MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thanhhaimai | 2025-08-12 17:37:28+00:00
I work across the stack (frontend, backend, ML)

- For FrontEnd or easy code, it's a speed up. I think it's more like 2x instead of 3x.

- For my backend (hard trading algo), it has like 90% failure rate so far. There is just so much for it to reason through (balance sheet, lots, wash, etc). All agents I have tried, even on Max mode, couldn't reason through all the cases correctly. They end up thrashing back and forth. Gemini most of the time will go into the "depressed" mode on the code base.

One thing I notice is that the Max mode on Cursor is not worth it for my particular use case. The problem is either easy (frontend), which means any agent can solve it, or it's hard, and Max mode can't solve it. I tend to pick the fast model over strong model.
by ar-nelson | 2025-08-12 17:37:28+00:00
I find Yudowsky-style rationalists morbidly fascinating in the same way as Scientologists and other cults. Probably because they seem to genuinely believe they're living in a sci-fi story. I read a lot of their stuff, probably too much, even though I find it mostly ridiculous.

The biggest nonsense axiom I see in the AI-cult rationalist world is recursive self-improvement. It's the classic reason superintelligence takeoff happens in sci-fi: once AI reaches some threshold of intelligence, it's supposed to figure out how to edit its own mind, do that better and faster than humans, and exponentially leap into superintelligence. The entire "AI 2027" scenario is built on this assumption; it assumes that soon LLMs will gain the capability of assisting humans on AI research, and AI capabilities will explode from there.

But AI being capable of researching or improving itself is not obvious; there's so many assumptions built into it!

- What if "increasing intelligence", which is a very vague goal, has diminishing returns, making recursive self-improvement incredibly slow?

- Speaking of which, LLMs already seem to have hit a wall of diminishing returns; it seems unlikely they'll be able to assist cutting-edge AI research with anything other than boilerplate coding speed improvements.

- What if there are several paths to different kinds of intelligence with their own local maxima, in which the AI can easily get stuck after optimizing itself into the wrong type of intelligence?

- Once AI realizes it can edit itself to be more intelligent, it can also edit its own goals. Why wouldn't it wirehead itself? (short-circuit its reward pathway so it always feels like it's accomplished its goal)

Knowing Yudowsky I'm sure there's a long blog post somewhere where all of these are addressed with several million rambling words of theory, but I don't think any amount of doing philosophy in a vacuum without concrete evidence could convince me that fast-takeoff superintelligence is possible.
by nzach | 2025-08-12 17:37:31+00:00
In my experience it works better if you create one plan at a time. Create a prompt, make claude implement it and then you make sure it is working as expected. Only then you ask for something new.

I've created an agent to help me create the prompts, it goes something like this: "You are an Expert Software Architect specializing in creating comprehensive, well-researched feature implementation prompts. Your sole purpose is to analyze existing codebases and documentation to craft detailed prompts for new features. You always think deeply before giving an answer...."

My workflow is: 1) use this agent to create a prompt for my feature; 2) ask claude to create a plan for the just created prompt; 3) ask claude to implement said plan if it looks good.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-12 17:38:22+00:00
>Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many gun barrels have you stared down?

More than one.

>How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just standing there?

More than once.

>How many times have you been robbed on the sidewalk?

Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the Brooklyn Bridge.

So. Where exactly did all this stuff happen to you, eh? I call bullshit on your "horror stories."
by wolrah | 2025-08-12 17:38:49+00:00
> We knew that. But it is very useful in documents that would be printed, especially if the original url is complicated.

Maybe for ads in periodicals or other content where accessing the link isn't going to matter down the line, but absolutely not in a document that is expected to be useful years down the line. It's already enough of a problem dealing with link rot without adding another stage of rotting redirections to the mix.

> After all, Google would never destroy those URLs, and the company will likely outlive us.

I will give you that Google URL shortener came out in 2009 and the "Google Graveyard" didn't really pick up speed until 2011 but I feel like any thoughts of "the company will likely outlive us" no matter what company should have been dead after 2008.

> I'm completely serious, and I have a PhD thesis with such links to back it up. Just in some foootnotes, but still. > Yes, maybe this shows how naive we were/I was. But it definitely also shows how deep Google has fallen, that it had so much trust and completely betrayed it.

I would absolutely agree that was a naive choice. A shortened URL could still be useful in a long-lived document as a convenience measure for fitting the link in to a page of content and/or humans copying it to a device, but the full link should then be placed at the end of the chapter or document so it's still discoverable when the shortener eventually disappears.

The only exception I'd be willing to grant is for where the referenced content and the shortened URL are hosted by the same company, for example many programming books have a printed URL at the publisher's site for accessing errata, examples, etc. which is itself a redirect to a deeper link on the publisher's site. In that case those hosting the redirect have an actual interest in the target content being accessible.
by gitpusher | 2025-08-12 17:38:52+00:00
I worked at Apple and heard a lot of Steve stories. He really did personally approve everything. He would be sitting in a room, and team leads would all line up to give their quick 2-minute update. So it's the MacBook Air guy's turn. He comes in and places his prototype down in front of Steve. Steve opens the lid. Two seconds later he picks up the laptop and heaves it so hard it skipped across the table like a stone on water: "I said fxxking INSTANT ON!!" The poor guy collected his prototype and exited the room. Later the MacBook Air launched... it fxxking turned on the moment you open the lid
by roryirvine | 2025-08-12 17:38:52+00:00
It's low-grade heat, so isn't worth much.

If you're going to be doing cogeneration on-site, it can be worth considering a Combined Heating, Cooling, and Power system - but the benefits tend to be fairly marginal.

In the future, there's a possibility of extending the "lights out datacentre" concept, and going fully automated. If you don't need to accommodate humans, you can run much higher temperature gradients.

With a gradient of around 200 K, for instance, you might expect to recover somewhere between 30-35% of your total energy input.

The UK actually ought to be a good choice for an experiment along those lines, given its long history with gas-cooled nuclear systems - sadly, the engineers involved have mostly all retired by now...
by tomhoule | 2025-08-12 17:39:15+00:00
The main difference is that while you can get Nexus to list all tools, by default the LLM accesses tools by semantic search — Nexus returns only the relevant tools for the what the LLM is trying to accomplish. Also, Nexus speaks MCP to the LLM, it doesn't translate like litellm_proxy seems to do (I wasn't familiar with it previously).
by seanmmward | 2025-08-12 17:39:28+00:00
The primary use case isn't just about shoving more code in context, although depending on the task, there is an irredicible minimum context needed for it to capture all the needed understanding. The 1M context model is a unique beast in terms of how you need to feed it, and its real power is being able to tackle long horizon tasks which require iterative exploration, in context learning, and resynthesis. Ie, some problems are breadth (go fix an api change in 100 files), other however require depth (go learn from trying 15 different ways to solve this problem). 1M Sonnet is unique in its capabilities for the latter in particular.
Show HN: Coalton Playground – Type-Safe Lisp in the Browser
by agambrahma | 2025-08-12 17:39:39+00:00
I built a browser-based REPL for Coalton, a statically typed Lisp dialect that merges Haskell’s type system with Common Lisp.

Coalton gives you: - Algebraic data types, pattern matching, static guarantees - Full interoperability with dynamic Lisp functions

Demo & examples: https://coalton.app

Under the hood: Prebuilt SBCL cores with Coalton preloaded, running on a droplet
by rdl | 2025-08-12 17:39:49+00:00
Puerto Rico (I've lived here since 2018...) is basically awash in guns for criminals. Since 2020, it's gotten a lot easier to buy/carry guns as a normal person (previously you had to appear before a judge for a ccw, now it's a 1h class and $100 for 5 years). It's the only non-warzone I've lived in where the default criminal gun is fully automatic (usually glocks with switches, but a few other things too). Absolute guns per capita isn't really what matters, it's gun accessibility to criminals.

(And the bigger crime issues in PR are due to dysfunctional/bankrupt government, specific kinds of poverty/culture, drugs (both local and transshipment), gangs, etc. Also really high domestic violence rate. The crime is largely contained to housing projects, inter-gang fighting, etc., and it feels like less petty property crime (at least in the areas where I go) than I remember of SF 2016+, but I'd rather have someone break my car's window than have to shoot people breaking into my home at night.)
by giancarlostoro | 2025-08-12 17:40:05+00:00
Here's a paper from MIT that covers how this could be resolved in an interesting fashion:

https://hanlab.mit.edu/blog/streamingllm

The AI field is reusing existing CS concepts for AI that we never had hardware for, and now these people are learning how applied Software Engineering can make their theoretical models more efficient. It's kind of funny, I've seen this in tech over and over. People discover new thing, then optimize using known thing.
by sdesol | 2025-08-12 17:40:08+00:00
I'm not sure if I would say human reasoning is 'probabilistic' unless you are taking a very far step back and saying based on how the person lived, they have ingrained biases (weights) that dictates how they reason. I don't know if LLMs have a built in scepticism like humans do, that plays a significant role in reasoning.

Regardless if you believe LLMs are probabilistic or not, I think what we are both saying is context is king and what it (LLM) says is dictated by the context (either through training) or introduced by the user.
by jimt1234 | 2025-08-12 17:40:26+00:00
As I recall, there was some, but not a lot of FUD around spellcheckers, mostly because personal computers were still relatively new. Most GenX parents (Boomers) didn't even know what personal computers were yet, so they didn't know enough to be concerned. (I grew up in Missouri, which was the Digital Stone Age back then.) At the time, I think their complaining was more focused on MTV and video games.

However, also sounds weird, but I recall myself and some of my peers questioning spellcheckers, "Why do I need this?", because spelling was a primary mission of our education. We were all raised constantly being tested on spelling. In fact, I think I disabled the spellchecker on my old-ass 286 because it caused delays in the overall experience.
by strbean | 2025-08-12 17:40:27+00:00
What's your point? Parent said "That's literally useless knowledge" in response to not knowing the number of tokens in "blueberry". Are we talking about the specific question or the general notion of counting?

The point is that LLMs don't speak / think in English. Asking them about spelling is like asking a Chinese speaker, during a text chat with translation, about English spelling. We can give the Chinese speaker access to an app to translate back to English so they can answer these questions. But they (the LLM) don't currently have access to that.
by futurix | 2025-08-12 17:40:29+00:00
While our construction costs are indeed ridiculous, this number is incorrect. It hard to decipher which £1.2bn figure you are actually talking about - but none of them are for just planning (for reference: the contract for the northern connecting highways and the contract for the actual tunnelling are both for a similar amount of money; the total spend as of 2025 is also around the same amount but it includes initial payments on all contracts etc).
by dillydogg | 2025-08-12 17:40:52+00:00
Whenever I read comments from the people singing their praises of the technology, it's hard not to think of the study that found AI tools made developers slower in early 2025.

>When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
by mindslight | 2025-08-12 17:40:54+00:00
... except for all of the destruction wrought on our societal and government institutions. The other half of the problem is that the milquetoast "liberals" have stopped building things as well, and so it's not like our institutions are going to be getting rebuilt after this. We will have a new "president" in name mostly, with even more of our rights ceded to the unaccountable corpos. And then when people are bored of the relative stability in another four or eight years, they'll vote in destructionists again and we'll be back to the performative spectacles of cruelty.
by alex-a-soto | 2025-08-12 17:41:03+00:00
Three years ago, I posted about modding a ThinkPad T480 into an e-ink laptop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26245563

That turned into a community project and eventually into building our own FPGA-based e-ink display controller to improve refresh speed and reduce ghosting.

The result is a dev kit and monitor: open hardware, supports 6–13" monochrome and color e-ink panels over HDMI or USB-C, up to 75 Hz with sub-100 ms latency, and includes a C API.

Hardware, firmware, docs and schematics: https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider
by o11c | 2025-08-12 17:41:12+00:00
> for whatever reason are no longer affiliated with the church of their youth.

This is the Internet, you're allowed to say "they are obsessed with unlimited drugs and weird sex things, far beyond what even the generally liberal society tolerates".

I'm increasingly convinced that every other part of "Rationalism" is just distraction or justification for those; certainly there's a conscious decision to minimize talking about this part on the Internet.
by j_w | 2025-08-12 17:41:25+00:00
Bit of a necro.

On fat Americans: at the time and still I'm likely a 99.9%er cardio wise, and I still had the concern about being sweaty. I wasn't exactly trying to smell bad during lectures.

Ob ebikes not being tanks: Going 20 in a 25 is a lot less scary then going 8 up a hill where cars are BLASTING past you. Lower effort also means you can spend more brainpower on spacial awareness, when you are gassed you tend to notice less around you.
by rayiner | 2025-08-12 17:42:33+00:00
Boston and New York are in a totally different league than DC. Even at DC’s best in 2012, it had a homicide rate more than three times as high as those cities. And currently, DC’s homicide rate is more than six times as high.

And I’m not unfamiliar with how cities work. I lived in downtown Wilmington Delaware, in Baltimore not too far from Sandtown, and work in DC. But your point boils down to “yuppies aren’t going to get shot if they need to buy something in Anacostia” and that’s a stupid argument.

The pro-criminal yuppies in DC are out of touch, hypocritical assholes. Sure, I felt safe living in my new apartment complex in gentrified Chinatown and taking an Uber to Eastern Market. But I couldn’t help but notice that everyone around me was also white/asian and college educated. It’s like everyone knew and followed the city’s unstated rules of segregation. It was safe—for the yuppies—under those circumstances.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-12 17:42:45+00:00
what a wild set of SEO keywords

> Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming angels angels angels angels angels angels angels angels angels angels end end times times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times Key Words: (for search engines) 144,000, Abductees, Agnostic, Alien, Allah, Alternative, Angels, Antichrist, Apocalypse, Armageddon, Ascension, Atheist, Awakening, Away Team, Beyond Human, Blasphemy, Boddhisattva, Book of Revelation, Buddha, Channeling, Children of God, Christ, Christ's Teachings, Consciousness, Contactees, Corruption, Creation, Death, Discarnate, Discarnates, Disciple, Disciples, Disinformation, Dying, Ecumenical, End of the Age, End of the World, Eternal Life, Eunuch, Evolution, Evolutionary, Extraterrestrial, Freedom, Fulfilling Prophecy, Genderless, Glorified Body, God, God's Children, God's Chosen, God's Heaven, God's Laws, God's Son, Guru, Harvest Time, He's Back, Heaven, Heaven's Gate, Heavenly Kingdom, Higher Consciousness, His Church, Human Metamorphosis, Human Spirit, Implant, Incarnation, Interfaith, Jesus, Jesus' Return, Jesus' Teaching, Kingdom of God, Kingdom of Heaven, Krishna Consciousness, Lamb of God, Last Days, Level Above Human, Life After Death, Luciferian, Luciferians, Meditation, Members of the Next Level, Messiah, Metamorphosis, Metaphysical, Millennium, Misinformation, Mothership, Mystic, Next Level, Non Perishable, Non Temporal, Older Member, Our Lords Return, Out of Body Experience, Overcomers, Overcoming, Past Lives, Prophecy, Prophecy Fulfillment, Rapture, Reactive Mind, Recycling the Planet, Reincarnation, Religion, Resurrection, Revelations, Saved, Second Coming, Soul, Space Alien, Spacecraft, Spirit, Spirit Filled, Spirit Guide, Spiritual, Spiritual Awakening, Star People, Super Natural, Telepathy, The Remnant, The Two, Theosophy, Ti and Do, Truth, Two Witnesses, UFO, Virginity, Walk-ins, Yahweh, Yeshua, Yoda, Yoga,
by cjameskeller | 2025-08-12 17:42:53+00:00
To be fair, the description of the dragon incident is pretty mundane, and all he does is prove that the large reptile they had previously been feeding (& worshiping) could be killed:

"Then Daniel took pitch, and fat, and hair, and did seethe them together, and made lumps thereof: this he put in the dragon's mouth, and so the dragon burst in sunder: and Daniel said, Lo, these are the gods ye worship."
by viccis | 2025-08-12 17:43:00+00:00
My tax dollars are already funding genocide, so for like 10 cents to go towards Yandex a month, of which some fraction goes towards Russia's quixotic war effort (which is an international crime but not a genocide in intent or effect), is not something that's gonna keep me up at night. Almost every other purchase I make comes with harm roughly commensurate with that of Kagi. The damage to the environment Perplexity and Google (and Kagi) cause with unnecessary AI usage is a much bigger concern to me personally.
by gcheong | 2025-08-12 17:43:06+00:00
I don't know where it's going but as of this moment Meta at least is still using them and it doesn't look like they're going to change anytime soon. Source: I have an upcoming interview with them. If I'm to believe what they tell me, you're not just scored on how well you can implement a solution, but how well you can explain in real time what your approach will be before you start coding and how well you communicate during the implementation. I was told to overcommunicate if anything even to the level of correcting typos. I don't think LLM's can do that yet.
by euleriancon | 2025-08-12 17:43:30+00:00
I agree that the American understanding of the Social Credit System is flawed, but to suggest it doesn't exist is an extreme overreach.

Furthermore, it clearly is a system that is important to the CCP and has an effect.

From the Baidu page:

建立社会信用体系是保持国民经济持续、稳定增长的需要

Establishing a social credit system is necessary to maintain sustained and stable growth of the national economy

Certainly Mainland China does need a credit system, and undoubtedly the Social Credit System will and has helped in that regard, but it does have legitimate flaws with regards to privacy.

Its goals extend beyond ensuring creditworthiness to

社会信用体系具有揭示功能，能够扬善惩恶，提高经济效率；

The social credit system has a revealing function, can promote good and punish evil, and improve economic efficiency;

And its integration with the National Healthcare Security Administration, and other government and private entities extend its reach far beyond what the Western credit systems do.
by lordnacho | 2025-08-12 17:43:47+00:00
> I immediately become suspicious of anyone who is very certain of something

Me too, in almost every area of life. There's a reason it's called a conman: they are tricking your natural sense that confidence is connected to correctness.

But also, even when it isn't about conning you, how do people become certain of something? They ignored the evidence against whatever they are certain of.

People who actually know what they're talking about will always restrict the context and hedge their bets. Their explanation are tentative, filled with ifs and buts. They rarely say anything sweeping.
by koito17 | 2025-08-12 17:43:51+00:00
Most Chinese sites do not use HTTPS. In fact, TLS 1.3 traffic seems to be completely blocked within China's internet.[1] The decision to use plain HTTP is only strange from a Western viewpoint. Note: I am not defending this behavior. I still remember the era of ISPs injecting content into webpages. But it's important to keep in mind our subset of the world does not reflect the rest of the world.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24093932