MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stephc_int13 | 2025-08-09 22:16:09+00:00
I have not tried every IDE/CLI or models, only a few, mostly Claude and Qwen.

I work mostly in C/C++.

The most valuable improvement of using this kind of tools, for me, is to easily find help when I have to work on boring/tedious tasks or when I want to have a Socratic conversation about a design idea with a not-so-smart but extremely knowledgeable colleague.

But for anything requiring a brain, it is almost useless.
by corimaith | 2025-08-09 22:16:10+00:00
I think it's the opposite actually. I think the moment you're consciously, systematically trying to optimize for "smartest and most ambitious" on a meritocratic basis is the point in which your respective field falls into decline and is relegated to slow, incremental improvements rather than revolutionary jumps. Primairly because "the smartest and most ambitious" are more about seeing that specific field as vehicle for wealth and prestige rather than actual passion. Many of the legends of the past were not good enough for the elite institutions of their time.

I mean really, it's the question of why this over preexisting patronage systems. And looking at the "achivements" of this so-called "meritocratic elite" this last century (especially in enshittification) leaves alot to be desired.

It's just one self-serving 1% attempting to ursurp another 1%. And they certainly aren't going to be solving your problems. They don't have the ability to solve the coordination problem, the housing crisis, involution, climate change and Donald Trump.
by jaberjaber23 | 2025-08-09 22:16:28+00:00
Most developers guess why their CUDA code is slow. I wanted answers, so I built RightNow AI.

It’s a GPU-first editor that:

Profiles your kernels live without leaving the editor

Lets AI rewrite and tune them for your exact GPU

Autocompletes based on your hardware, not generic code

Supports multi-GPU setups out of the box

Works with local or cloud LLMs

In tests, we’ve seen up to 180× speedups on the same machine with no manual tuning.

Beta is open now, and we’ll open source it soon once it’s stable.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-08-09 22:17:29+00:00
> Something which the communists have not done.

Except when they effectively enslaved people on the basis of their ethnicity (the reality of being Soviet German, Crimean Tatar or Chechen in 1940-early 1950s). My German grandfather was taken into Labor Army (forced labor institution) as soon as he turned 16 (in 1952). He obviously wasn’t a Nazi collaborator. He was fully rehabilitated only in 1990.

Soviet communist policies towards ethnic minorities often did involve oppression and almost genocidal treatment. That fact of course should not be used to paint an all-black picture. Late USSR wasn’t bad at all for our family, creating a lot of opportunities.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-09 22:17:37+00:00
When Minsky and Papert showed that the perceptron couldn't learn XOR, it contributed to wiping the neural network off the map for decades.

It seems no amount of demonstrating fundamental flaws in this system that should have been solved by all the new improved "reasoning" works anymore. People are willing to call these "trick questions", as if they are disingenuous, when they are discovered in the wild through ordinary interactions.

Does my tiny human brain in, this.
by v5v3 | 2025-08-09 22:17:40+00:00
Risk cannabalising sales from their other products?

For example Nvidia seek to ban consumer GPU use in datacenters as they to sell datacentre GPUs.

If they made consumer platforms that can take 1tb of ram etc, then people may choose to not buy EYPC.

Afterall many cloud providers already offer Ryzen VPS's.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-09 22:18:08+00:00
I've been in the developer's shoes. I've also been in the manager's shoes.

It's not that simple. There's possibly better ways to deal with it, but for safety-critical stuff (like a navigation display in a vehicle), simple is much, much better. In many cases, there's actually laws and liability stuff involved.

I once spent six months, developing an "un-asked-for" WiFi control app for a digital camera, and had it nuked. It worked much better than the shipping app (which was enjoying a richly-deserved one-star rating in the app store).

The considerations had a lot to do with the corporate Process (note the capital "P"), which I sidelined. I thought I could do better, but the people with the hands on the brake, thought different. I didn't kiss the right rings. That's a very real consideration in any corporation.

As a manager, however, I did go to bat for employees that displayed initiative. In some cases, I was successful. In some cases, not so much.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-09 22:18:13+00:00
> Modern Americans would go absolutely ballistic if they came to a shop with empty shelves and a bored arrogant assistant who would jeer at their very question "I want to buy X".

Reminds me of an old Russian joke. In stores, you'd typically go to one counter to get some produce weighed, then to a cashier to pay for it.

So, someone goes up to the meat counter, and asks, "Can you weigh me out half a kilo of sausage?" And the guy behind the counter replies: "Sure, bring some in, and I'll weigh it out for you."
by epistasis | 2025-08-09 22:18:16+00:00
I have had the system for eight years and at no point would upgrading RAM have increased performance.

Upgrading the RAM would have created more waste than properly sizing the RAM to COU proportion from the beginning.

It is very odd to encounter someone who has such a narrow view of computing that they cannot imagine someone not upgrading their RAM.

I have not once, literally not once have RAM break either. I have been part of the management of clusters of hundreds of compute nodes, that would occasionally each have their failures, but not once was RAM the cause of failure. I'm fairly shocked to hear that anybody's RAM has failed, honestly, unless it's been overlocked or something else.
by ghaff | 2025-08-09 22:18:42+00:00
I don't remember what schools I applied to in general. But I didn't get into Dartmouth and did get into MIT which was something of shocker. Did go to the latter as an undergrad (though had never visited the campus) and have stayed involved. Started a non-profit at the former as a grad student at Dartmouth and still involved so all good. At the time, didn't seem to make a lot of sense to go to west coast (or UK) in part for schools as air travel was still relatively expensive.
by stuvinton | 2025-08-09 22:19:50+00:00
Thanks for your engagement, yes your understand is right "..ability to quantify how much the video differs from its original form" is a really good way of putting it. You are also right about the limitations; if the aspect ratio changed this would affect the verification process and would result in a much lower and likely a 0% score, I could build this to be more forgiving but I wanted it to be more sensitive, and then it would rely on someone seeing that the 0% match would be a good indicator that there was a crop or something.
by kbrkbr | 2025-08-09 22:20:02+00:00
I see that. I just have a hard time seeing how it is related to my question. Euclidean geometry was an "obvious mathematical certainty". Until it wasn't, and we learned that there are no "obvious mathematical certainties".

So I wanted to understand what you mean by this concept.

But we can leave it. It's not important. No harm meant.
by CRConrad | 2025-08-09 22:20:57+00:00
> When that account went down, all those “other” backups were just dead noise encrypted forever.

How and why? Are you saying you had encrypted backups on other providers, but... Didn't keep the encryption keys to those backups somewhere handy and unencrypted? Why not? Can you even call that “backups”?

BTW, this is the first time in all this saga I've seen you mention other providers. Smells fishy.
by thfuran | 2025-08-09 22:21:19+00:00
Rinderpest (a cattle disease) and Smallpox are the only two diseases ever successfully eradicated. The smallpox vaccine was the first vaccine ever invented and it took until 1980, about 180 years later, to eradicate the disease entirely. It pretty much is an unceasing war, though Guinea worm and polio are also relatively close to being eradicated. But if you stop fighting them, they'll just spread again.
by holografix | 2025-08-09 22:21:52+00:00
Author disregards why none of these technologies are relevant in the modern web.

Sure, they might still find themselves in highly regulated industries where risk avoidance trumps innovation everyday, all day.

MCP is for _the web_ , it started with stdio only because Anthropic was learning lessons from building Claude Code.

Author also seems to expect that the result from MCP tool usage will feed directly to an LLM. This is preposterous and a recipe for disaster. Obviously you’d validade structured response against a schema, check for harmful content, etc etc.
by shadowjones | 2025-08-09 22:21:52+00:00
It's a trick question for an artificial intelligence that tokenize words. Humans have plenty of different weaknesses.

>Why would you offer up an easy out for them like this? You're not the PR guy for the firm swimming in money paying million dollar bonuses off what increasingly looks, at a fundamental level, like castles in the sand. Why do the labour?

I deeply hate OpenAI and everything it stands for. But I can't deny the fact that they're +/- dominating the market and releasing SOTA models on a regular basis, trying to understand why and how it fails seems important to not get left behind.
by gambiting | 2025-08-09 22:22:37+00:00
>>University admission is handled by a similar circle.

So obviously I welcome any anecdotes to the contrary, but I was always told that in my formely communist country(Poland) university admissions were extremely fair. Everyone had equal chance if they passed exams well enough - in fact messing around with this system was guaranteed to get you in prison for corruption. And in there were many examples of poor families from very disadvantaged backgrounds sending kids to top universities because they studied hard enough to pass the entrance exams - there was no bribe you could give anyone to get you in, because the principles of fair admissions were upheld as the greatest value. I'm sure there are examples of it happening that we could find, but my understanding is that it was incredibly rare.

Now, top posts at universities - that's a different situation. To be the dean you had to be in the party and know the right people to be considered for the position. But students? Anyone could get anywhere and study completely for free.
by nec4b | 2025-08-09 22:22:42+00:00
>>1. Black Book of Communism

Are you contending existence of mass murders under almost any communist regime? What agenda are you talking about? You are making it sound communism is a noble idea, which someone is trying to discredit undeservingly.

>>2. "Unborn" It was about an estimation of how much more people would Soviet Union have in time if it hadn't murdered so many of its citizens. Imagine children of children of missing 20 million people.
by ndiddy | 2025-08-09 22:23:05+00:00
Mainframes are still holding on in use cases where a single server having continuous uptime is vital. They're designed to have uptime measured in decades, so even components like the processors and main memory have hot spares available and can be hot-swapped without interrupting the OS or running services. They also have continually running system monitoring and diagnostics at the hardware level (not running as an OS service) that will alert both the owner and IBM if they detect some sort of hardware fault. IBM has supported Linux as a first-class OS option for their mainframes since the early 2000s.

From a developer perspective, s390x is also the last active big-endian architecture (I guess there's SPARC as well, but that's on life support and Oracle doesn't care about anyone running anything but Solaris on it), so it's useful for picking up endianness bugs.

Another interesting thing is that the only two 32-bit architectures left supported are armel and armhf. Debian has already announced that this will be the last release that supports armel (https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues....), so I guess it'll be a matter of time before they drop 32-bit support altogether.
by abdusco | 2025-08-09 22:23:27+00:00
I tried using `tailscale funnel` against a dummy server `python -m http.server`, and within 10 seconds the bots started to check for vulnerabilities.

Tailscale warns you about how enabling it will issue an HTTPS certificate which will be in a public ledger. But I wasn't expecting it to be this quick.

127.0.0.1 - - [10/Aug/2025 00:11:34] "GET /@vite/env HTTP/1.1" 404 - 127.0.0.1 - - [10/Aug/2025 00:11:34] code 404, message File not found 127.0.0.1 - - [10/Aug/2025 00:11:34] "GET /actuator/env HTTP/1.1" 404 - 127.0.0.1 - - [10/Aug/2025 00:11:34] code 404, message File not found 127.0.0.1 - - [10/Aug/2025 00:11:34] "GET /server HTTP/1.1" 404 - 127.0.0.1 - - [10/Aug/2025 00:11:35] code 404, message File not found 127.0.0.1 - - [10/Aug/2025 00:11:35] "GET /.vscode/sftp.json HTTP/1.1" 404 - 127.0.0.1 - - [10/Aug/2025 00:11:35] code 404, message File not found 127.0.0.1 - - [10/Aug/2025 00:11:39] "GET /s/7333e2433323e20343e2538313/_/;/META-INF/maven/com.atlassian.jira/jira-webapp-dist/pom.properties HTTP/1.1" 404 -
by tracerbulletx | 2025-08-09 22:23:32+00:00
In what way can you say that the forces acting on the particle in the western pacific is the same force acting on a completely different particle in that same wave 1000s of miles away when it hits California? It's not by any physical definition. The relationship is purely through the chain of causation over time. In our defining that network of causation as a cohesive system. When a wave interferes with another wave, why do we say both waves died, those energies still exist, when two waves join and magnify each other or cause child waves to branch off in different directions, where does the identity of the wave go?
by Terr_ | 2025-08-09 22:23:44+00:00
I'm not sure why you think-I-think it's just a prompt thing.

I brought up prompts as a convenient way to demonstrate that a magic-trick is being performed, not because prompts are the only way for the magician to run into trouble with the illusion. It's sneaky, since it's a trick homo narrans play on ourselves all the time.

> The document or whatever you'd like to call it is only one part of the story.

Everybody knows that the weights matter. That's why we get stories where the sky is generally blue instead of magenta.

That's separate from the distinction between the mind (if any) of an LLM-author versus the mind (firmly fictional, even if possibly related) that we impute when seeing the output (narrated or acted) of a particular character.
by zmmmmm | 2025-08-09 22:24:23+00:00
if employment reduced, did the industry contract? Or did it maintain its size and make do with less employees?

It's not good for the individuals, but in broader economic terms, an industry that delivered the same value with less people is effectively increasing productivity which is economically generally a good thing. Of course one industry is not a closed system, whether those unemployed people go and contribute somewhere else in the economy or sink into unemployment is a critical question.

If the industry contracted then it's harder to argue it's a good thing.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-08-09 22:24:50+00:00
How many times does this need to be repeated.

It works in this instance. On this run. It is not guaranteed to work next time. There is a error percentage here that makes it _INEVITABLE_ that eventually, with enough executions, the validation will pass when it should fail.

It will choose not to pass this to the validator, at some point in the future. It will create its own validator, at some point in the future. It will simply pretend like it did any of the above, at some point in the future.

This might be fine for your B2B use case. It is not fine for underlying infrastructure for a financial firm or communications.
by degamad | 2025-08-09 22:24:53+00:00
By 2-sided, OP probably means that the problem is that the cable has two USB-C ends, not that the USC-c connector is symmetric.

If you have an A end and a B or C end, you can assume that the device on the A end is supplying power and the device on the B or C end is consuming power without breaking anything. The A end cannot supply power to it's device by design, so an A to C cable cannot be used to power the A device from the C device, regardless of whether the device on the C end can supply power.

But if you have two C ends, you need some way to establish which device is the supply device and which is the consuming device, because the cable can be used to connect two devices which both can supply power (e.g. a laptop and a phone).
by whoknowsidont | 2025-08-09 22:26:04+00:00
>This is deterministic, it is validating the response using a JSON Schema validator and refusing to pass it to an LLM inference.

No. It is not. You are still misunderstanding how this works. It is "choosing" to pass this to a validator or some other tool, _for now_. As a matter of pure statistics, it will simply not do this at some point in the future on some run.

It is inevitable.
by dismalaf | 2025-08-09 22:26:16+00:00
I've kind of been using Debian 13 for awhile now (I'm on Unstable) and for me what's impressive is how polished a default Debian installation is these days. With Gnome, you literally can run it as is, no config needed. It just works.

That being said, I like Flatpak, so I installed it (was super easy and Flathub provides instructions), and I added a few Gnome Shell extensions (a Dock so my wife can find apps when she occasionally uses my laptop).

Debian gives you a feeling of ownership of your computer in a way the corporate distros don't, but is still pretty user friendly (unlike Arch).

I'd definitely install Debian Stable on a grandparents' computer.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-09 22:26:29+00:00
In ten years time an LLM lawyer will lose a legal case for someone who can no longer afford a real lawyer because there are so few left. And it'll be because the layers of bodges in the model caused it to go crazy, insult the judge and threaten to burn down the courthouse.

There will be a series of analytical articles in the mainstream press, the tech industry will write it off as a known problem with tokenisation that they can't fix because nobody really writes code anymore.

The LLM megacorp will just add a disclaimer: the software should not be used in legal actions concerning fruit companies and they disclaim all losses.
by mattnewton | 2025-08-09 22:27:18+00:00
So, not exactly the same thing at all, but the ARChitects do a really cool thing I didn't have time to talk about in this post, which is a kind of depth first search with a cumulative "minimum probability" threshold for backing out of a path. This does let the model kind of reason ahead a few tokens, and then back out if it doens't look like it's going well and try the next most likely token. https://github.com/da-fr/arc-prize-2024/blob/main/training_c...

You can image something like that for any autoregressive llm, but it probably needs some heavy heuristics. Here there are like 11 valid tokens (end of line, 1-9, or end of sequence), and other use cases are going to have way more options making this more intractable.
by austin-cheney | 2025-08-09 22:27:25+00:00
Writing software is no different than writing a novel or a music album. Its creating a product. All of these require the ability to write, but its more than just writing an essay. There are functional aspects that require different stages of planning and composition that must be put together in a way that can be maintained, described, and decomposed. Its that vision for composition and extension which requires organizational capacity drawn from lots of experience.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-08-09 22:27:28+00:00
The poorest people are not the ones working minimum wage full-time. However, the poorest do want to purchase take-out. Increasing the minimum for fast food realistically helps a pretty minute demographic of workers, but the carry-over cost to consumers means that poor people can afford less fast food.

Maybe that's not such a bad thing, but if it's meant to help the poor (who either earn nothing or earn much less consistently) it's pretty ineffectual at it, particularly when accounting for differences in cost-of-living, and the types who typically work minimum wage fast food in particular. Walk into a McDonalds and you'll mostly see students and immigrants, that's not "the poor". "Livable" needn't arbitrarily mean a spacious 1-bedroom apartment either, which is why migrants paid below-market wages don't worry about rent.

Cash transfers and other schemes are better. We already do that to a small extent and could just expand it.

Edit: should clarify, it's a balancing act because a higher main wage on net can be beneficial, but after a certain level will lead to undesirable effects
by whoknowsidont | 2025-08-09 22:28:52+00:00
You've misunderstood his statement and proven his point.

`DateTime` is not an ISO-8601 type. It can _parse_ an ISO-8601 formatted string.

And even past that, there are Windows-specific idiosyncrasies with how the `DateTime` class implements the parsing of these strings and how it stores the resulting value.
by resonious | 2025-08-09 22:29:20+00:00
Though sometimes the higher ups might not be the same as (or understand) the actual audience.

In this case the higher ups may have been confused due to, say, looking at the app while indoors (and from the perspective of "let's judge this developer's work"), while the actual users would see it in a vehicle alongside the real sky (and from the perspective of "let's see how easy this is to match up with reality").
by kiratp | 2025-08-09 22:30:33+00:00
> Edit: Letter frequency apparently has just become another scripted output, like doing arithmetic. LLMs don't have the ability to do this sort of work inherently, so they're trained to offload the task.

Mechanistic research at the leading labs has shown that LLMs actually do math in token form up to certain scale of difficulty.

> This is a real-time, unedited research walkthrough investigating how GPT-J (a 6 billion parameter LLM) can do addition.

https://youtu.be/OI1we2bUseI
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-08-09 22:30:50+00:00
It clearly is an artifact of tokenization, but I don’t think it’s a “just”. The point is precisely that the GPT system architecture cannot reliably close the gap here; it’s almost able to count the number of Bs in a string, there’s no fundamental reason you could not build a correct number-of-Bs mapping for tokens, and indeed it often gets the right answer. But when it doesn’t you can’t always correct it with things like chain of thought reasoning.

This matters because it poses a big problem for the (quite large) category of things where people expect LLMs to be useful when they get just a bit better. Why, for example, should I assume that modern LLMs will ever be able to write reliably secure code? Isn’t it plausible that the difference between secure and almost secure runs into some similar problem?