MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by esperent | 2025-07-07 07:44:13+00:00
Not that I'm a fan of this kind of interview, but these answers illustrate different kinds of skill/intelligence.

One is domain knowledge which is less important in the age Google search and StackOverflow (and even less so in the age of LLMs but I guess interview techniques haven't caught up yet).

The second is the ability to understand a nested for loop, and if a coder can't do that by the point they reach an interview, it can probably never be taught.

It could be argued that being able to think up using a set in this instance is also an important skill, and I agree. But nested for loops are foundational skills, if the interviewee has problems there it's a good thing to know about early.

It could also be argued that they should just say directly "solve this using loops" if that's what they want, and well, yeah.
by z3phyr | 2025-07-07 07:46:12+00:00
I think cryptanalysis as a discipline is not massively funded. All of the cryptography is only as strong as the collective failure of all human intelligence so far to break it.

Most people consider cryptography as a "solved" problem, but I don't think it is. I am sure if enough cryptologists try algorithmic methods and are well compensated for it, they will likely find algorithmic weaknesses (and invent new kinds of mathematics) that can bring down complexity of solving such schemes, even before we have real and functional Shor machines.
by sublinear | 2025-07-07 07:46:13+00:00
I completely disagree, but your experience may vary. I am not trying to take away from that.

I am merely saying that maybe there should be a stronger discussion than just dismissing engineers as mere "thing-doers". I also accept that there are many people here who are exactly that, and I and they should find it shameful.

We can't control that, but maybe we should try harder to do instead of being lazy and assuming market forces are the boss... maybe we are the boss (we are).
by bayindirh | 2025-07-07 07:46:28+00:00
Depends on the hardware and what you are making with that hardware. Some processors can do complicated things stupidly fast (e.g. when SIMD done right), and for some hardware platforms, a mundane operation can be very costly since they are designed for other things primarily.

My favorite story is an embedded processor which I forgot its ISA. The gist was, there was a time budget, and doing a normal memory access would consume 90% of that budget alone. The trick was to use the obscure DMA engine to pump data into the processor caches asynchronously. This way, moving data was only ~4% of the same budget, and they have beaten their performance targets by a large margin.
by seadan83 | 2025-07-07 07:46:48+00:00
>> given a human and a sequence of words, I cannot begin putting a probability on "will this human generate this sequence".

> Sure you can! If you address an American crowd of a certain age range with "We’ve got to hold on to what we’ve got. It doesn’t make a difference if..." I'd give a very high probability that someone will answer "... we make it or not".

I think you may have this flipped compared to what the author intended. I believe the author is not talking about the probability of an output given an input, but the probability of a given output across all inputs.

Note that the paragraph starts with "In my worldview, humans are dramatically different things than a function, (R^n)^c -> (R^n)^c". To compute a probability of a given output, (which is a any given element in "(R^n)^n"), we can count how many mappings there are total and then how many of those mappings yield the given element.

The point I believe is to illustrate the complexity of inputs for humans. Namely for humans the input space is even more complex than "(R^n)^c".

In your example, we can compute how many input phrases into a LLM would produce the output "make it or not". We can than compute that ratio to all possible input phrases. Because "(R^n)^c)" is finite and countable, we can compute this probability.

For a human, how do you even start to assess the probability that a human would ever say "make it or not?" How do you even begin to define the inputs that a human uses, let alone enumerate them? Per the author, "We understand essentially nothing about it." In other words, the way humans create their outputs is (currently) incomparably complex compared to a LLM, hence the critique of the anthropomorphization.
by easyThrowaway | 2025-07-07 07:47:01+00:00
Melodics[1] got a few gamey features, but in the larger scope such tools are pretty orthogonal to actually learning to play piano - I wouldn't say they hurt, like some teachers suggest (they'd say the same about hanon warmups) but they help you becoming a better musician the same way writing the alphabet everyday would make you a better writer.

[1]https://melodics.com/
by jrank | 2025-07-07 07:47:12+00:00
Yes, LLM don't improve as humans do, but they could use other tools for example designing programs in Prolog to expand their capabilities. I think that the next step in AI will be LLM being able to use better tools or strategies. For example, designing architectures in which logic rules, heuristic algorithms and small fine-tuned LLM agents are integrated as tools for LLMs. I think that new, more powerful architectures for helping LLMs are going to mature in the near future. Furthermore, there is the economic pushing force to develop AI application for warfare.

Edited: I should add, that a Prolog system could help the LLM to continue learning by adding facts to its database and inferring new relations, for example using heuristics to suggest new models or ways for exploration.
by mynti | 2025-07-07 07:47:39+00:00
i wonder what the impact of the e-bike is on car traffic/sales. i guess in the us it is probably not noticable but here in the eu or in germany were i live i can definitely feel that there is more bike traffic and most are e-bikes now. with them coming down in price significantly this could be the second wave that kills ice cars (and hopefully reduces car traffic in general)
by ileonichwiesz | 2025-07-07 07:48:05+00:00
This is admittedly a rare and minor use case, but maybe on a plane if you’re not sitting next to each other? Last time I flew I saw two teenage girls communicating by typing into the same note file and Airdropping it back and forth for hours - it struck me as very silly that there was no messaging interface that they could use instead.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-07 07:50:20+00:00
> Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization

It can't be an affrication, because /ʃ/ is not an affricate. (Although /tj/ is affricated, as /tʃ/ [think "gotcha"] - when you say 'ti', you're referring to words that were pronounced with /s/ rather than /t/.)

Wouldn't /sj/ -> /ʃ/ usually just be called "palatalization"?

(The specific phenomenon in the context of English appears to be called "yod-coalescence".)
by qsort | 2025-07-07 07:50:25+00:00
Well, that's because they're really languages and not dialects! They all derive from Latin, there is no "old Italian" or anything, at some point we decided the Florentine "dialect", having the most literary prestige, would be standard Italian.

Italians only really started speaking Italian in their day-to-day life after the war. It was mostly a written/literary language before that.
by vinci00 | 2025-07-07 07:50:46+00:00
ScrapeGraphAI is doing something different this week: releasing 5 major web scraping innovations, one each day.

The goal is simple—make web scraping less painful. Modern websites are dynamic, complex, and constantly changing. Traditional scrapers break constantly. AI can understand websites like humans do, but execute at machine speed.

Day 1 starts Monday with performance improvements. The rest of the week covers AI agents, developer tools, and some open source releases.

Not trying to replace existing tools, just solving the parts that waste everyone's time: brittle selectors, infinite scroll handling, dynamic content, endless maintenance.

Curious what the HN community thinks about AI-powered approaches to web scraping. What breaks most often in your current setup?
by jdietrich | 2025-07-07 07:51:00+00:00
>Source: a lifelong recipient of talk therapy.

All the data we have shows that psychotherapy outcomes follow a predictable dose-response curve. The benefits of long-term psychotherapy are statistically indistinguishable from a short course of treatment, because the marginal utility of each additional session of treatment rapidly approaches zero. Lots of people believe that the purpose of psychotherapy is to uncover deep issues and that this process takes years, but the evidence overwhelmingly contradicts this - nearly all of the benefits of psychotherapy occur early in treatment.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30661486/
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-07-07 07:51:36+00:00
I think it's worth distinguishing between the use of anthropomorphism as a useful abstraction and the misuse by companies to fuel AI hype.

For example, I think "chain of thought" is a good name for what it denotes. It makes the concept easy to understand and discuss, and a non-antropomorphized name would be unnatural and unnecessarily complicate things. This doesn't mean that I support companies insisting that LLMs think just like humans or anything like that.

By the way, I would say actually anti-anthropomorphism has been a bigger problem for understanding LLMs than anthropomorphism itself. The main proponents of anti-anthropomorphism (e.g. Bender and the rest of "stochastic parrot" and related paper authors) came up with a lot of predictions about things that LLMs surely couldn't do (on account of just being predictors of the next word, etc.) which turned out to be spectacularly wrong.
by ghxst | 2025-07-07 07:51:44+00:00
> I considered that an appropriate punishment would have been a pay cut for a few months

This can absolutely cripple a family, I'd be really cautious wishing that upon someone if they wronged you without malice, though I completely understand where you are coming from.

In this case at the very least, I'd want to know what went wrong and what they’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again. From a software-engineer’s standpoint, there’s probably a bunch of low-hanging fruit that could have prevented this in the first place.

If all they sent was a (generic) apology letter, I'd have switched banks too.

How did you pursue the matter?
by giingyui | 2025-07-07 07:51:56+00:00
It’s surprising that this article doesn’t mention LGBT or disabilities at all. The same effect extends to those two. And, in the same vein, it’s females “buying” it.

“…between 19% and 22% of women aged 18 to 25 identify as bi.” https://nypost.com/2023/04/18/gen-z-women-identify-as-bisexu...
by raspasov | 2025-07-07 07:52:06+00:00
Of course, I have no original thoughts. Something is not created out of nothing. That would be Astrology, perhaps :).

But the difference between a human and an LLM is that humans can go out in the world and test their hypothesis. Literally every second is an interaction with a feedback loop. Even typing this response to you right now. LLMs currently have to wait for the next 6-month retraining cycle. I am not saying that AGI cannot be created. In theory it can be but we are definitely milking the crap out of a local maximum we've currently found which is definitely not the final answer.

PS Also, when I said "it can spot mistakes," I probably gave it too much credit. In one case, it presented several potential issues, and I happened to notice that one of them was a problem. In many cases, the LLM suggests issues that are either hypothetical or nonexistent.
by Applejinx | 2025-07-07 07:52:19+00:00
Note that all these things are in the training data. That's all that is.

I'm trying to remember which movie it was where a man left notes to himself because he had memory loss, as I never saw that movie. That's the sort of thing where an AI could easily tell me with very little back-and-forth and be correct, because it's broadly popular information that's in the training data and just I don't remember it.

By the same token you needn't think there's a person there when that meme pops up in the output. Those things are all in the training data over and over.
by sublinear | 2025-07-07 07:52:25+00:00
What could possibly be more threatening, especially in a time of dire straits for a business, than a "lowly dev" who has an opinion and has visions of more and better?

Let's get real.

Who is more directly in charge and knowledgeable of a product result than a developer? If you are not heads-down and working than you are (intentionally or not) misrepresenting your product and a fool. This has always been true and nobody knows it better than the investors. Do you think we're stupid?
by tomhow | 2025-07-07 07:52:47+00:00
Please don't use HN for ideological battle or post flamebait like this. We've had to ask you this before [1]. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines whenever posting on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37924118
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-07 07:54:27+00:00
>The feedback of reality will fix it, like for all young people.

"A child who isn't disciplined at home, will be disciplined outside of the home" - old African proverb.

The issue is kids growing up without being taught accountability, but instead that they're perpetual victims of "the system" created by evil old white men, and therefore nothing they do is ever their fault. This is the fault of the parents, school system and society as a whole who coddles kids giving them the false sense of security that they can always have their way, right until they hit the brick wall of adulthood featuring employment, bills, debt, responsibilities and self sufficiency.
by motbus3 | 2025-07-07 07:54:36+00:00
Anyone who recommends LLM to replace a doctor or a therapist or any health profession is utterly ignorant or has interest in profiting from it.

One can easily make LLM say anything due to the nature of how it works. An LLM can and will offer eventual suicide options for depressed people. At the best case, it is like recommending a sick person to read a book.
by DidYaWipe | 2025-07-07 07:57:07+00:00
Exactly. The single menu causes quite a few problems, both obvious and subtle.

But yeah... now I'm relieved when I go home from work and get back on my Mac. I waste so much time hunting for stuff on Windows now... it's just incredible.

Pompous pedants used to trot out "Fitt's Law" in defense of the Mac's dumb menu all the time, when in fact it contra-indicates it:

"Fitts’ law states that the amount of time required for a person to move a pointer (e.g., mouse cursor) to a target area is a function of the distance to the target divided by the size of the target. Thus, the longer the distance and the smaller the target’s size, the longer it takes."

Right, so where should an application's menu go? ON ITS WINDOW. Not way up at the top of the screen. It's as if the people citing this "law" don't even read it.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-07 07:59:15+00:00
> in more recent centuries, there's been a tendency to adopt Latin and Greek words for new word formation rather than (as German did) using native words

Note that the prevalence of native words in German is the result of a modern reform movement, not something that happened naturally within the language.

> [English] never really adopted foreign grammar

There's the argument that do-support is borrowed from Celtic.
by opnkuis | 2025-07-07 07:59:27+00:00
All of the posts arguments are good, though I think instead of only trying to regulate what AI companies can do with your whole post history, we should also strive for local AI development and accessibility for the average Joe. I think stuff that can run on the user's own device, should.

Much lower risk of massive data leaks when single big targets get hacked, no need for recurrent subscriptions, and way less central authority deciding which opinions are allowed
by nradov | 2025-07-07 07:59:52+00:00
You can differentiate that by buying some pure food grade gluten and eating that. There's a lot of stuff in wheat beyond just gluten. Of course this won't be a truly scientific controlled experiment but maybe good enough for your purposes.

Most restaurants have menu items with zero gluten, so eating out is hardly difficult. Not much gluten in a plain steak, potato, and vegetables.
by raspasov | 2025-07-07 08:00:09+00:00
Sure, the market, but HFT is relatively tiny as a market and the profit it brings. Not to mention, it's essentially a zero-sum game.

Brought to you by your favorite Google LLM search result:

"The global high-frequency trading (HFT) market was valued at USD 10.36 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 16.03 billion by 2030"

(unverified by a human, use at your own risk).
by jwpapi | 2025-07-07 08:00:42+00:00
How can I change from gemini to claude ?

Also I’m not fully sure about your setup. In my fresh pov I would next set up agents that check my github repo for backlog tasks and do pull requests on those tasks. If I write a good description and ideally tests I can optimize the results of these.

This creates the possibility of agents checking your backlog and prepare the work.

I usually work with aider everyday and I’m quite fast in achieving task, the next limitation would be the latency and some back and forth. I have some dead time in between. I can definitely define tasks faster than 1-1 AI.

Yeah if you could share a bit more how you do this with Claude we would all be thankful, also I havent seen anywhere to sponsor/tip you, would love to!
by noone_youknow | 2025-07-07 08:00:47+00:00
Nice article! Always good to see easy-to-follow explainers on these kinds of concepts!

One minor nit, for the “odd corner case that likely never exists in real code” of taken branches to the next instruction, I can think of at least one example where this is often used: far jumps to the next instruction with a different segment on x86[_64] that are used to reload CS (e.g. on a mode switch).

Aware that’s a very specific case, but it’s one that very much does exist in real code.
by dkdbejwi383 | 2025-07-07 08:01:07+00:00
> Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it.

is there no accent variation in Spanish?

Such a 1:1 system would never work in English, because the way words are pronounced can be very different in e.g. Melbourne, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Boston, for example.
by thomashlvt | 2025-07-07 08:01:22+00:00
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Our infra processes ~4000 jobs/s and billions of $ in e-commerce transactions. We're building realtime data pipelines and complex data analysis tools -- lots of interesting challenges.

Have a look here for more info - runconverge.com/careers
by Doxin | 2025-07-07 08:01:30+00:00
> The inability to want to sit in a chair and reorganise spreadsheets for 8 hours straight isn’t a disability

I mean sure, but that's also not what ADHD is. It's how ADHD gets described, by medical professionals too, but in my lived experience the attention deficit part of ADHD is the least bad part.

It's the executive function stuff that's real fucked up. You know how if you gotta do something you don't reaaaally wanna do it's kinda hard to get started? Imagine instead if it was nigh impossible. Imagine if it happened with things you DO want to do. All the time. On the outside you just look lazy, while on the inside you're screaming at yourself to go do the thing for hours. Imagine being unable to attain your goals specifically because they are your goals.

Imagine the only way to keep your house even slightly clean is to wait for the planets to align and give you the power to even start cleaning. Half the time it happens at 1AM, but you can either clean until 3AM and be completely fucked at work the next day or just not clean at all until the next time the planets align, which might be the next day or next month.

Imagine being told your entire life you're a lazy fuckup that's not living up to their potential.

Yeah not being able to do boring shit for 8 hours straight is normal. Not having sufficient executive function is a real handicap and being told that it's a moral failing repeatedly will really fuck up a person for a good long while.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-07 08:01:32+00:00
I think many haven't yet grasped the future is heterogeneous computing, especially, when many desktops are actually laptops nowadays.

Software working poorly in such setup means no effort was made to actually make it perform well in first place.

Games requiring desktop cases looking like a rainbow aquarium with top everything will become a niche, in today's mobile computing world, and with diminishing sales and attention spans, maybe that isn't the way to keep studios going.
by omar_szn | 2025-07-07 08:01:59+00:00
I built WakeMinder because I often remember things after stepping away from my Mac — but forget them again by the time I return.

WakeMinder solves that by showing reminders the moment you wake your Mac. You can add reminders from your iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch (with voice dictation), and they instantly appear on your Mac the next time you open it.

It syncs via iCloud, works offline, and doesn’t rely on notifications or background apps. Just wake your Mac — and your reminder is there, waiting.

Would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or questions!
by unknownhad | 2025-07-07 08:03:29+00:00
100% correct. Couple of reasons

1) I felt like I made it sounded like I am leaking a 0 day , which it isn't.

2) AI agent thought it was AI generated

I like LLM's but broo I spent a little too much time on this and don't want AI to claim it as AI generated content.
by schnitzelstoat | 2025-07-07 08:04:25+00:00
Honestly, I think LLM's are a distraction from AGI. It seems to me that the path to AGI will likely be some sort of Reinforcement Learning approach.

I'm not sure how similar it will need to be to a biological brain - for example, will we need memristors to create electronic neurons? Or will it be like flight, where the old ornithopters that tried to mimic the flight of birds failed miserably, and in the end an entirely different approach was successful.
by JdeBP | 2025-07-07 08:04:36+00:00
Since the context is systemd, one really should look to Unices in the 1980s rather than to Microsoft Windows in the 1980s. INI files were popularized by DOS+Windows, where there was no formal specification and whatever the Win16 API happened to do was gospel, but were largely nonexistent as a file format on contemporary Unices. Far from being "the" configuration file format, they were barely a blip on the radar and their introduction into Linux was somewhat akin to an invasive species as the Unix world had plenty of file formats and tooling for such formats before then, and the Linux-based operating system world had been busy cloning them all for years.

Things like rc files for shells and .mailrc for BSD Mail were simply scripts written in the program's own command language. The .newsrc used by ReadNews was an example of a common colon-separated key+value format, also seen in Xresources and others. The sendmail.cf used by BSD Sendmail was its own very special thing, indistinguishable from modem line noise.

BSD also widely used the "capabilities" file format, which still exists in many parts of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD to this day for various things such /etc/login.conf and /etc/gettytab and termcap. (In many cases nowadays, cap files are compiled into Berkeley DB or other constant database files by tools such as cap_mkdb and tic.)

Many configuration files in the Unix world were simply flat file tables, with colons, whitespace, or TAB as the field separator. phones(5) is one such TAB-separated table that is in FreeBSD to this day.