their goal of demonstrating that LRMs can't use reasoning to solve complex puzzles organically (without contamination/memorization): IMO testing the model's ability to define an algorithm to solve the puzzle would have been a better evaluation of that (rather than having the model walk through all of the steps manually). I don't know that I'd use an LRM for this sort of long-tail reasoning where it has to follow one single process for a long time over just one prompt; if I needed a really long chain of reasoning I'd use an agent or workflow.

It sounds more like the tests measure a model's ability to reason coherently and consistently over many steps rather than a model's ability to understand and solve a complex puzzle. For example, for the Tower of Hanoi, a prompt like "Define an algorithm that will find the sequence of moves to transform the initial configuration into the goal configuration" (e.g. "find an arithmetic series formula, young Gauss") seems like it would have been a better approach than "Find the sequence of moves to transform the initial configuration into the goal configuration" (e.g. "add up all these numbers"). This is kind of seen in how the study included a step where the LRMs were given the algorithm and then asked to solve the problem, the focus was on an LRM's ability to follow the steps, not their ability to come up with an algorithm/solution on their own.

In a job interview, for example, who among us would accept inability to hold all of the `(2^n) - 1` steps of the Tower of Hanoi in our brain as evidence of poor reasoning ability?

Again, I think it's a really interesting study covering a model's ability to consistently follow a simple process over time in pursuit of a static objective (and perhaps a useful benchmark moving forward), but I'm not confident that it successfully demonstrates a meaninful deficiency in overall reasoning capability.

[1]: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/gausss-day-of-reck...
by m_v_c | 2025-06-09 15:37:47+00:00
You writing "one of these land sharks" here shows nothing but your ignorance, to both pit bulls and sharks, as both of these animals don't have any kind of natural aggression towards humans. Sure, both are powerful and CAN hurt you (perhaps more than other animals), but are certainly not short-wired to bite you.

But especially in the case of domesticated dogs, the problem are NOT the pits themselves, but the conditions in which they were raised.
by sys32768 | 2025-06-09 15:38:25+00:00
American descendants of loyalists often hide their roots.

I know this because my grandmother told me a few years before she passed that her father, a mason and devoted patriot, once confided a scandalous family secret: there are loyalists in our family tree.

Sadly, grandma's research never got her to the root of this claim despite much research, but thanks to online resources and some helpful Canadians, I discovered the truth.

Grandma's grandfather had emigrated from New Brunswick, Canada, during the Civil War, in which he served the Union.

It turns out his great-grandfather was a captain in the Queen's Guard during the American revolution, born in Connecticut. He and his wife and children had fled after the war with other loyalists to New Brunswick, Canada. They suffered many deprivations, although the loyalist commission board compensated them about half their worldly goods they lost in America.

This captain had married a woman whose brother fought for the Americans at Bunker Hill.

While researching my grandmother's grandfather from Canada, I discovered a telling white lie: he would tell the local busybody newspaper that he was visiting his sister in New York. Thing is, he had no sister in New York. Instead, I discovered the Canadian newspapers not long after were reporting he had arrived from America to visit his sister in New Brunswick.

I was blown away by all this rich history, but when I shared my discoveries with all the remaining family on that side, nobody expressed excitement. In fact, the one person who used to call me up to discuss family history, stopped calling me.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-09 15:38:28+00:00
We evolved empathy towards them because of superficial cute features. Like puppy dog eyes and other endearing child like features. Dogs are evolving towards a parasitic role by hijacking our biological instincts to care for things that are small and cute. This instinct never evolved t the point where it specifically only applies to human cuteness because such selection pressure was unneeded. There were human babies and that’s it.

Dogs took advantage of this situation and they evolved to hijack our paternal and maternal instincts. Now there is selection pressure. But note dogs reproduce much much faster than humans so this will be an evolutionary arms race where dogs get cuter and humans become less interested in dogs. The first round comes when the people who have dogs instead of kids fail to reproduce. Also Expect an increase in dog allergies over time.
by cometapi | 2025-06-09 15:38:59+00:00
OpenAI’s Codex CLI has quickly become a must-have tool for developers seeking to integrate AI directly into their local workflows. Since its announcement on April 16, 2025, and subsequent updates—including internet-access capabilities on June 3, 2025—the Codex CLI offers a secure, privacy-focused, and highly customizable way to harness OpenAI’s powerful reasoning models right from your terminal. This article synthesizes the latest developments and provides a step-by-step guide to installing and configuring the Codex CLI on your machine.

## What I
by dtagames | 2025-06-09 15:39:03+00:00
We have this already. You can ask Cursor to go read the doc on syntax it may not have ever seen and write something that conforms. I used this recently to support a new feature in Lit which I'd never seen before and I doubt is in the training set much, if at all.

You can also describe your own app's syntax, architecture, function signatures, etc. in markdown files or just in chat and Cursor will write code that conforms to your desired syntax, which definitely doesn't exist in the training set.
by belter | 2025-06-09 15:39:22+00:00
"...Eran Hammer resigned from his role of lead author for the OAuth 2.0 project, withdrew from the IETF working group, and removed his name from the specification in July 2012. Hammer cited a conflict between web and enterprise cultures as his reason for leaving, noting that IETF is a community that is "all about enterprise use cases" and "not capable of simple". "What is now offered is a blueprint for an authorization protocol", he noted, "that is the enterprise way", providing a "whole new frontier to sell consulting services and integration solutions".[28] In comparing OAuth 2.0 with OAuth 1.0, Hammer points out that it has become "more complex, less interoperable, less useful, more incomplete, and most importantly, less secure"...."

"...David Recordon later also removed his name from the specifications for unspecified reasons..."

"...David Harris, author of the email client Pegasus Mail, has criticised OAuth 2.0 as "an absolute dog's breakfast"..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OAuth
by daxfohl | 2025-06-09 15:40:35+00:00
It's like trying to learn math by reading vs by doing. If all you're doing is reading, it robs you of the depth of understanding you'd gain by solving things yourself. Going down wrong paths, backtracking, finally having that aha moment where things click, is the only way to truly understand something.

Now, for all the executives who are trying to force-feed their engineering team to use AI for everything, this is the result. Your engineering staff becomes equivalent to a mathematician who has never actually done a math problem, just read a bunch of books and trusted what was there. Or a math tutor for your kid who "teaches" by doing your kid's homework for them. When things break and the shit hits the fan, is that the engineering department you want to have?
by swells34 | 2025-06-09 15:41:17+00:00
> I doubt there is any specialised hardware on the Windows 95 machines, the specialised hardware is likely connected to something else.

Based on my experience with older government systems, this is likely an incorrect assumption. It was extremely popular in the 90s to create custom hardware that integrated directly to windows machines. I've had to reverse engineer so many drivers to upgrade old bespoke equipment to integrate with newer OSs
by idopmstuff | 2025-06-09 15:41:39+00:00
So you would do what - have engineers hired as part of individual government departments instead of USDS? How would that stop them from being coopted by future administrations? Anybody employed by the US government can't be insulated from changes in who runs the government.

Since you're serious and I'm not, can you propose any specific solution that avoids this issue?
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-09 15:41:56+00:00
I'd say "marketing is hard". It's easy to fault advocacy organizations that spend 90% of their donations on fundraising and overhead but it's the way that it is.

When I was in college I was the PR manager for college radio station KTEK which was notorious for having dances where hardly anyone showed up. My prescription was plastering the campus (2000 students or so) with a ream of paper worth of posters with 15 different designs. Our DJ crew was great so we retained people once they came, but it took about two years of that to get to the place where people expected a KTEK dance to be hopping.

My expectation is that if I tasked a young person with that kind of marketing task today they'd make one poster, put up four of them, and have some excuse like "anybody who wanted that information would seek it out." Doesn't work that way.
by antics | 2025-06-09 15:41:56+00:00
If I give you a biased coin can you simulate a truly random coin flip with it? The answer turns out to be yes. Flip the biased coin twice: HT = heads, TH = tails, and HH/TT = flip twice again.

The general study of such things is called “randomness extractors”. The new Gödel prize goes to this paper which shows how to extract a nearly perfect random bit out of two sources with low min-entropy.
by MisterTea | 2025-06-09 15:42:14+00:00
I too dislike extreme dog people - the kind of people who treat them as a human equal. I grew up with dogs and cats, nowadays just two cats, after they go, no more pets for me. I deeply love my animals and they make great companions.

But make no mistake, they're still animals and are not predictable. I would never bring a dog with me outside to do anything other than go for a walk, always on a leash. They really dont belong in public spaces. I've seen and heard too many stories of dogs suddenly not being the perfect precious animal their owner claims and it bites or attacks another animal or person. Then when they do the owners insist the victim must have done something wrong and take zero responsibility.
by 0x_rs | 2025-06-09 15:42:15+00:00
There's services that do this automatically for a price, and they've been around for a while, for e-mail, phone numbers, and much more. Any bits (literally, bits) of information given without authorization (or plausible belief it's the intended user on the other side) will be efficiently put together from a variety of sources, as there's no shortage of incentive, and many all over the world prodding services used by billions of people worldwide. And then eventually leaked..
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-09 15:42:32+00:00
Don’t be biased because you love dogs. Face the truth.

The economy IS a factor.

But sinking resources into a dog that offers no evolutionary or biological benefit IS ALSO a factor.

There is no other way to look at this. You are committing an act of irrationality if you refuse to see dogs from a biological perspective.

Porn sits in the same area. Hijacking biological instincts to prevent reproduction.

We are looking at multiple causal sources that prevent us from having more children. In the same way men use porn to assuage our sexual urges, many women use dogs to help assuage their maternal instincts. Don’t let your emotions cloud your logic.

This article did not deserve to get flagged simply for offering their own perspective.
by duxup | 2025-06-09 15:42:40+00:00
I have a "wild" area around the borders of my home. I love it.

However, the idea that it is wonderful to just leave entirely is a little alien to me. I don't mow or landscape it like a yard, but it IS work to even just leave it wild. We've got several invasive species in my area and it's a regular fight with them to allow the local species to thrive.

The invasive species wouldn't be invasive if local species were able to handle them ... it is still work to trim them out / fight them.
by taylodl | 2025-06-09 15:43:09+00:00
Apple's real problem is that people have stopped caring about keeping up with the latest iPhone. No matter which model you have, you have a solid camera, reliable connectivity, good music features, and an extensive app ecosystem. In short, your current phone is good enough.

There’s no compelling reason to upgrade. Recent "innovations" like emoji avatars and Apple Intelligence feel superficial - Siri is still as underwhelming as it was a decade ago.

Meanwhile, HomeKit is stagnant, iWork remains irrelevant, and new iPhones offer little meaningful improvement over older ones. Most users are hanging onto their devices until they physically break - and that’s a serious problem for Apple’s bottom line.
by cratermoon | 2025-06-09 15:43:44+00:00
Tim doesn't address this in his essay, so I'm going to harp on it: "AI will soon be able to...". That phrase is far too load-bearing. The part of AI hype that says, "sure, it's kinda janky now, but this is just the beginning" has been repeated for 3 years now, and everything has been just around the corner the entire time. It's the first step fallacy, saying that if we can build a really tall ladder now, surely we'll soon be able to build a ladder tall enough to reach the moon.

The reality is that we've seen incremental and diminishing returns, and the promises haven't been met.
by guywithahat | 2025-06-09 15:43:47+00:00
Every person who has a dog/cat isn't stiffed, just that they progress less on average.

What I've seen is they aren't getting into real relationships or developing hobbies, and are instead becoming attached to their pets. I know it's dismal but the loneliness associated with being single is supposed to motivate you into improving yourself and finding a partner. By spending money and a few hours a day with your pet, you're not doing other (potentially more real) things.
by pzo | 2025-06-09 15:44:14+00:00
MCP is now only used by really power users and mostly only in software dev settings but I see them used by users in the future. There is no decent mcp client for non tech savvy users yet. But I think if browsers will have build in better implementation of them they will be used. Think what perplexity comet or browser company dia trying to do. It's still very early for MCP.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-06-09 15:44:28+00:00
> The real answer is that it is probably not worth anything unless they have stock liquidity events that only a handful of large startups have (e.g. Stripe.) If you dont have that, the price is purely theoretical.

This is not true in Australia, where they are proposing a new 15% tax on gains attributed to the portion of an individual's retirement account larger than $3 million, including unrealized gains. That means people must put a dollar value on each asset at the end of each income year, including startup shares or venture fund interests.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-06-09 15:44:32+00:00
It's much much more complicated than this, nuclear power plants need significantly more maintenance, are much more complex to operate, and have somewhat unique failure risks and security concerns.

Solar vs wind vs nuclear is also a lose-lose sort of debate where you're ultimately disparaging a form of energy that is better than what most people are using today (coal and gas).

If we could get solar or nuclear or wind or just about anything ahead of coal and gas it would be a massive improvement.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-06-09 15:44:35+00:00
It helps to enjoy all the things kids enjoy - reading silly books, legos, going to the beach, walking, sports, trampoline parks, water guns, nerf, kids movies, school, frisbee, crafts, etc. Kids are an excellent excuse to do more of these things, and an excellent counter to being sucked into the black hole of throwing all your energy into work or a hobby.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-09 15:44:40+00:00
Back when phone books were a thing, you couldn't take over a phone number from the other side of the country in the middle of the night and use it to transfer funds to a foreign bank account before you even wake up.

Social security numbers were also never supposed to be secret but as their use changed over the years, so did the way people treat them.

Yes, phone numbers are leaked everywhere. So are social security numbers and home addresses. That doesn't mean your website should be leaking that information.
by fatnoah | 2025-06-09 15:44:49+00:00
>This will almost never be the case. This doesn't account for different share classes, liquidation preferences, preferred stock, all of which get exercised before common shares.

>Equity as an incentive truly favors the employer. With vesting, equity rarely works out to be better than having a market rate salary, unless the company becomes a household name

I've worked at 4 different startups. Two were acquired and two are still going, with one making a small profit and being a lifestyle business for the founder, and the other having a great product and still growing.

For the two acquisitions, one of which I held 1% equity in, the value of my options was $0, which was very disappointing. In that case, I did get a cash bonus as the VP Engineering and an offer from the acquiring company that was 3X my cash comp, but the stock was worthless.

At this point in my career, I value stock in private companies at exactly $0 and treat it like a nice bonus should it ever amount to anything.
by acheron | 2025-06-09 15:44:52+00:00
Can't tell you about the kids, but I started out with an amber monochrome CRT, and I used plenty of Apple II and MS-DOS text mode over the years, so it's not a lately adopted affectation. :) But I'm being around 75% facetious about calling it "original sin" -- I think Atkinson is right that "light mode" is better for graphics work, and his push for it on the Lisa and Mac was probably the right move.

But yes, I also think of "light mode" as "starting into a light bulb all day" and when possible prefer light text on a dark background. How much of that is real and how much is just part of the same nostalgic impulse that leads me to install PxPlusVGA9 [0]...

[0] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-09 15:45:09+00:00
You’re ignorant. Every scientific measurement from every major statistical source about these things knows that there is a population problem. It’s not even a right or left thing it’s reality. It’s science. I can source dozens of neutral sources.

Look it up yourself. This is not a political issue. This is a logistical one and it is highly verified through science.
by lazide | 2025-06-09 15:45:10+00:00
Regardless of what humans do, gene based evolution is constant. And even if we go full cloning - there is still gene based evolution which can (and certainly would) occur even in humans because humans work like humans. Regardless of what we pretend to work as.

Which is back to my original point. You can’t ‘compile your way out of compilers’ either. The entire discussion is just ignoring actual reality in a way that makes no actual sense to even discuss.
by D13Fd | 2025-06-09 15:45:21+00:00
> There are over 200 breeds of dog, it doesn't really track that only 2-3 breeds would be significantly more violent than the others.

Why not? There are breeds that are taller or shorter, high-energy or low-energy, great hunters or awful hunters, and so on. And it’s not a mystery why some breeds got this way: they were specifically bred for it.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-06-09 15:45:58+00:00
The flaws in democracy were always apparent, and they've always been exploited by parties willing to do the dirty work. But they couldn't be exploited consistently and decisively. Now they can be.

Think of it this way: you can't reach people who don't read much by starting a newspaper, but you can reach them with Fox News and Twitter. Mix in a bit of that old-time religion -- Billy Graham with a side of sauce Bernays -- and the left-hand side of the bell curve is yours to do with as you please.
by dtagames | 2025-06-09 15:46:10+00:00
Great stuff here. I've also found that doing all the architecture and interface work manually, then having Cursor write plans that follow that architecture to implement specific features is an ideal place to separate the human from the vibe coding.

Then, it's easy to revise the plan itself or have Cursor do that, then re-run it to make individual implementation changes or fixes that don't affect your architecture or invent new interfaces.
by ta1243 | 2025-06-09 15:46:16+00:00
Whenever I've taken a bus in London it tends to be in zone 1. Between the walking to the right stop, waiting for the bus, the traffic, then walking at the far end, it's rarely quicker than walking.

Last week for example I took a bus from near St Pauls to Trafalgar Square, the entire jouney took about half an hour for 1.5 miles.
by kiitos | 2025-06-09 15:46:21+00:00
> After a few decades of writing code, it wasn't "fun" to write yet another file parser or hook widget A to API B -- which is >99% of coding today.

If this is your experience of programming, then I feel for you, my dude, because that sucks. But it is definitely not my experience of programming. And so I absolutely reject your claim that this experience represents "99% of programming" -- that stuff is rote and annoying and automate-able and all that, no argument, but it's not what any senior-level engineer worth their salt is spending any of their time on!
by icedchai | 2025-06-09 15:46:21+00:00
Yes, it was thin, but 1995 - 96 was when "Internet" went mainstream. Depending on your area, you could have several dialup ISP options. Major metros like Boston had dozens. I remember hearing ISP ads on the radio!

1995 was when Windows 95 launched, and with its built in dialup networking support, allowed a "normal" person to easily get online. 1995 was the Netscape IPO, which kicked off the dot-com bubble. 1995 was when Amazon first launched their site.
by PorterBHall | 2025-06-09 15:46:37+00:00
Personally, becoming a dad was the single best thing that ever happened to me. I haven’t loved every minute of it, but it added abundant love and purpose to my life and gave me what I didn’t know I needed. My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.

But I’ve been lucky in this regard. I was deeply conflicted going into it. But all of that doubt left me the moment I first held him in my arms. I don’t know if circumstances were different whether I would’ve had the same experience.

And the scariest part about becoming a parent is that there’s no way for you to try it out. I had been an uncle for decades before becoming a parent. Those experiences are not the same.

The choice to become a parent, or to not become a parent, is one of those choices in life that requires a leap of faith. There’s no way to explore the counter factual.

But, for those of you on the fence, let me say this. We all come from a long line of parents. I believe that there are certain rewards placed in our brain by evolution that are only unlocked by becoming a parent. Nothing can help you understand your parents and the love you did or didn’t receive from them quite like loving your own child.