MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gpm | 2025-06-01 23:09:25+00:00
There's a slight exception to this, in that LLMs are able to accurately describe portions of the buffer that are arbitrarily hidden from the user.

An LLM that says "I said orcs are green because I recalled a scene in lord of the rings..." is fabricating*. An LLM that says "I talked about white genocide because my system prompt told me to" is very likely telling the truth because it can literally see the system prompt as it generates the output. Even though in the situation I'm referring to the system prompt was hidden from users. It's a logical conclusion from the combination of the system prompt and its previous output that that is why its previous output is what it is (that anyone could make with the same degree of confidence if they had access to the full buffer).

* Unless it's reading back from a <thinking> section of the buffer that was potentially hidden from the user.
by const_cast | 2025-06-01 23:11:20+00:00
It is illegal, and has been illegal for quite some time, to hire individuals do to their status as a protected class. Nobody is getting hired because they are black. The reality is these are perfectly qualified individuals.

This rhetoric that black people are being hired and they're unqualified is just not true. There's a lot of qualified people vying for a position, and some of those people will be black and some of them will be hired. That doesn't mean they're hired because they're black.

There's this sort of strange implication that if someone is hired and they're a minority, they must not be qualified. But nobody makes the same argument for white people - we just assume that white people are qualified if they're hired.

This systemic racism is why DEI was implemented in the first place. Merely mimicking that rhetoric is not a stab as DEI - quite the opposite.
by rzzzt | 2025-06-01 23:13:02+00:00
If you have impressively low error rates in mind, I think they are coming from "They Write the Right Stuff":

> Consider these stats: the last three versions of the program - each > 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this > software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent > complexity would have 5,000 errors.
by tomhow | 2025-06-01 23:14:39+00:00
Thanks!

The “bugs are 100x more expensive to fix in production” study might not exist - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917595 - July 2021 (130 comments)

Software engineering research is a train wreck - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27892615 - July 2021 (166 comments)
by pavlov | 2025-06-01 23:15:13+00:00
”I don’t recall seeing Atari specifically market the Mega ST to developers, but I suspect a lot of developers found the better keyboard and extra RAM to be worth the upgrade.”

There wasn’t such a thing as a general developer market.

When you didn’t have internet and cloud services and free Unix, how could you develop for something else than a specific platform and device?

If you bought a Mega ST to write programs, your target audience were still only the people who had a regular ST. You couldn’t reach anyone else. So the advantage was minimal.

The idea that there can be a developer market separate from the baseline end-user platform is quite new. It emerged around 2007-2010 when web apps became a realistic option and you didn’t have to be on Windows to target the 90% of people who are on Windows.
by ggm | 2025-06-01 23:16:14+00:00
Absolutely makes sense. I have a 1960s desk tchotchke paper tape punch and I am tempted to cut my password store keyphrase into a tape in 7 bit ASCII with checksum as a super-encoded string, and then put it in the tombstone letter with the USB stick and instructions for decoding running the home filestore. A friend has a 3D printer and I think a small optical (light behind) reader and a decode table print might do the trick. There is the sprocket holes in paper tape but the weakness is driving things, and the tape roll is now 5 decades old, so the risk of a tear is there.

I'd do it in my stash of hollerith cards, but I don't have a desk punch. I suppose I could simply take some of the pre-punched ones, and use them as the key phrase!
by phillipcarter | 2025-06-01 23:16:23+00:00
I managed this (and still do) just fine by using source control. Commits are checkpoints and it's trivial (esp. with AI-assisted CLI) to roll things back if needed. Workflow is all about small diffs, with sessions being fine-grained, not about implementing entire features wholesale. Serialize overall plans for feature work as files in the codebase in the interim.
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-01 23:18:35+00:00
Ah, good to know. I was asking on behalf of a hypothetical person that didn’t have one, if it were necessary. I appreciate that you did the work. The sad part is I think this discussion about this user came up before.

This whole situation feels like fake users on digg/reddit but on HN. What a sham. It’s all the more sad when the actual creator gets scooped/buried. Instead of moving comments and discussion to the actual OP’s thread, we favor the bot user.

As dang wrote in reply you, and echoing conversations I have had with him:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44152290

> Of course, when the author of an article also posts it (as was the case with the OP), or when some less prolific submitter posts it, then we want that person's post to "win", but this doesn't always happen.

> I wonder if we could write some code to catch this when it does happen, and then maybe we could have the best of both worlds or at least a chunk of it.

Why is anyone worried about the best of both worlds, if the worst of both worlds isn’t willing to be addressed vigorously, because that’s the reality we already find ourselves in?

If these posts are somehow better for HN than then alternative, then we should have some idea of what success or the ideal case looks like, or talk of what could be done to solve the negative externalities rings hollow when it still isn’t done years later, as this scripted behavior has been running for years now. Karma sharing still is DOA, and would be much less necessary to begin with if we didn’t have what are essentially karma front runners and karma police on behalf of capital (not directed at dang personally or HN specifically, but HN is backed by capital so let’s not beat around the bush).

It’s a matter of priorities, and how they translate into success of the community. When individuals are favored when doing things that would be disallowed if they became a norm, at the harm of the users doing the work, on a site run by capital investors, it becomes a bit silly to steelman the case for HN, but I hope you can see I’m doing my best here.

If HN is better with the posts than without, then allow users to mark their accounts or posts as bots, like on Twitter/X? Perhaps such markings should be mandatory under the guidelines? I’m sure there are other ways to balance the incentives here, and I’m sure others also have ideas. The status quo on HN apparently of allowing special good boy users to farm karma isn’t a good result when it leaves original content posted by the creator left out in the cold.

Generated comments are already against HN guidelines, and generated posts ought to be as well, for the same reasons. I come to HN to see posts made by humans, not bots. I can go literally anywhere else for bot slop. This situation is untenable.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-06-01 23:18:38+00:00
Claiming that a supposedly well known study doesn't exist when that study is in fact not at all well known or even cited (although the premise is) is like pure rage-bait/clickbait gold.

edit reply because fuck you hn mods:

What? How?? Im not claiming it's from a scientific study I'm claiming it's "conventional wisdom" firmly in the zeitgeist.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-06-01 23:19:20+00:00
It sounds like what they're actually doing is going closed-source, and using a Rust rewrite as cover for that.

This is interesting, because the current Codex software supports third-party model providers. This makes sense for OpenAI Codex, because is is the underdog compared to Claude Code, but perhaps they have changed their stance on this.

[edit] Seems that this take is incorrect; the source is in the tree.
by mlechu | 2025-06-01 23:20:32+00:00
Agree that time spent preventing cheating is preferable to time spent detecting or punishing cheating, and that all are terrible distractions from time spent actually teaching. In response to OP saying that honor pledges are unhelpful, GP only mentions that they can make the punishment part less painful and time-consuming, but I can personally confirm GP exhausts the prevention route (including putting out "novel and strange" assignments :) ) before trying to detect and punish cheating, at least in my experience.

I've heard many a story about professors treating it like a trap door, paying no attention to prevention and much more to detection/punishment to the point you'd think they're sadistic pleasure out of it. (I doubt they are, but you'd have to numb yourself to it in that position.) In certain ways, I guess this is better than pushing people through to the next class—giving them no option but to catch up quickly or cheat more—but it isn't great...

OP mostly talks about detection/punishment, but I think it's also the job of course staff to make cheating as impossible as possible before it happens. Engaging and novel assignments are great; putting more weight on exams is low-cost and acceptable.
by solardev | 2025-06-01 23:25:23+00:00
I feel like the only way this could work and NOT be enshittified is if it were not-for-profit and community-driven, such that the basic matching algorithm was known to all, customizable for each user, and not subject to a profit motive.

I'd prefer such a thing be free and open-source with a community of stewards, kinda like Wikipedia, but without as much nepotism and hierarchy as their admins. It would also have to be end-to-end encrypted so individual users don't give up their privacy to some central server. There would have to be some interesting fancy encryption so that matches can stay private (or at least encrypted) as well.

To help pay for network resources, people could voluntarily contribute, say, $10 after a nice date, and maybe $100 if they stay together for at least a year (or whatever).

Implemented poorly, it would turn into a massive honeypot and privacy nightmare :( But I would love to see something that happen, just for the sake of making happier people and families.

-------

I met many of my exes on OkCupid; it used to be a wonderful service before Match.com bought it and turned it into every other swipe-based dating app. But even after that, I still managed to meet my current partner (of 4+ years) on it... I'm not particularly attractive or disgusting, just average, but got lucky and found my person. Many friends met their SOs online as well. For my generation (millennials) it's pretty common. I'm all for these services, I just wish they weren't so profit-driven.
by okayestjoel | 2025-06-01 23:25:33+00:00
Yes, I am familiar! I didn't play his games growing up, but I see it as a great reference for various logic puzzle game implementations and one of the few examples of quality logic puzzle collections.

I think one thing missing from my 5x5 puzzle thing is that good nonograms are not just those that have a unique solution and require no guessing, but also create a compelling image when the puzzle is complete. My game, Pixelogic, features user-submitted puzzles in addition to in-house ones, and I'm often blown away how creative the pixel art creations are given the constraints of solvability under my game's standards and just on and off pixels.

I wrote about what makes a good nonogram puzzle (in my opinion) in my weekly nonogram newsletter, if anyone is interested: https://weekly.pixelogic.app/p/pixelogic-weekly-4
by alainx277 | 2025-06-01 23:25:36+00:00
Where are you getting these numbers from? I'm finding data between 0.3Wh and 3Wh for a 4o query, while a typical phone battery has 10Wh.

The energy consumption per prompt will decrease for the same task complexity, as inference hardware gets better (as they already have from the 2023 paper that reported 3Wh).
by elliotto | 2025-06-01 23:28:09+00:00
The fact that productivity gains are bad for employees (labour vs capital) should raise significant questions about the economic systems that we have in place.

Instead, AI is treated as the boogeyman and progress is treated as the devil. These events should be an impetus towards class consciousness, but instead the hate is directed to the token producing machine. I wonder how much of this redirection is a deliberate psyop.
by elliotec | 2025-06-01 23:28:44+00:00
Better start now! It’s incredible and unbelievable how productive it is. In my opinion it still takes someone with a staff level of engineering experience to guide it through the hard stuff, but it does in a day with just me what multiple product teams would take months to do, and better.

I’m building a non-trivial platform as a solo project/business and have been working on it since about January. I’ve gotten more done in two nights than I did in 3 months.

I’m sure there are tons of arguments and great points against what I just said, but it’s my current reality and I still can’t believe it. I shelled out the $100/mo after one night of blowing through the $20 credits I used as a trial.

It does struggle with design and front end. But don’t we all.
by tymscar | 2025-06-01 23:29:33+00:00
This is an interesting proof of what I keep reading about. Where people are quick at making something, like a PR, with AI, but then doing the last 10% is left in the air.

If codex was half as good as they say it is in the presentation video, surely they could’ve sent a request to the one in chatgpt from their phone while waiting for the bus, and it would’ve addressed your comments…
by perching_aix | 2025-06-01 23:29:44+00:00
Maybe my perspective on this is different because of my experiences, but I won't deny it, content creator ads are annoying, and if I didn't have Sponsorblock, I'd be banging on the desk for it to become a proper Premium feature too.

In my location, the ads served up by YouTube were a whole lot worse than what you'd see in videos. Think unapologetically ragebait local political propaganda. Passing through adblocking, even multiple layers of it. And since YouTube is actually interested in serving you those ads, they'll engage in an increasing amount of technological efforts as time goes on to ensure you see them. That's when I decided I'll rather pay up, than to see any of those ads even just one more time. Compared to that, being yapped to about some water bottle merch some creator is selling is almost like heaven.

But yeah, if I didn't need to go the extra mile, would be happy about it too.
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-06-01 23:31:02+00:00
And I ported DOOM to it.

Well, it's actually just a hardcoded slideshow of E1M1 while something vaguely approximating the main riff of At Doom's Gate plays inconsistently in the background, but you'll have to watch all 15 excruciating minutes of this poorly-narrated Youtube video I'm linking to figure that out.
by bilbo0s | 2025-06-01 23:31:11+00:00
In that case, I’d seriously question the 6 sec vulkan startup time. Since the bottlenecks would be IO speed and memory availability, not processor speed. Certainly not GPU speed. Assuming assets with, say, 8k textures and millions of verts per mesh. All compounded by the scene containing, say thousands of said meshes.

Time in Vulkan or OGL would barely register against IO and memory when loading such scenes.
by solardev | 2025-06-01 23:32:41+00:00
(Video discusses a dating app made by the Japanese government)

I heard about that recently and thought it was interesting, but that can probably only work in high trust cultures with stable governments. In the US, I don't think many people (of any political affiliation) would trust their government to play matchmaker and see all their private messages.

It's a lot easier to make a centralized dating app with a regular server client model than some sort of decentralized peer to peer thing, where the central admins couldn't peek at everyone's matches and private messages and photos.

That Japanese app is also pretty invasive and only supports traditional monogamous marriages leading to childbirth. A western one probably wouldn't and couldn't have the same mentality, unless it wanted to be eHarmony (which, early on, was very strict about who could join).
by const_cast | 2025-06-01 23:32:54+00:00
This bio-essentialism we see where we say men are born evil and this sort of original sin mentality is actually a soft implementation of patriarchy attitudes, in my mind.

There's a very small hop between "gender is in blood" to anti-trans mentality, gender roles, toxic masculinity, etc.

Really when we say men are born evil we denounce the idea of gender being socially constructed, and how we socialize men. We essentially let men, and those who raise them, completely off the hook. We ignore rape culture, we ignore toxic masculinity ingrained in boys, we ignore neglect of emotional education. Which are all very important.

In actuality, almost nobody is born bad. We socialize them in their communities in families to express that behavior. Which means we can chip away at it, slowly over time. Which we've already done to a large degree - men are so much more progressive today. Things that were once normal and expected, like domestic violence, are now denounced and demonized as they should be. We haven't fixed anything completely, and likely never will, but that shouldn't stop us from making improvements.
by hirsin | 2025-06-01 23:34:53+00:00
And you're lucky if it's two. If they're not familiar with the rendering engine/docs system/API platform/middleware etc (or just think they aren't), or have low confidence in a debt ridden platform, they'll spend five minutes a day for a week or three theorizing on how it could have gone wrong, debating if, actually, it's correct the way it is, refreshing their knowledge of deep internals, debating if a fix could break something, and so on. Way safer to do that than risk making things worse in an uncertain system.
by neepi | 2025-06-01 23:35:18+00:00
This was a favourite for me at school. Had a great chemistry teacher. Always had something that blew up available.

This was motivational until I did A level chemistry a few years later. He vetoed my attempts to make RDX out of hexamine tablets and normal nitric acid. He got suspicious when I was trying to dehydrate nitric acid with sulphuric acid.

Good job I gave up on chem or I’d probably be dead or in prison.
by raincom | 2025-06-01 23:36:28+00:00
Movies portray spies as some special operations people. However, most of the academics in humanities are potential spies: they gather intelligence by offering fellowships, scholarships and grants to people from abroad to stay at hosting institutions' "Depart of Government", "Center for Peace", "Department of Political Sciences", "Department of Asian studies", "Center for conflict resolution". The targets are usually other Ph.Ds and others who are connected to the elite in the target countries.
by tonyarkles | 2025-06-01 23:36:53+00:00
I don’t have a link handy but one of the videos I saw on Twitter looked like there was pretty bad latency. Once they got to the target aircraft they went into a hover and very slowly set it down on the wing before the FPV feed froze.

Edit: https://x.com/jimmysecuk/status/1929164382061092952
by josephcsible | 2025-06-01 23:37:19+00:00
> The intent of these apps is to keep you single and spending money.

Perhaps a different monetization model would fix that. The ideal outcome of a dating app for you, the user, is that you find someone to marry and spend the rest of your life with, and that means you won't need the app anymore. This means that for apps where the user is a source of ongoing revenue (either paying directly, or through ads), there is an perverse incentive for the app to want exactly what you said. An idea I've heard before would be an app where there's a one-time payment to join, and that's the only revenue ever generated by each user. Then their incentives would be aligned with yours.
by caleblloyd | 2025-06-01 23:37:47+00:00
Ah nice! Unfortunately many people (like me) won’t notice that and will probably not be able to consider using it though if they are using corporate license scanners or blanket enterprise policies that don’t allow LGPL.

But that is a nice special permission for those who are still able to use it!

And that could also be a good model if the plan is to dual license it and sell to enterprise.
by tristenharr | 2025-06-01 23:38:27+00:00
Hey! Yes, to be fair I am indeed bipolar so I have personally been a bit concerned about things. Sometimes I do end up going “off the deep end” a bit. Maybe that is what is happening, but I feel I did find some things that are quite interesting though. Also ChatGPT and the like get very overly excited. I didn’t pay much attention to its delusions of grandeur. (Of course forget the things about BSD, Riemann hypothesis and such.. my current goal is to solve ANY open problem in mathematics)

I understand that many of these identities, claims, etc have been proven before.

Personally I am most interested in further developing this Algebra.

The identity e^{2\pi i \phi} = e^{2\pi i(\phi + 1)} though obvious to a number theorist what derived structurally from reciprocal identities involving T and J.

The other curiosity is preservation under transcendental maps.

As far as I understand.. this to me is the only known case where a nonlinear algebraic relation like a - b = kab is realized inside a number field, preserved exactly under exponentiation and sine.

But as you mention I am probably just crazy to be honest haha. Thank you much for taking the time to look and give your thoughts.
by ClumsyPilot | 2025-06-01 23:38:41+00:00
> An amazing idea: Drive a truck full of drones deep into enemy territory and let them loose.

Is it such an amazing idea? Imagine the shoe is on the other foot - would you normally be able to drive a truck full of drones into a country at war, say Israel? This puts a target on civilian vehicles.

> In the process, manage to poke serious holes into Russia's nuclear deterrent.

Again, is it such an amazing idea? Do you want to make people in charge of nuclear weapons more jumpy and likely to make a rash decision?
by serjester | 2025-06-01 23:39:27+00:00
There’s been plenty of anti missile systems deployed to Ukraine and the tank losses have still been absolutely insane.

Fundamentally it’s not about building anti-missile technology, it’s about doing it cheaply and at scale. That is a much, much tougher problem.

These drones cost less than a thousand bucks, and if each interception cost you 100k (the cost of a trophy shot) you’re going to lose a lot of equipment. It only takes one miss.

Now imagine scaling that system to protect an entire airfield. That seems next to impossible when these drones have a range of 10+ miles and are basically unjammable. You need China level surveillance across your entire county as a bare minimum.
by echelon | 2025-06-01 23:39:38+00:00
> Recently, with Zed ported to Vulkan, we saw the variety of half-broken platforms and user configurations.

Thank you for sharing this! It'll be good to prevent others from following down the same path (my team included).

How is life at Zed? Have y'all raised capital in line with Windsurf / Cursor? Are you bootstrapping instead?

It's phenomenal that y'all are working natively in Rust rather than building on kludgy web tech.