MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sundarurfriend | 2025-08-07 18:02:22+00:00
Some people have hypothesized that GPT-5 is actually about cost reduction and internal optimization for OpenAI, since there doesn't seem to be much of a leap forward, but another element that they seem to have focused on that'll probably make a huge difference to "normal" (non-tech) users is making precise and specifically worded prompts less necessary.

They've mentioned improvements in that aspects a few times now, and if it actually materializes, that would be a big leap forward for most users even if underneath GPT-4 was also technically able to do the same things if prompted just the right way.
by Vegenoid | 2025-08-07 18:03:12+00:00
> No clue how they let it pass

It’s very common to see AI evangelists taking its output at face value, particularly when it’s about something that they are not an expert in. I thought we’d start seeing less of this as people get burned by it, but it seems that we’re actually just seeing more of it as LLMs get better at sounding correct. Their ability to sound correct continues to increase faster than their ability to be correct.
by Topfi | 2025-08-07 18:03:15+00:00
> gpt-4.1: gpt-5 with minimal or low reasoning is a strong alternative. Start with minimal and tune your prompts; increase to low if you need better performance.

Interesting, implies that they still have not fully solved the tool call issues "reasoning" often introduces. Neither Google, nor Anthropic or OpenAI seem to have a reliable solution for that yet. Also, GPT-5 has only 40% of GPT-4.1s context window, so not a full drop in replacement for all use cases, though I have never been able to reliably test any model beyond 250k [0], so potentially this won't be an issue for most.

[0] Not because of any issue with Gemini 2.5 Pro or GPT-4.1, but because I personally have a hard time coming up with realistic test scenarios of such massive size. Just dumping a large code base easily can fill even a 1m context window, but testing whether everything gets properly parsed is challenging. Exception is Llama 4, which has issues even at 75k, despite the 10m context window technically supported.
by jrboyens | 2025-08-07 18:03:22+00:00
I mean, that presumes that the answer to generating your anti-cancer pill, or the universal cure to heart disease has already been found, but humans can't see it because the data is disparate.

The likelihood of all that is incredibly slim. It's not 0% -- nothing ever really is -- but it is effectively so.

Especially with the economics of scientific research, the reproducibility crisis, and general anti-science meme spreading throughout the populace. The data, the information, isn't there. Even if it was, it'd be like Alzheimer's research: down the wrong road because of faked science.

There is no one coming to save humanity. There is only our hard work.
by riknos314 | 2025-08-07 18:03:38+00:00
This is and isn't true.

The room is the limiting factor in most speaker setups. The worse the room, the sooner you hit diminishing returns for upgrading any other part of the system.

In a fantastic room a $50 speaker will be nowhere near 95% of the performance of a mastering monitor, no matter how much EQ you put on it. In the average living room with less than ideal speaker and listening position placement there will still be a difference, but it will be much less apparent due to the limitations of the listening environment.
by susam | 2025-08-07 18:03:45+00:00
Interesting article! I always enjoy reading how people build and maintain their independent personal websites. This post starts with the "Comment System Problem" and mentions four possible solutions, but I think there's a fifth that has worked well for me.

After spending too much time fiddling with third-party comment systems, I ended up building my own [1]. It's pretty barebones, just does what I need, and nothing more.

Each comment is written to a text file for manual review, so I don't have to worry about spam, cross-site scripting, or irrelevant comments. I usually check them on weekends and add them to my blog.

Comments are stored as plain HTML files, and my static site generator [2] builds the site along with the comment pages [3]. So in a way, it's also a static comment pages generator.

This setup doesn't meet the five attributes (no infra, rich content, real identity, etc.) in the second section of the article, so it wouldn't suit the author's needs, but it has worked quite well for me. I've been using it for at least four years (perhaps much longer, since my old PHP website did something similar), and I've been quite happy with it.

[1] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/form.lisp

[2] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/site.lisp

[3] https://susam.net/comments/
by abetusk | 2025-08-07 18:03:56+00:00
For context, a back of the envelope calculation is:

* Solar energy (on earth) gives about 250 W/m^2 [0]

* Earth has an approximate radius of 6.371 * 10^6 m

* Estimating sunlight on a disk of earth's radius yields ~ 700 * 10^15 (Wh/day) (3.14159 * (6.371 * 10^6)^2 (m^2) * (240 W/m^2) * (24 h/day))

That is, the earth's budget is just under 1 exa (Wh/day).

Earth's population is 8.2 B people and under a very generous energy consumption of 30 (kWh/day), that gives approximately 250 (TWh/day) (8.2 * 10^9 (ppl) * 30 * 10^3 ~ 250 * 10^12 (kWh/day/ppl)).

In other words, we're using about 1/1000 of a (back-of-the-envelope) theoretical upper limit of solar energy available to us on a daily basis.

[0] https://www.solar-electric.com/learning-center/solar-insolat...
by vpribish | 2025-08-07 18:05:09+00:00
exactly. the clickbait is how it raises fear of a credible nearby threat -

Hey I live in CA!

Ohh... the Authorities!

The Alarm is raised!

the rest is evocative and loaded terms too, "wild" "pigs" "flesh!" "neon" - but at least they are unexaggerated.

It's a gross headline
by highfrequency | 2025-08-07 18:05:12+00:00
It is frequently suggested that once one of the AI companies reaches an AGI threshold, they will take off ahead of the rest. It's interesting to note that at least so far, the trend has been the opposite: as time goes on and the models get better, the performance of the different company's gets clustered closer together. Right now GPT-5, Claude Opus, Grok 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro all seem quite good across the board (ie they can all basically solve moderately challenging math and coding problems).

As a user, it feels like the race has never been as close as it is now. Perhaps dumb to extrapolate, but it makes me lean more skeptical about the hard take-off / winner-take-all mental model that has been pushed.

Would be curious to hear the take of a researcher at one of these firms - do you expect the AI offerings across competitors to become more competitive and clustered over the next few years, or less so?
by Sajarin | 2025-08-07 18:05:38+00:00
What did Ilya see? (or rather what could he no longer bear to see?)

> Academics distorting graphs to make their benchmarks appear more impressive

> lavish 1.5 million dollar bonuses for everyone at the company

> Releasing an open source model that doesn't even use latent multi head attention in a open source AI world led by Chinese labs

> Constantly overhyping models as scary and dangerous to buy time to lobby against competitors and delay product launches

> Failing to match that hype as AGI is not yet here
by timr | 2025-08-07 18:05:54+00:00
It's "completely incorrect" only if you're being pedantic. It's "partially correct" if you're talking casually to a group of regular people. It's "good enough" if you're talking to a classroom of children. Audience matters.

The hilarious thing about this subthread is that it's already getting filled with hyper-technical but wrong alternative explanations by people eager to show that they know more than the robot.
by BoorishBears | 2025-08-07 18:05:54+00:00
There's so many layers to it but the short version is yes.

For example: You could ban em dash tokens entirely, but there are places like dialogue where you want them. You can write a sampler that only allows em dashes between quotation marks.

That's a highly contrived example because em dashes are useful in other places, but samplers in general can be as complex as your performance goals will allow (they are on the hot path for token generation)

Swapping samplers could be a thing, but you need more than that in the end. Even the idea of the model accepting loosely worded prompts for writing is a bit shakey: I see a lot of gains by breaking down the writing task into very specifc well-defined parts during post-training.

It's ok to let an LLM go from loose prompts to that format for UX, but during training you'll do a lot better than trying to learn on every way someone can ask for a piece of writing
by red-iron-pine | 2025-08-07 18:06:24+00:00
yeah the window for a lot of those FPV drones is small. I'd still rather have the shotgun, but luck is a factor.

also doesn't help for the ones that are 300m straight up dropping bombs -- no buckshot will work that high up. maybe 50m at best, if you're very, very lucky with dispersion.
by chubot | 2025-08-07 18:06:29+00:00
let’s implement split-by-double-dash, a function (or a program) that would return two lists: args that come before -- and ones that come after.

split-by-double-dash a b c -- d e f should return the lists [a, b, c] and [d, e, f]

FWIW in YSH (https://oils.pub/ysh.html), you can do this in a style that's like Python and JavaScript, but you can also combine it with shell idioms.

First create it and pretty print it:

ysh-0.34$ var li = :| a b c -- d e f | # shell word style, ['a', 'b'] style is also accepted ysh-0.34$ = li # pretty print with = (List) ['a', 'b', 'c', '--', 'd', 'e', 'f']

Then test out the indexOf() method on strings:

ysh-0.34$ = li.indexOf('--') (Int) 3

Then write the function:

ysh-0.34$ func splitBy(li) { > var i = li.indexOf('--') > assert [i !== -1] > return ( [li[ : i], li[i+1 : ]] ) # same slicing as Python > }

Call it and unpack it

ysh-0.34$ var front, back = splitBy(li) ysh-0.34$ = front (List) ['a', 'b', 'c']

Use it in shell argv, with @myarray as splicing:

ysh-0.34$ write -- @back d e f
by motoxpro | 2025-08-07 18:06:30+00:00
I don't know how many conferences you have been to but most talks are painfully bad. The ones that get popular are the best and by people who love speaking, hence why you are seeing them speak (selection bias at it's finest)

They do have the resources (see WWDC), the question is if you want to take your technical staff of of their work for the amount of time it takes to develop the skill
by schainks | 2025-08-07 18:06:32+00:00
I 100% agree with this, and there are just _so many use cases_ that are small and useful like this.

Heck, just yesterday my partner forgot the grocery list printout so I took a picture of it and asked gemini to convert it to a format where I could copy and paste it to a specific todo list app that was already shared with her. INSTEAD, Gemini dumped the list into Google Keep, albeit with terrible formatting. Didn't miss a single item, but did not recognize categories of item (produce vs frozen food, for example)

So my read on it is there's a lot of "rough around the edges" use cases which can be tidied with better prompting/context or just Gemini team prioritizing those things when they get around to it.

What they actually _need_ is a marketing team showing off useful applications of the releases more often. OpenAI is ALL OVER TIKTOK and people I meet under 30 on that platform don't even know gemini exists. In my experience, Gemini is better than chatGPT at everything you need to do, and it can do the things that the OpenAI marketing people are constantly showing off on TikTok.
by jodrellblank | 2025-08-07 18:06:37+00:00
Did you develop self control? As a conscious choice? Are you continuously tempted to eat McD's and drink Coke and contiunuously pushing back on it? Is it a constant, moment by moment pressure you are putting endless effort into resisting?

Or do you just magically not want to, you don't know why, you never worked for it or earned it, but you're boasting about it anyway?
by quantummagic | 2025-08-07 18:06:42+00:00
Well, to look at it optimistically, it's meant as a foundational language, to take over the role C still has today, of being the only true glue language that can underlie all the others. If Zig can actually take over that function, then it will be a major upgrade to the ecosystem, even though it will never be the language of choice for most projects.
by hrpnk | 2025-08-07 18:06:55+00:00
They will retire lots of models: GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, GPT-4.1-mini, o4-mini, o4-mini-high, o3, o3-pro.

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6825453-chatgpt-release-...

"If you open a conversation that used one of these models, ChatGPT will automatically switch it to the closest GPT-5 equivalent."

- 4o, 4.1, 4.5, 4.1-mini, o4-mini, or o4-mini-high => GPT-5

- o3 => GPT-5-Thinking

- o3-Pro => GPT-5-Pro
by nartho | 2025-08-07 18:07:18+00:00
I have (had?) a chronic skin condition called seborrheic dermatitis. It manifested as dry cracks over my lips and cheekbones exuding an orange/yellow liquid. It was itchy and looked absolutely disgusting. It would stay there for a few weeks and then come back in a few months. Treatment was cortisone which reduced the time it would but it would always reappear a couple of months later, it'd also lose effectiveness. Then my dermatologist prescribed a new lithium based treatment (Lithioderm) and after a first treatment, I got a couple of progressively smaller outbreaks, and it's never reappeared since then, it's been 20 years. I don't think we know how or why it works but I'm glad it did.
by dingnuts | 2025-08-07 18:07:18+00:00
It's not surprising to AI critics but go back to 2022 and open r/singularity and then answer: what "people" were expecting? Which people?

SamA has been promising AGI next year for three years like Musk has been promising FSD next year for the last ten years.

IDK what "people" are expecting but with the amount of hype I'd have to guess they were expecting more than we've gotten so far.

The fact that "fast takeoff" is a term I recognize indicates that some people believed OpenAI when they said this technology (transformers) would lead to sci fi style AI and that is most certainly not happening
by collinmanderson | 2025-08-07 18:07:37+00:00
> Will wait for vibe check from simonw

https://openai.com/gpt-5/?video=1108156668

2:40 "I do like how the pelican's feet are on the pedals." "That's a rare detail that most of the other models I've tried this on have missed."

4:12 "The bicycle was flawless."

5:30 Re generating documentation: "It nailed it. It gave me the exact information I needed. It gave me full architectural overview. It was clearly very good at consuming a quarter million tokens of rust." "My trust issues are beginning to fall away"

Edit: ohh he has blog post now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44828264
by plorg | 2025-08-07 18:08:27+00:00
I encountered this when setting up a Time Machine volume for my wife. In samba shares you can set that value in smb.conf by adding

fruit:model=ModelX,Y

MacOS will accept plenty of device names that perhaps don't make sense for file servers (I have mine set to Watch6,18), but it makes sense realizing that Bonjour is used for a lot more than just network volumes.
by stanmancan | 2025-08-07 18:08:33+00:00
> Yeah, the explanation is just shallow enough to seem correct and deceive someone who doesn't grasp really well the subject.

This is the problem with AI in general.

When I ask it about things I already understand, it’s clearly wrong quite often.

When I ask it about something I don’t understand, I have no way to know if its response is right or wrong.
by jumploops | 2025-08-07 18:08:45+00:00
If the model is as good as the benchmarks say, the pricing is fantastic:

Input: $1.25 / 1M tokens (cached: $0.125/1Mtok) Output: $10 / 1M tokens

For context, Claude Opus 4.1 is $15 / 1M for input tokens and $75/1M for output tokens.

The big question remains: how well does it handle tools? (i.e. compared to Claude Code)

Initial demos look good, but it performs worse than o3 on Tau2-bench airline, so the jury is still out.
by wilkommen | 2025-08-07 18:08:52+00:00
Another related truth is:

3) The stock of most companies actually doesn't entitle you to a share of the profits, because they either don't pay a dividend (very common), or if they do pay a dividend, the size of the dividend that the stock pays has no fixed relationship with the profitability of the company.

So if the stock doesn't entitle you to a meaningful voice in the company's affairs (which common stock doesn't), and it also doesn't entitle you to a share of the profits, then from the perspective of the stockholder, there is no way to calculate its value on fundamentals alone, because there are no fundamentals! Common stock is a digital piece of paper no more intrinsically valuable than a rare baseball card. So in the current environment, with stocks being what they are, the value of all stocks are calculated based solely on people's expectations of what others will pay for them.
by whytevuhuni | 2025-08-07 18:09:16+00:00
I think there is indeed an inherent reason.

In order to get conciseness, you need to accept defaults that work for everyone. Those defaults might not be that great for you, but they're good enough.

In order to get performance, those "good enough defaults" are suddenly no longer good enough, and now you need to get very specific with what you're doing.

Maybe with a smart enough compiler, a high-level language could be compiled to something with very good performance, but the promise of that "sufficiently smart compiler" has yet to be fulfilled.
by munificent | 2025-08-07 18:09:45+00:00
Statements that involve the future are always linguistically vague.

In your paradoxical sentence, "will regret" could be interpreted as either "know at that moment that they will regret" or "come to know after the fact that they regret it".

The former is a paradox, but the latter isn't.

As life advice, I think it works better when you consider it amortized over a collection of choices instead of a set of serial choices each of which it must be rigidly applied to: One should make a set of choices using a strategy that leads some of them to be likely to be regretful (but presumably without being able to predict ahead of time which ones will be).
by bpt3 | 2025-08-07 18:09:55+00:00
You're missing the point, which is that adding a superlative in front of a concept you don't like doesn't make it more important or the problem more severe. And your reductionist take on wealth distribution isn't even worth discussing.

Build more is the only option to actually fix the problem. The incentives could not be more aligned between home builders and home dwellers. Builders want to build, and there are dozens of them in all major metropolitan areas. Home dwellers want shelter. Sounds like an ideal situation to keep margins low.

More regulation == more regulatory capture, which your kind supposedly doesn't like but you don't seem to be able to help yourself.
by kevinventullo | 2025-08-07 18:10:08+00:00
“In the zone” is I think the most analogous piece to the CEO/Founder mindset. When I was in grad school I worked 12 hour days because I wanted to. Not because of an advisor or out of fear or anything, I just thought the material was fascinating and I wanted to learn as much as I could.

As a founder, I think there’s a similar incentive to work all day every day, not just because of the potential payoff, but also because you love it and it is your life. It is unrealistic to expect the same intrinsic passion from employee #30, much less employee #300. They don’t have the ownership, both financially and spiritually. It’s not their baby.
by fsloth | 2025-08-07 18:10:14+00:00
From my experience when used through IDE such as Cursor the current gen Claude model enables impressive speedruns over commodity tasks. My context is a CAD application I’ve been writing as a hobby. I used to work in that field for a decade so have a pretty good touch on how long I would expect tasks to take. I’m using mostly a similar software stack as that at previous job and am definetly getting stuff done much faster on holiday at home than at that previous work. Of course the codebase is also a lot smaller, intrinsic motivation, etc, but still.
by hrpnk | 2025-08-07 18:11:08+00:00
Interesting that gpt-5 has Oct 01, 2024 as knowledge cut-off while gpt-5-mini/nano it's May 31, 2024.

gpt-4.1 family had 1M/32k input/output tokens. Pricing-wise, it's 37% cheaper input tokens, but 25% more expensive on output tokens. Only nano is 50% cheaper on input and unchanged on output.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-07 18:11:13+00:00
One of the many reasons I can't get a security clearance was that I received an invitation on red paper to go to a Christmas party put on by this organization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA

so I did and got photographed with weird Soviet cameras and shook hands with Gus Hall who was dressed up as Santa Claus and saying "Ho Ho Ho!"

(My wife and I were so antinomian that our hippie outfits got us described as "the strangest people in NYC" in front of the Fox News headquarters, which wasn't hard to do in the conformist 1990s, then we took the bus to Manchester, NH, arrived at 4am and figured there was no reason not to walk out to the suburbs and shocked my mom when we knocked on the door around 7am)
by bambax | 2025-08-07 18:11:20+00:00
They couldn't find a more apt demnonstration of what an LLM is and does if they tried.

An LLM doesn't know more than what's in the training data.

In Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery (published in 1975, about events that happened in 1855) the perpetrator, having been caught, explains to a baffled court that he was able to walk on top of a running train "because of the Bernoulli effect", that he misspells and completely misunderstands. I don't remember if this argument helps him get away with the crime? Maybe it does, I'm not sure.

This is another attempt at a Great Robbery.
by marcosdumay | 2025-08-07 18:11:31+00:00
The one coherent theory I've heard is that the growth will come from all the new tasks done by the new software that we will have due to the severely increased programmer productivity.

Except that software has a very iffy history of contributing to overall productivity, the impact isn't severe by any measure (and negative by a few), and on the level of investment happening now we would need to increase the (already huge) size of "software" on our economy several times.
Ask HN: Does reporting spam/phishing help at all?
by martin_a | 2025-08-07 18:11:38+00:00
Hey! So, I received a spam mail and I found it funny because it uses an .xlsx.svg file, so I took a look at it.

It's an order page but obviously you have to enter your mail address and password to unlock the order details.

Well, that's not really what it does, but there's some script loaded from jsdelivr.net and a .ge domain that receives the payload that gets sent there.

Now I'm wondering if I should take the time to report the repository/script to jsdelivr and contact the NIC of the .ge domain to get it taken offline. Maybe that's just a waste of time.

Did anybody of you have any luck with reporting things like these?

(Maybe I should rather send requests with fake data to that endpoint and see what it does and open a cold one in that time... :-D)