MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HocusLocus | 2025-07-12 18:23:15+00:00
Upvoted to discourage greyness. Your observation is very applicable and is heavily grounded in human nature. It's even funny! But it turned grey because no comment mentioning Trump is complete without the author stating how they FEEL about Trump. Extra greyness awarded for wrong answers. People trying to avoid entanglement in the partisan fight are the new 'enemies of America'.
by boulos | 2025-07-12 18:23:45+00:00
You should probably use either boost::unordered_flat_map or absl::flat_hash_map if you don't need ordering. Especially with 20-byte values. (Though you didn't mention the key type). If you're dealing with building against Boost already, I'd just switch and measure it.

https://github.com/boostorg/boost_unordered_benchmarks/tree/... (Via a response from the boost authors in https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/yikfi4/boost_181_will_...) has more benchmarks depending on your pattern.
by ben_w | 2025-07-12 18:25:05+00:00
> Was there a sudden rash of holocausts the year that publishing started again?

Bit worse than the baseline, I'd say. You judge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides

2016 was also first Trump, Brexit, and roughly when the AfD (who are metaphorically wading ankle deep in the waters of legal trouble of this topic) made the transition from "joke party" to "political threat".
by wunderwuzzi23 | 2025-07-12 18:25:21+00:00
I'm curious if this is intentional or just a side effect of multiple agents having multiple system prompts.

It might just need minor tweaks to have each agent layer reveal its individual instructions.

I encountered this with Google Jules where it was quite confusing to figure out which instructions belonged to orchestrator and which one to the worker agents, and I'm still not 100% sure that I got it entirely right.

Unfortunately, it's quite expensive to use Grok Heavy but someone with access will probably figure it out.

Maybe the worker agents have instructions to not reveal info.
by efecan0 | 2025-07-12 18:25:33+00:00
You’re right: HTTP adds an extra RTT and headers we don’t strictly need.

My current roadmap is:

1. Keep WebSocket as the “zero-config / browser-friendly” default. 2. Add a raw-TCP transport with a single-frame handshake: [auth-token | caps] → ACK → binary stream starts. 3. Later, test a QUIC version for mobile / lossy networks.

So users can choose: * plug-and-play (WebSocket) * ultra-low-latency (raw TCP)

Thanks for the nudge this will go on the transport roadmap.
by simonw | 2025-07-12 18:25:43+00:00
> I've always been curious why people think that models are accurately revealing their system prompt anyway.

I have a few reasons for assuming that these are normally accurate:

1. Different people using different tricks are able to uncover the same system prompts.

2. LLMs are really, really good at repeating text they have just seen.

3. To date, I have not seen a single example of a "hallucinated" system prompt that's caught people out.

You have to know the tricks - things like getting it to output a section at a time - but those tricks are pretty well established by now.
by throw0101a | 2025-07-12 18:25:59+00:00
> I see these headlines a lot. Honest question: do we know if these programs actually do anything?

The Pentagon themselves seem to think so, "Space Force officials and more than 450 aerospace companies are against the White House's proposal":

> Space Force officials are eager to exit the business of warning third-party satellite operators, including rivals such as Russia and China, of possible collisions in orbit. The military would prefer to focus on managing ever-growing threats from satellites, an intensive effort that requires continual monitoring as other nations' increasingly sophisticated spacecraft maneuver from one orbit to another.

> But until someone else is ready to take over, the Space Force will remain saddled with the responsibility of issuing these alerts. The Space Force calls these alerts conjunction assessments, and there are national security reasons for sharing the warnings far and wide, because a traffic accident in orbit would endanger the Space Force's own satellites.

* https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/07/nearly-everyone-oppose...
by conartist6 | 2025-07-12 18:26:08+00:00
People want and need to learn about science from sources they trust because actually parsing through a scientific paper critically (as a peer reviewer would do) is very hard and is likely only to leave you with more questions while providing an incredibly narrow kind of knowledge.

What interests me is the politics of it. A paper in a vacuum is nothing. How do people really convince each other of the importance of one argument or observation over another? How do those arguments grow to the scale of a whole society? Science at the scale of society doesn't happen in the language of scientific papers, but rather in rhetoric: in appeals to what the Greeks categorized as Ethos (Emotion), Pathos (Authority), and Logos (Logic).

At its most brilliant this is "Schroedinger's cat," which in two words encodes in our collective consciousness an appeal to logic which entreats us through contradiction to consider a philosophically meaningful set of ideas about the nature of reality. (shoutout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTXTPe3wahc)
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-07-12 18:26:19+00:00
Text is just one representation. The model uses tensors (think multi-layered matrices in the context of ML that handle language and you're not too far off; in laymans terms, 'hard maths') to actually represent the inputs when they're being processed.

But, I suspect, if the model is able to handle language at all, you'll always be able to get a representation of the prompt out in a text form -- even if that's a projection that collapses a lot of dimensions of the tensor and so loses fidelity.

If this answer doesn't make sense, lmk.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-07-12 18:26:53+00:00
o3/o3-pro is probably the best model, or very close to being the best model, overall. It beats Grok 4 in writing/composition and analysis tasks. [1] Performance is a toss-up between o3 and Claude 4 Opus, but I find o3 easier to interact with and more trustworthy. (Less likely to push back against requests and more likely to attempt to fulfill them in good faith.)

4.5 is also great for certain things. Of all models, it's the second best writer. (DeepSeek R1 is the best prose stylist, surprisingly!)

[1] - This is Grok 4: https://x.com/i/grok/share/e51O9rK0W7UaIN81nFBQoJDSs

This is o3-pro, same question: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_68710185cf04819185dc25233280e46b

o3 made fewer mistakes and drafted a more neatly structured and better written output.
by ozgune | 2025-07-12 18:26:54+00:00
This is a very impressive general purpose LLM (GPT 4o, DeepSeek-V3 family). It’s also open source.

I think it hasn’t received much attention because the frontier shifted to reasoning and multi-modal AI models. In accuracy benchmarks, all the top models are reasoning ones:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/

If someone took Kimi k2 and trained a reasoning model with it, I’d be curious how that model performs.
by globnomulous | 2025-07-12 18:27:05+00:00
Sure, cable has huge downsides, such as cable news, reality television, and countless other sources of unconscionable garbage. On the other hand, I grew up with these and survived the onslaught of dreck with my wits basically intact, and I discovered a number of things through TV that I wouldn't otherwise have.

I really think that part of what's healthy about cable is precisely that you don't control when or how much of something is available.

That full hard drive doesn't hold much appeal for me.
by djoldman | 2025-07-12 18:27:45+00:00
Here's the uncomfortable fact:

If the US Federal Government spent ZERO money on anything except:

1. Social Security

2. Medicare & Medicaid

3. National Defense

4. Net Interest on the Public Debt

5. Income Security

6. Veterans Benefits & Services

7. Federal Civilian & Military Retirement and Disability

... the US would still have a sizable deficit.

All the hoopla surrounding science spending, education, DEI, FDA, housing, foreign aid, disaster relief, etc., doesn't really address some huge issues if the goal is to reduce deficit spending.
by hinterlands | 2025-07-12 18:27:48+00:00
Similarly to how most web dev isn't exactly on the frontiers of computer science, a lot of day-to-day PCB design isn't about cutting-edge analog or radio stuff. It's just putting the same MCU or SoC on differently-shaped boards over and over again.

If you can reliably automate that, it's still a pretty big deal.
by 827a | 2025-07-12 18:28:03+00:00
Yeah but that last paragraph is the crux of it: No one is using Grok. They have no path to profitability. They have very low traction among consumers, and even lower traction among enterprises. Their CEO seems to think that copy-pasting code into a web browser is a good strategy for attracting programmers. Its most common usage is on X where people say "@grok is this true", which is fine, except its unclear if anyone is actually paying for that. Over the past week, OpenRouter has been processing ~125M x-ai/grok-3 tokens per day; compare that to anthropic/claude-sonnet-4 @ ~45B/day and openai/gpt-4.1-mini @ ~5B/day.

Yeah its only one somewhat specialized source, but its a big one. The only time anyone talks about Grok or xAI is their now-annual accomplishment of taking the intelligence crown, for about a month, before OpenAI comes out and beats them, then Anthropic comes out and beats them, then Gemini comes out and beats them, then DeepSeek crashes the stock market because china scary, then we repeat again. These things are so damn fungible now that it startles me that any investors would touch any of these companies at their current valuations.

The future where Claude/ChatGPT/DeepSeek become the next iPhone/Android/Huawei is only going to happen if these companies make hardware and traditional software operating systems. OpenAI is trying. But, by the way, one of those companies on the right side is already doing that and has a world-leading AI strategy (Google), so I'm not convinced the status quo is as disruptable as some people think.
by colecut | 2025-07-12 18:29:11+00:00
Interestingly, In 2006 I had both the best and worst night of my life (up to that point, this was pre-fatherhood) while on acid... but the acid wasn't really the primary factor in either direction..

Some of the best raves of the late 90s and early 2000s were at The State Palace Theater in New Orleans.. At the last party thrown there, I was invited to play first on the main stage, biggest soundsystem and crowd I ever played for, all my friends there to support.. Set goes great, we all hug and celebrate and and start tripping, and have a great time..

At about 4AM I go to get something in my record bag that I left on the stage by the decks.. someone stole it. It also had my car keys in it, among other things..

My buddy had to drive me 3+ hours away to get my spare keys, and hours back, and hours back home again, it was two days after the party before I finally settled in at home, without most of my keys and my stuff.

I had a friend who recorded and took pictures during my set, but in a different incident at the party, he dropped the camera in a literal hole in the floor of this dilapidating building, never to be seen again.

Despite being the worst feeling of my life, and being on acid, it wasn't a "bad trip" because it wasn't the trip's fault...

I would be interested to hear about your experiences. username at gmail if you'd rather not share here.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-12 18:29:35+00:00
Okay, I laughed. At first I thought the author was actually publishing music on the platform, so I patiently waited for their justification to quit Spotify relative to other platforms. It's a big world, maybe they're a big-shot who's tired of negotiating splits with their label...?

...nope! They're publishing playlists, a software feature that frankly shouldn't belong restricted to any one platform. On top of that, they're playing moral augur on behalf of the musicians they support without seemingly asking any of them how they feel. Tidal and Apple Music are both awful for musicians too; all the royalties in the world won't matter if your listenerbase consists of four people from Cupertino. Why not publish playlists everywhere, YouTube and Soundcloud included? Why split hairs in an unwinnable, service-oriented fight?

You'd think this would end up with a one-or-the-other solution. Either "we're uploading playlists in a text format now, as it should be" or "we're just going to leverage every service's native features" as the stance. Playing the reductive moralist card will end with you uploading Bandcamp playlists and begging Epic Games to listen to your plight and negotiate better terms as your publisher.
by ourmandave | 2025-07-12 18:29:54+00:00
Are they hoping satellites studying climate change get destroyed?

Also let's not forget Sharpie Gate and how the petty Orange Emperor appointed a climate science denier to a top position in NOAA.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/12/912301325/longtime-climate-sc...

Yet another systemic rat fucking so somebody can make a buck. It's only ever about the money.
by notahacker | 2025-07-12 18:31:31+00:00
There's no shortage of hatred on the internet, but I don't think it's "training on the open web" that makes Grok randomly respond with off topic rants about South African farmers or call itself MechaHitler days after the CEO promises to change things after his far-right followers complain that it's insisting on following reputable sources and declining to say racist things just like every other chatbot out there. It's not like the masses of humanity are organically talking about "white genocide" in the context of tennis...
by oasisbob | 2025-07-12 18:31:43+00:00
I dunno - artwork in this style did pretty good on ffffound back in the day. That's at least as early as 2007. I'm sure you could go back further in other forums and find appreciation for the same reason people like it here.

To contrast, a lot of content from clip-art collections at the time looked awful then and didn't age well at all.
by wiseowise | 2025-07-12 18:32:48+00:00
> The purpose of a program is not to execute the rules of the programming language. It's to perform a real and useful task. If those real and useful tasks are complicated because synthetic and arbitrary behaviors of the language exist, then the language is wrong. The tool exists to do work. The work does not exist to provide academic examples for the language.

The tasks are not complicated because of this, it literally is default behavior in mainstream languages. And no, they’re neither synthetic, nor arbitrary limitations. The rule is based on types, not on whatever one specific value might mean.

And if they were to define “exceptions”, where do you draw the line?

“F41S3” is this? False? No? What if I’m a l33t h4x0r? What about 0xF4153? Looks false enough to me.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-07-12 18:32:49+00:00
Interesting enough my friend's background was in SEO so this topic also came up, and currently one of my books does show up immediately when asked about the subject!

The early days of Google felt very similar to the current state of LLMs. The web at the time was filled with the laziest keyword spam, search results where awful. Then Google changed all that (hard to even imagine today): you nearly always got the results you wanted without garbage. Early Google fought spam pretty aggressively, old time HNers might recall when the Genius lyric site was caught gaming the system (more aggressively than standard SEO) and was permanently punished in Google results. Similarly early Facebook was actually pretty pleasant, just a way to catch up with old high school classmates, I don't even remember ads in the early versions.

My guess is LLMs will follow a very similar path, but because it is a new medium it won't evolve in exactly the same way. I suspect once the major players are established there will be no more SEO, but rather major advertising agreements behind the scenes. One nice thing about SEO is that anyone could do it, sadly I think we'll soon be back in a world where only big players really matter.

To be clear, I don't have any fantasies that "this time it will be better!" I'm pretty certain we'll see the same enshitification cycle play out, but I'm trying to enjoy at least being on the less-shitty part of the cycle for a moment.
by rs186 | 2025-07-12 18:33:00+00:00
Customer of what, model?

In terms of AI coding assistant, almost every product out there allows you switch to a different model with a single click. If Gemini is not giving you the answer you want, what do you do? Switch to Claude and bang you have it.

The only thing that has some stickiness is products like ChatGPT. But that's so much more than just a model -- it's a product with many features smoothly integrated.

xAI does not currently have any product that is sticky for the average user.
by grg0 | 2025-07-12 18:33:48+00:00
My takeaway from your verbose description is:

- You don't need a visitor pattern if you have predetermined the data you are going to work with and all the operations on it (i.e., the open/closed principle does not apply.)

- For the same reason, you don't need dynamic dispatch, which is often how the visitor (and other) pattern(s) are implemented.

- The code is much simpler to understand (and debug) because it's all there in once place. It's also faster than the dynamic dispatch version because it's all known at compile-time.

- Personally: OOP is stupid, confusing, and inefficient; I think universities should only teach it as an optional course. These patterns are 50% lack of functional programming features and 50% sheer stupidity. Universities should go back to teaching real abstraction with Scheme and SICP, a MIPS-style assembly language, and stop confusing students.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-07-12 18:34:02+00:00
Strange comment. Strange because at the high end, I very much doubt that any non-human ape will ever get close to Adam Ondra's ascent of "Silence" (9c). On the other hand, the average human is very much less able to climb trees and other topologically similar objects than most apes. So I am not sure that it really makes sense to talk about "our lack of climbing ability" - in humans, it is unevenly exercised and thus shows huge range, but the best humans can climb in ways that I doubt most or any other apes could.
by creata | 2025-07-12 18:34:23+00:00
Haskell can have circular references because its laziness is implemented with thunks, which have a mutable cell in which to store the computed value so that terms don't get evaluated more than once. Here's a Haskell function that makes a circular linked list:

-- circular linked list with one item repeat x = let xs = x:xs in xs

Here's a rough equivalent in JavaScript that doesn't use thunks, just functions:

function repeat(x) { function xs() { return [x, xs]; // [first, rest] } return xs; }

The Haskell version has a cycle because, after evaluation, `repeat x` will be a circular linked list, but all the "lists" we create in the JavaScript code above are just the closure `xs`.

For completeness, here's a JavaScript version that uses thunks:

class Thunk { constructor(f) { this.f = f; } get() { if (this.f) { this.v = (this.f)(); delete this.f; } return this.v; } } function repeat(x) { let xs = new Thunk(() => { return [x, xs]; // [first, rest] }); return xs; }

If you try calling `x = repeat(1); x.get()`, you can see that we get a circular list.
by 827a | 2025-07-12 18:35:32+00:00
The other thing that would scare me: What percentage of Anthropic's revenue comes from Anysphere/Cursor? Think about that for a second: Given that we know Cursor is on a nine-figure ARR now, the intrinsic value in being the "default" model in Cursor, similar to Google being the default search on iOS, is now worth billions of dollars. Does Anysphere have significant exclusivity arrangements with any of these frontier model providers? They took funding from OpenAI. The ludicrous clip at which Anthropic's revenue could drop by whole percentages just because Anysphere pushes a change to prefer competitors models, has got to be the scariest business arrangement in the history of computing.

None of these companies will survive if they don't own multiple parts of the stack. As deep as possible, to the hardware if they can. That's why Anthropic is investing heavily in Claude Code, and why OpenAI is looking at hardware. You can't just build models and sell tokens, yet that seems to be Grok's entire strategy right now [1]

[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1943178423947661609
by mindslight | 2025-07-12 18:36:07+00:00
It seems like you think this is some standalone law rather than an integral part of the system that is able to create the concept of "owning" a piece of land to begin with. The fundamental problem here is that both of these real estate owners did not care about "the line" enough to ascertain where it actually was, until a court finally had to do it decades later. The straightforward way to avoid that is to head off any such ambiguity ahead of time.

Also in the context two-thirds of an acre doesn't seem like that much - it was seemingly only one eighth of what the plaintiff was looking to sell. The NPR long-form interview format is lacking in that it pushes out a bunch of pertinent details, but I'm guessing that was either goat grazing area outside the pen and/or the plaintiff/grandfather had already subdivided it into building lots and the judge saw using those lines as a straightforward way of settling the matter for a pro se defendant?
by glimshe | 2025-07-12 18:36:11+00:00
Python would be the wrong choice. BASIC is the ultimate "batteries included" language. No weirdness hidden behind dynamic types and you can make full games with graphics and sounds (in most implementations) without installing a single external library. BASIC is feature-poor by design and beginners can quickly fully master it. And there are classic variants without line numbers (no need for GOTOs) for those who hate them.

IMHO, humanity is yet to build a better beginner language, at least if you look at the late BASICs such as QuickBASIC.
by frollogaston | 2025-07-12 18:36:50+00:00
After using JS, Python dicts and objects feel so cumbersome. I don't see why they need to be separate things, and why you can't access a dict like `dict.key`. Destructuring is the icing on the cake. In JS, it even handles the named args use case like

const foo = ({name, age, email}) => { }

I'm guessing all of this has been proposed in Python before, and rejected in part because at this point it'd create way more confusion than it's worth.
by omneity | 2025-07-12 18:37:21+00:00
Hello HN!

I've been developing a lot of LLM-based apps recently, and I got tired of writing the same glue code each time to switch providers, find the base URL again, or other strategies to deal with provider idiosyncracies, so I extracted out that code into an MIT licensed package named BorgLLM.

It's a zero-config Langchain client to 100s of providers & models, it has automatic API key rotation, rate-limit fallback strategies and more concerns you won't have to put in your application code...

One liner to rule them all (you can pick any model or any provider):

llm = create_llm("anthropic:claude-sonnet-4")

And my application code is finally clean, focusing on the domain. It's not a very complex package yet it might be one of the biggest time savers I added to my development workflow.

I hope you'll find it useful. Questions and feedback points are most welcome!
by atavistically | 2025-07-12 18:37:56+00:00
I'm calling it right now. Develop world costumers are increasingly seeing smartphones as limiting rather than empowering. It will shift into a product for areas with poor infrastructure as higher income push back against this invasive and manipulative technology. This will create a feedback loop. Lower average income will drive down the utility of the platform for those who fund it (advertisers), smartphones will gradually lose their status signalling value and in another generation it will be prevalent only in areas with poor infrastructure.