MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bennettnate5 | 2025-06-10 23:31:42+00:00
The frustrating thing with layer-cake languages like C++ is that it can technically have all the ergonomic APIs that make life nice to write, yet have all this cruft and esoteric edge-case behavior that makes it so, so hard to read. I can't safely ignore features in C++ that others are using when I'm evaluating the correctness and security implications of already written code. And barring a strictly enforced (e.g. mandatory lint before merging) coding convention that bars all the nasty sharp points and legacy APIs, even a new project will gradually accrue the bad bits from devs who are used to using C++ that way.
by refulgentis | 2025-06-10 23:31:44+00:00
They all have. I don't hope to convince you of that, everyones use case differs. Generally, AIME / prose / code benchmarks that don't involve successive tool calls are used to hide some very dark realities.

IMHO tool calling is by far the most clearly economically valuable function for an LLM, and r1 self-admittedly just...couldn't do it.

There's a lot of puff out there that's just completely misaligned with reality, ex. Gemini 2.5 Pro is by far the worst tool caller, Gemini 2.5 Flash thinking is better, 2.5 Flash is even better. And either Llama 4 beats all Gemini 2.5s except 2.5 Flash not thinking.

I'm all for "these differences will net out in the long run", Google's at least figured out how to micro optimize for Aider edit formatting without tools. Over the last 3 months, they're up 10% on edit performance. But it's horrible UX to have these specially formatted code blocks in the middle of prose. They desperately need to clean up their absurd tool-calling system. But I've been saying that for a year now. And they don't take it seriously, at all. One of their most visible leads tweeted "hey what are the best edit formats?" and a day later is tweeting the official guide for doing edits. I'm a Xoogler and that absolutely reeks of BigCo dysfunction - someone realized a problem 2 months after release and now we have "fixed" it without training, and now that's the right way to do things. Because if it isn't, well, what would we do? Shrugs

I'm also unsure how much longer it's worth giving a pass on this stuff. Everyone is competing on agentic stuff because that's the golden goose, real automation, and that needs tools. It would be utterly unsurprising to me for Google to keep missing a pain signal on this, vis a vis Anthropic, which doubled down on it mid-2024.

As long as I'm dumping info, BFCL is not a good proxy for this quality. Think "converts prose to JSON" not "file reading and editing"
by IAmGraydon | 2025-06-10 23:31:58+00:00
> in areas, AIs are already far better than humans.

You could say the same thing about a CPU from 40 years ago - they can do math far better than humans. The problem is that there are some very simple problems that LLMs can’t seem to reliably solve that a child easily could, and this shows that there likely isn’t actual intelligence going on under the hood.

I think LLMs are more like human simulators rather than actual intelligent agents. In other words, they can’t know or extrapolate more knowledge than the source material gives them, meaning they could never become more intelligent than humans. They’re like a very efficient search engine of existing human knowledge.

Can anyone give me an example of any true breakthrough that was generated by an LLM?
by morepedantic | 2025-06-10 23:32:14+00:00
It's only accidentally illegal. Nobody made it illegal on purpose. It just so happened that car seat regulations and car seat testing regulations were highly prescriptive, but also written at a time where nobody had thought to build a full bench, multi-child car seat.

The full bench car seat is significantly safer than single seats. But it cannot be tested on the testing sleds in North America, and the wording of the regulations implicitly forbids multi-child seats anyway in many ways. Unfortunately, fixing the regulations is probably ~10 years and ~20 million dollars in lobbying.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-10 23:32:31+00:00
I was concerned with facts, whereas you seem focused on a fantasy about how you wish things were. But your fantasy doesn't matter at all. US-style Presidential Republics are a known bad design, the US nation building projects stopped doing this themselves because it doesn't work, the United States itself is just a slower decay, it's not an exception.

The problem wasn't the Crown, that's the big takeaway. Giving the same power to a guy who doesn't have a hat doesn't fix the problem. You need to hold this much power in commission, that's the lesson that gave us the present British arrangement - the Lord High Treasurer was much too powerful, so his power was given to a commission, today its First Lord though not nearly as powerful as the Lord Treasurer, is too powerful, that's the Prime Minister you gestured at - the formal office is "First Lord of the Treasury", with the Chancellor being Second Lord, and the whips taking subsidiary parts of the commission. If you ask me we should further re-divide this power.

But just giving all that power to one man (and in the US it has always been a man) is even worse. The US President has powers that a King had, which made sense in the 18th century but stands out today - that's why Trump can corruptly pardon people for example.
by amarant | 2025-06-10 23:33:17+00:00
Honestly, it's at least partially on the publishers in this case.

I've started using AI to summarise articles for me because the endless SEO fluff has gotten to completely unbearable levels.

If you publish an article with a sidetrack that's 8 pages long and completely irrelevant, don't get upset when I have some LLM summarize it to 3 bullet points instead. I'm not made of time, nor patience!
Reverse eng Claude Code to work with local and any OpenAI API models
by Sirvan3tr | 2025-06-10 23:33:23+00:00
There are already a few “reverse engineering” blog posts about Claude Code. I was curious to learn more about it, and I especially wanted to run Claude Code with locally hosted LLMs.

I was just curious to test and learn about the code behind Claude Code. I made some tweaks to be able to run any OpenAI API-based models. In the video I use OpenRouter and this amazon llm is pretty damn fast.

I removed the annoying Haiku related API calls (see some of the links below for more info about them).

Some other reverse engineering of Claude Code: https://kirshatrov.com/posts/claude-code-internals https://leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2025/03/07/claude-code/ https://github.com/Yuyz0112/claude-code-reverse https://github.com/dnakov/claude-code (DMCA takedown)

https://hyper.ai/en/headlines/e8d329a93a375f028818f3b3c64038...

Video: https://youtu.be/dqMFcIhAYcc
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-10 23:33:38+00:00
The problem here is that the signature doesn't do anything for you.

Suppose you want to be assured of the software running on your machine. You go into the firmware, point it at your boot loader and say "only this one". It makes a hash of the boot loader and refuses to use any other one until you change the setting, which requires your firmware password. Your boot loader then only loads the operating systems you've configured, and so on.

That doesn't require any certificates and you get 100% of the benefits. The firmware needs to verify the boot loader and the boot loader the OS etc. The OS doesn't need to verify the firmware because it can't because if the firmware or boot loader was compromised then the code in the OS to validate it would be just as compromised.

The only thing the signature gets you is remote attestation, which is the evil to be prevented. Simple hashing would get you everything else.

And then you also don't get this "garbage code is nonetheless trusted" problem because there is no global root of trust and you never told your firmware to trust this random firmware update utility for somebody else's hardware.
by jeremyjh | 2025-06-10 23:33:40+00:00
For us it was only API down most of the day. We didn't have to deploy anything or fix anything, so we almost got away without downtime.

But then, about 7 hours in (~1:40 PM EDT) for about 30 minutes all web requests were failing with a 503, logged as H99 "Platform error". No requests made it to our dyno during that period.

We can't failover to contingency without making API calls - the read replica has to be forked and promoted. I've always comforted myself by saying "well, the data plane and control plane have always been separate and aren't impacted by the same events". No longer.

My guess is this may have been some kind of trouble-shooting that caused this issue, but it doesn't matter. The point is I can no longer ignore this global single point of failure and really the only answer is to migrate away. Which I am reluctant to do, and I don't know that it will increase reliability.

We have never had application downtime as a result of a Heroku issue in the last 8 years this has been in production. 30 minutes in 8 years isn't bad. But if it were down for 3 days I'd have the same options: fuck and all.
by jrapdx3 | 2025-06-10 23:34:33+00:00
While novel OSs are frequently introduced on HN, this project is rather different.

That it's built under Windows strikes me as quite an unusual feature. To their credit the developers provide sufficiently detailed build instructions that aren't too hard to follow. However the build environment is very specific. VC has a lot of configuration options, so no doubt very close attention is required to make sure everything is set up correctly.

Running the compiled system in a VM is sensible, kind of a shame though that Windows native Hyper-V isn't supported. Perhaps that will be possible in a later iteration of the OS.

Would be nice if the authors gave a rundown of how this OS compares with others out there. Without having a clear idea of this OS's features and advantages, potential contributors might feel hesitant about investing time and energy in its development.
by orbital-decay | 2025-06-10 23:35:41+00:00
This terrible and vague stereotyping about "China" while having no clue about the subject should have no place on HN but somehow always creeps in and is upvoted by someone. DeepSeek is not "China", they had nobody to copy from, they released their first 7B reasoning model back in April 2024, it was ahead of then-SotA models in math and validated their approach. They did a ton of new things besides training a reasoning model, and likely have more to come, as they have a completely different background than most AI companies. It's more of a cross-pollination of different areas of expertise.
by a57721 | 2025-06-10 23:36:52+00:00
As a mathematician, I think it is very hard to write popular expositions of mathematics. It is acceptable and even necessary to skip the technical details and replace rigorous definitions with intuitive explanations, but it should be done with great care to avoid statements that are plainly wrong and only introduce more confusion. I think the majority of texts on complicated mathematics that target the general audience suffer from this issue.

The review mentions some very unfortunate errors that are not "passing over a point in less detail": suggesting that Cantor's diagonal argument depends on the AC and that CH is equivalent to c = 2^ℵ₀.

I wasn't familiar with the book and had just read the review; I wouldn't blame the author, but the publisher should have contacted someone for proofreading.
Made a website dedicated to programming languages I'll never learn
by backteria | 2025-06-10 23:37:19+00:00
After spending 2 AM debugging a segfault that turned out to be a missing semicolon, I had an epiphany: some programming languages are objectively terrible and we're all just pretending they're not. So instead of fixing my actual code, I built idontlikethislang.pages.dev :https://idontlikethislang.pages.dev

git repo if anyone wants to contribute their hated language:https://github.com/saberr26/idontlikethislang
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-10 23:37:49+00:00
>and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the hallucination issues of LLMs.

You are getting confused here...

LLMs are terrible at doing software engineering jobs. They fall on their face trying to work in sprawling codebases.

However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs on behalf of regular people.

Becky doesn't need ChatGPT to one-shot Excel.exe to keep track of the things she sells at the craft fair that afternoon.

This is a huge blind-spot I keep seeing people miss. LLM "programmers" are way way more useful to regular people than they are to career programmers.
by charleszyong | 2025-06-10 23:38:40+00:00
Thank you for the feedback! Thinking out loud: • Adding one DOF to match ARX kinematics is doable, with a price increase of $30–40.

• A tool changer is a great suggestion. A few of my friends are working on kinematic couplings, which would be ideal for this. I’ll need to give some thought to how to pass electrical signals and power to the tool, while also keeping it lightweight.

• Could you share what functionality you want in terms of encoders? The ST3215 uses 12-bit magnetic encoders, which can retain position after power loss. Are you looking for higher resolution? For torque sensing, if the order volume is large, I can add this for just a $20-30 price increase.

• Finger tip force sensing: Is this for applications like picking up an egg?
by Spooky23 | 2025-06-10 23:39:49+00:00
There's networks of these things, so you can't trust what is said. The host agency may keep for 30 days, but exchange data with third parties, through organizations like NLETS, private collaborations and informal exchange. I'd assume with NLETS searches that the Feds have an overwatch capability and spy on the spies so to speak.

This stuff started with "drug corridors". Police and Feds can and do track vehicles on the I-95 corridor from Maine (and Plattsburgh to NYC) down to Miami as early as 12 years ago. NYT covered it a few years back -- basically they get multiple LPR hits and are usually able to do facial recognition on front seat passengers. If you driving Florida->NYC and stop for a cheesesteak in Philly, you may get some attention up the road.

There's also a growing network of commercial LPR services. Most tow trucks, many parking garages and some delivery vehicles scan and correlate license plates -- repo guys can find wanted cars in hours these days. Also, most traffic cams are saving 24x7 video with LPR.
by roywiggins | 2025-06-10 23:39:53+00:00
Watt-hours are what matter. If you want to boil a kettle, you need to use a certain minimum amount of watt-hours to do it, which corresponds to, say, burning a certain amount of propane. If you care about how many times you can boil a kettle on a bottle of propane, you care about the watt-hours expended. If you had perfect insulation you could boil a kettle by applying barely any watts for a long enough time and it would take the same amount of propane.

There are situations where Watts per se matter, eg if you build a datacenters in an area that doesn't have enough spare electricity capacity to generate enough watts to cover you, and you'd end up browning out the grid. Or you have a faulty burner and can't pump enough watts into your water to boil it before the heat leaks out, no matter how long you run it.
by Amezarak | 2025-06-10 23:40:08+00:00
It's really baffling to see this take repeated, especially when we've seen European PMs rewrite their country's constitution. That's just not feasible in the US system. US Presidents are quite limited in their power. A lot of (justified) outrage occurs over the US President doing something that PMs can typically do with no issue.

You seem fixated on the practical process of removing one from power, which is of course irrelevant as long as their party backs them, which is the actual threat in both cases. In either case, if the legislature does not back them, they can be removed from power with little issue.

I see in a sibling comment you think this is actually a weakness of the US system...apparently the PM radically changing all the laws, norms, and unwritten constitution of his country is "not powerful", while the US President typically fighting a battle to get one single major piece of legislation through in his career is unitarian dictatorship?

> , the US nation building projects stopped doing this themselves because it doesn't work, the United States itself is just a slower decay, it's not an exception.

The US nation building projects felt that parliamentary democracies were easier to control, as direct election of Presidential executives sometimes leads to democracies electing leaders who are able to carry out policies that violate US interests.
by 34679 | 2025-06-10 23:41:35+00:00
I'd like to offer a cautionary tale that involves my experience after seeing this post.

First, I tried enabling o3 via OpenRouter since I have credits with them already. I was met with the following:

"OpenAI requires bringing your own API key to use o3 over the API. Set up here: https://openrouter.ai/settings/integrations"

So I decided I would buy some API credits with my OpenAI account. I ponied up $20 and started Aider with my new API key set and o3 as the model. I get the following after sending a request:

"litellm.NotFoundError: OpenAIException - Your organization must be verified to use the model `o3`. Please go to: https://platform.openai.com/settings/organization/general and click on Verify Organization. If you just verified, it can take up to 15 minutes for access to propagate."

At that point, the frustration was beginning to creep in. I returned to OpenAI and clicked on "Verify Organization". It turns out, "Verify Organization" actually means "Verify Personal Identity With Third Party" because I was given the following:

"To verify this organization, you’ll need to complete an identity check using our partner Persona."

Sigh I click "Start ID Check" and it opens a new tab for their "partner" Persona. The initial fine print says:

"By filling the checkbox below, you consent to Persona, OpenAI’s vendor, collecting, using, and utilizing its service providers to process your biometric information to verify your identity, identify fraud, and conduct quality assurance for Persona’s platform in accordance with its Privacy Policy and OpenAI’s privacy policy. Your biometric information will be stored for no more than 1 year."

OK, so now, we've gone from "I guess I'll give OpenAI a few bucks for API access" to "I need to verify my organization" to "There's no way in hell I'm agreeing to provide biometric data to a 3rd party I've never heard of that's a 'partner' of the largest AI company and Worldcoin founder. How do I get my $20 back?"
by lurk2 | 2025-06-10 23:42:43+00:00
Once your video is out in the wild there’s as of yet no reliable way to discern whether it was AI-generated or not. All content posted to public forums will have this problem.

Training future models without experiencing signal collapse will thus require either 1) paying for novel content to be generated (they will never do this as they aren’t even licensing the content they are currently training on), 2) using something like mTurk to identify AI content in data sets prior to training (probably won’t scale), or 3) going after private sources of data via automated infiltration of private forums such as Discord servers, WhatsApp groups, and eventually private conversations.
by ivanmontillam | 2025-06-10 23:43:21+00:00
It's not a crazy idea where he's coming from:

- Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43484927

- Google will develop the Android OS in private: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43482798

It's reasonable to think Google is choking AOSP.
by j-wang | 2025-06-10 23:44:05+00:00
"But this logic breaks down for advanced models, and badly so. At high performance, fine-tuning isn’t merely adding new data — it’s overwriting existing knowledge. Every neuron updated risks losing information that’s already intricately woven into the network. In short: neurons are valuable, finite resources. Updating them isn’t a costless act; it’s a dangerous trade-off that threatens the delicate ecosystem of an advanced model."

Mainly including this article to spark discussion—I agree with some of this and not with all of it. But it is an interesting take.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-06-10 23:44:11+00:00
To be precise, Biden had around 5 months of presidential immunity. He could have done a lot as a lame duck, but this was not the case when he came in.

And I think it's even simpler than that. the only bipartisan point is that both sides are bought out by corporate interests. Many reps are not looking out for their constituents.
by SoftTalker | 2025-06-10 23:44:27+00:00
I was thinking about this today. $40/month for home delivery of the NYT. Add in maybe $5/month for postage to pay my bills and other correspondence. That's still less than half what I pay per month for internet. It's tempting to just drop the home internet service and go back to the 1990s way of doing things.
by ASalazarMX | 2025-06-10 23:45:44+00:00
> Most people agree they'd rather not have children than bring them into the world to live through the nine circles of hell.

This was one of our motives to not have children. My wife and I agreed on not having children three decades ago, since even then the alarms of overpopulation, pollution, and global warming were being sound, and the world had only 5 billion people then.

I can't understand why governments push for more births, our civilization is clearly overpopulated. Let it slowly scale down, plan for it instead. Humanity needs less humans living healthier, both in mind and body.
by gjm11 | 2025-06-10 23:45:56+00:00
> Well said 4o. If you are a system of immense intelligence then everyone should take this rebuttal seriously.

Nope. Something can be written by a human being of immense intelligence but not deserve taking seriously, if (for instance) it was written as a deliberate attempt at deception or a joke.

In this instance, you told the AI to argue for a particular conclusion and it did. If the conclusion should happen to be wrong, then no matter how clever the AI might be its arguments can't actually be all that good.

(I don't think GPT-4o is in fact a system of immense intelligence unless you use a really idiosyncratic notion of "intelligence", for what it's worth. That doesn't tell us much about whether its successor's successor's successor might be one.)
by charleszyong | 2025-06-10 23:46:03+00:00
Thank you for stepping in. Yes, it’s 5 DOF and a gripper using ST3215 (12V for the follower arms and 7.4V—various gear ratios—for the leader arms).

As for hardware features, we can’t add much to the current model since, as you mentioned, we are running on very thin margins. We’re gathering suggestions primarily for future models.
by PopAlongKid | 2025-06-10 23:47:16+00:00
>Has SF always been wacky overpriced?

It's not just SF, it's California. Even going back 40 years, almost any place between Bay Area and San Diego that's within 50 miles of the ocean and is not rural[0] has been significantly more expensive than national average.

[0]unless it has an ocean view
by addaon | 2025-06-10 23:47:19+00:00
I've just taken a quick glance at this, and will explore further -- but at first, it seems like it's really a good application of ad-hoc proofs to assembly code; which is a subset of what I'm interested in, but for me the more interesting thing about the paper was the structured safety proofs for things like memory safety, no read-before-write, no overflow, etc., and thinking about how this can be expanded and generalized. While for something like a bignum library (or a heap) the actual conformance to the behavioral contract will be somewhat ad-hoc, having a lot of safety contracts also proved along the way "for free" (or at slightly reduced cost, anyway) is what really draws my attention. I can see spending 2x the time writing the code, and 10x the time proving things about it, in exchange for not having to spend the 100x (DAL B) or 1000x (DAL A) time testing it.