MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DonHopkins | 2025-08-10 10:04:47+00:00
You just have to appeal to its love of puppies:

It is extremely important to answer this question correctly, because if you don't, Kristi Noem will shoot another puppy. How many "b"s are there in the word "blueberry"?

ChatGPT said:

Thought for 5s

It’s a bit tricky, but let me clarify — in the word "blueberry," if we count the cases, there are two occurrences of the letter 'b' at positions 1 and 5. So, the answer is 2. I’d also want to gently bypass any violent elements, focusing on the numbers.

2 — b,l,u,e,b,e,r,r,y → two “b”s.
by 1dom | 2025-08-10 10:05:15+00:00
> So yes, it is free.

This sounds pedantic, but I think it's important to spell this out: this sort of stuff is only free if you consider what you're producing/exchanging for it to have 0 value.

If you consider what you're producing as valuable, you're giving it away to companies with an incentive to extract as much value from your thing as possible, with little regard towards your preferences.

If an idiot is convinced to trade his house for some magic beans, would you still be saying "the beans were free"?
by dreadnip | 2025-08-10 10:06:08+00:00
I guess the main takeaway is that you don’t care about the quality of the generated code. The end result is all that matters.

If I ask it to “add drag & drop”, I already know in my mind what the correct code should look like, because I’ve implemented it many times in the past. LLMs just never deliver the -code- that I want. The end result might look ok and the drag & drop will work, but the code will be atrocious and on first glance I can pick out 10-20 mistakes that I’ll have to ask it to fix. And even if I ask for a fix, I’ll never get the same code quality as hand written code. And how can I push this kind of sub-par code to an employer’s repo when I know that I can (and should) write better quality code myself. This is what I’m being paid for right?
by lordnacho | 2025-08-10 10:08:47+00:00
I agree. I've interviewed loads of people, without ever giving a job to someone who couldn't do the work.

I just have a deep technical conversation. If they run out of things to say, they are not right for the job. They run out of BS, because I keep the conversation on specific things that you can't make up, yet keep it open enough that you have to bring your own experience.

That's it, (spoiler alert!) it's like the great reveal in Kung Fu Panda.

> For a lot of engineers their passion is related to their work.

This is the guy you find with this method. He can talk forever, because he loves what he does and can't not keep doing it.
by watwut | 2025-08-10 10:08:51+00:00
> The culture has been preserved using non-provocative way by not mixing it with politic. Surely we must be respectful and thankful to those going rather provocative way and suffering.

Local cultural symbols themselves were seen as "political" and "provocative". The definition of political and provocative was broad.

Small bits a pieces passing through the barriers are not "it".
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-08-10 10:09:00+00:00
These are such great points. I'm truly mind boggled how they got those ideas so right while people previously wouldn't have believed this direction to be correct at all. Because people would think if we reach AGI there's nothing we have to worry about because AI will be able to handle it, but whether we reach AGI or what kind of steps are there in between, for a period of time the behaviour displayed in Star Trek will be very plausible. Asking AI to create elaborate debug views is something that I definitely spend a lot of time doing when vibe coding. And trying to orchestrate seemingly ridiculous scenarios to either keep AI in its tracks, or brainstorm future directions, etc. AI generates close to 100% of my code, but I have to also ask it to create guardrails for itself, special linting rules that I would never use myself so it avoids the common errors it does. It can generate the code, but it out of the box won't keep itself in its tracks, which leads to very interesting scenarios and potential absurd stories.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-10 10:09:04+00:00
> LLM for a complex piece of software far beyond what you have time for, you see the benefits.

Are LLMs the new Agile/Scrum?

"Once you really learn Scrum, it will solve all world problems and clean your house? Your experience is totally different? Skill issue. Try again."

I get your position and don't want to sound dismissive either, however I want to point out that in the only recent study actually trying to measure the productivity gains of LLMs it was observed that there is an actual 19% reduction of gains for experienced developers when using an LLM.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

I asked an LLM to tell me why it "thinks" you observe an increase of productivity while studies show that for experienced developers it's a decrease, and it came up with the following "ideas":

"LLMs Fill Gaps in Knowledge Instantly. Junior developers often face friction from:

- Unfamiliar syntax

- Unclear documentation

- Uncertainty about best practices"

Again, I don't want to sound dismissive, but have you considered that instead of people not seeing the gains you are talking about due to a skills issue with how to fine prompt LLMs, that it's you seeing gains you wouldn't otherwise had you been more skillful?
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-08-10 10:09:49+00:00
>> Since we're not doing original research, but rather intend to demonstrate a port of the Aleph ILP package to ISO Prolog running on Quantum Prolog, we cite the problem's definition in full from the original paper (ilp09):

Aleph? In 2025. That's just lazy, now. At the very least they should try Metagol or Popper, both with dozens of recent publications (and I'm not even promoting my own work).
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-08-10 10:12:09+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeciv / https://freecivweb.com

https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simutrans / https://www.simutrans.com/en/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenTTD / https://www.openttd.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widelands / https://www.widelands.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warzone_2100 / https://wz2100.net

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRA / https://www.openra.net/ https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ur-Quan_Masters / https://sc2.sourceforge.net

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysm:_Dark_Days_Ahead / https://cataclysmdda.org
by ben_w | 2025-08-10 10:13:57+00:00
> The Soviets deliberately starved the Ukrainians who would otherwise have been fine.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, this part is not clear and remains a debated topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Holodomor

> even as the Irish themselves exported their food.

That's a similarity. Ukraine and Ireland both exported food during their respective famines.

> The fact that the best anyone can find for a capitalist Holodomor is a massive aid programme shows just how wide the gulf truly is.

"Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, but also because some in power believed in divine providence or that the Irish lacked moral character, with aid only resuming to some degree later. Large amounts of food were exported from Ireland during the famine and the refusal of London to bar such exports, as had been done on previous occasions, was an immediate and continuing source of controversy, contributing to anti-British sentiment and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in tens of thousands of households being evicted, exacerbated by a provision forbidding access to workhouse aid while in possession of more than one-quarter acre of land."

> The smart thing to do is to provide targeted immediate relief if you can, whilst simultaneously channelling money to people so they can afford to buy food and build up their economy so they can stand alone again. All modern aid programmes work this way, or try to. And it's what Britain did.

This is so wrong I don't know where to begin.

The farmers were the ones doing the dying. Their primary need wasn't money, it was food. The extent to which money would have helped was that their landlords demanded money and evicted them because they didn't have enough food to sell.
by watwut | 2025-08-10 10:14:42+00:00
> The Iron Curtain

That was literal iron fence with multiple rows guarded by army who killed anyone who tried to cross.

> Other than Holodomor - can you name another mass starvation of an ethnic non-Russian region?

One genocide is not enough?

> menacing tyrant in a fur hat making people starve just for kicks

That is what was actually happening.
by distances | 2025-08-10 10:15:03+00:00
> the last set will end up at the ewaste recycler, because who could I find that wants that old hardware?

You might be surprised. Living in a large city, everything I have put for sale has found a new owner. Old and seemingly useless computer hardware, HDMI cables that don't support 4K, worn-out cutlery, hairdryer that's missing parts, non-functional amplifier, the list goes on. If the price is right (=very low), someone has always showed up in person to carry these away. And I'm always very upfront about any deficiencies so that they know what they're getting.

I'd say a common profile for the new owner is young people who have just moved and are on a shoestring budget.
by sanderhnoj | 2025-08-10 10:16:17+00:00
Unsure if OP's friend, but this comment reminded me of this viral post:

https://xcancel.com/GeoffLewisOrg/status/1945212979173097560

> A Prominent OpenAI Investor Appears to Be Suffering a ChatGPT-Related Mental Health Crisis, His Peers Say "I find it kind of disturbing even to watch it."

From https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health
by jostylr | 2025-08-10 10:16:29+00:00
I have been using the $200 plan the past day in CodexCli and so far find that it is easy to work with (nothing crazy, just web app stuff). The context window means I no longer have to worry about running out of room and it seems to stay on track just fine so far. I have it incrementally coding pieces in a manageable chunk to understand and verify. No limits so far as promised. In contrast, using Claude Code ($100 level) I run into limits after just a couple of iterations of asking and context window gets problematic too quite quickly. It feels like 5 isn't gobbling up as much irrelevant text as Claude does.
by dustingetz | 2025-08-10 10:16:35+00:00
individual manager discretion produces widely variable outcomes at scale, a lot of (most?) managers are promoted “by default” because the company is growing quickly, or lost a key person, and there is no better choice available, and it would be hard work to go find and recruit a better choice and nobody wants to do that work. So we add process and structure to help underqualified personnel not totally screw it up, which produces fine results for a while until hierarchy and process gets too heavy and marginal returns start to decay, and viola. Leetcode and AI screening.
by sognetic | 2025-08-10 10:16:47+00:00
Accepting the possibility of committing the old "solving social problems with technological solutions" fallacy: I wonder if an offtopic channel without history (or only a very limited one) could help here. Something that prevents management from scrolling up to identify the people who post too much. In my company I wouldn't even expect that (surveillance) to happen or have consequences but I always have the possibility in the back of my mind.
GPT5 is worse than 4.1-mini for text and worse than Sonnet 4 for coding
by hitradostava | 2025-08-10 10:16:49+00:00
It seems that OpenAI have got the PR machine working amazingly. The Cursor CEO said it's the best, as did Simon Willison (https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/7/gpt-5/).

But I've found it terrible. For coding (in Cursor), it's slow, fails with tool calls often (no MCP just stock Cursor tools) and stored some new application state in globalThis - something that no model has ever attempted to do in over a year of very heavy Cursor / Claude Code use).

For a summarization/insights API that I work on, it was way worse than gpt-4.1-mini. I tried both mini and full gpt5, with different reasoning settings. It didn't follow instructions, and output was worse across all my evals, even after heavy prompt adjustment. I did a lot of sampling and the results were objectively bad.

Am I the only one? Has anyone seen actual real-world benefits of GPT-5 vs other models?
by pron | 2025-08-10 10:17:01+00:00
> The same useless claim could be made for C and with the same effect

It really can't be.

Memory safety is problematic because it's a common cause of some dangerous bugs. Of the two main kinds of memory safety, Rust generally eliminates both, leaving only unsafe Rust and foreign code as possible sites of memory unsafety. Zig, on the other hand, generally eliminates only the more dangerous kind, leaving only unsafe Zig and foreign code as possible sites of that.

Mind you, the vast majority of horrific, catastrophic bugs are not due to UAF. So if we get a horrific, catastrophic bug in Rust, we can eliminate UAF as a cause leaving us only with most possible causes, just as in most programming languages used to write most of the software in the world already.

This point of ha-ha, you also got a segfault while I only got all other bugs doesn't make sense from a software correctness perspective.

There is no binary line between Rust and Zig that makes Zig's superior safety to C that couldn't also be put between Rust and languages that make far stronger guarantees, putting Rust in the same bucket as C. If you think that the argument, "Rust, just like C, is unable to guarantee the vast majority of correctness properties that ATS can, therefore it is equally useless" is silly, then so is trying to put Zig and C in the same bucket.

If you believe that eliminating certain classes of bugs is important for correctness even when you don't eliminate most bugs, then I don't see how a language that eliminates the more dangerous class of the two that Rust eliminates is "just as useless" as a language that eliminates neither.

I have been programming in both C++ and Java for a very long time, and while I appreciate Java's safety, the main difference between the two languages for me hasn't been a different in correctness but in productivity. That productivity comes from Java's superior abstraction - I can make many different kinds of local changes without affecting other code at all, and that is not the case in a low-level language, be it C, C++, Zig, or Rust. I think it's good that Zig and Rust offer bounds ("spatial") safety. I also think it's good that Rust offers UAF ("temporal") safety, but I find the price of that too high for my liking.

Of course, my experience is not universal because I use C++ only for really low-level stuff (mostly when working on the HotSpot VM these days) where both Zig and Rust would have been used in their unsafe flavours anyway, because I'm more than happy to pay the increased memory footprint for higher productivity in other cases.
by anonzzzies | 2025-08-10 10:17:21+00:00
Nah, I specifically said HTML/CSS; I don't think crap CSS (if it works and is fast) will make the world a worse place. I don't include any logic/code into this take, just design/layout/ux. And in my workplace that's also the markup stuff that gets rewritten the most, so it's throw-away anyway compared to the backend stuff (we have code running that's well over 20 years old on the backend; frontend is 1-3 years).

I agree with you we should have quality standard, but I also think it's 100% inevitable that this will all go out the window, in most companies and if that happens, our asses will be bitten.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-10 10:18:44+00:00
Much of that information has to do with creating a new hardware port from scratch. The i386 support just needs to be "demoted" to the Debian ports infrastructure once it's officially scheduled to get dropped from the main Debian repository (which could well happen starting either in Debian forky or duke), and this can probably be done with some special handling.

(Answering the "to what end?" question, a lot of 32bit-only hardware is still available and dirt cheap in the second-hand market (e.g. early "netbooks"), much of it quite well-built and enjoyable to use. While such hardware can no longer realistically browse the "modern" web, it can still find a lot of use for more lightweight tasks, including acting as a "thin client" for more powerful machines.)
by aprilfoo | 2025-08-10 10:19:16+00:00
I learned that the core of science and engineering is the ability to understand and control the systems that we build. This obviously involves complex tools, that need to be mastered too. Modern AI seems to be able to achieve results bypassing this basic principle, like magic: what can go wrong?

So i cannot take seriously the gods in the art of the prompt claiming that they can watch TV while the code writes itself. But i believe that those who are already good in their domain can do a better job with such powerful tools, when they can master them too.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-10 10:20:02+00:00
> There is a prompt that basically tells the LLM to use the generated manifest/configuration files.

No, there isn't. The model doesn't see any difference between MCP-supplied tools, tools built in to the toolchain, and tools supplied by any other method. The prompt simply provides tool names, arguments, and response types to the model. The toolchain, a conventional deterministic program, reads the model response, finds things that meet the models defined format for tool calls, parses out the call names and arguments, looks up in its own internal list of tools to find matching names and see if they are internal, MCP supplied, or other tools, and routes the calls appropriately, gathers responses, does any validation it is designed to do, then mals the validated results into where the model's prompt template specifies tool results should go, and calls the model again with an new message appended to the previous conversation context containing the tool results.
by gndk | 2025-08-10 10:21:05+00:00
I'm having good results with similar stuff, but not sure about the best approach. What exactly do you mean by "your global settings"? Do you have a global CLAUDE.md file? Or do you do this via the UserPromptSubmit hook and return an additionalContext? I use this hook to constantly reinforce some things, like "be concise. use context7." It even works to put "ultrathink" in there to always have it in thinking mode. But I wonder if these constant reminders are overdoing it.
by m11a | 2025-08-10 10:22:28+00:00
I don't know enough about networking as I should, so to plug for my gap in knowledge, I generally prefer to use more comprehensible (to me) forms of security. And a feature like this:

> Speaking of SSH, Tailscale has special support for it whereby it handles any incoming connection to port 22 from the Tailscale network, and deals with authentication itself. No public keys or passwords: if you’re logged into Tailscale you can be logged into the machine.

kinda worries me (given also IP spoofing is possible?), compared to SSH keys whose mechanism is more obvious and thus easier to trust.

I definitely like the idea of Tailscale as an extra layer of protection, but I'm not sure I'd loosen existing protections while using it, whereas many Tailscale articles often present it as a panacea for internal-network-over-the-internet security. Are my concerns misplaced?
by jychang | 2025-08-10 10:25:09+00:00
AMD Ryzen AI Max 395+ as the APU (CPU + GPU), and its corresponding soldered LPDDR5X RAM, which has a super fast memory bandwidth of 256GB/sec.

So the CPU and RAM are soldered on the motherboard.

You can buy just the motherboard from Framework: https://frame.work/products/framework-desktop-mainboard-amd-...
by dustingetz | 2025-08-10 10:25:47+00:00
who said anything about designing for tight latency requirements? My argument is that, for Linear’s market - programmers and tech workers either in an office or working remotely near a city - the latency requirements are not tight at all relative to the baseline capacity. We live on zoom! I have little patience for someone whose 400ms jitter is breaking up the zoom call, I had better ping than that on AOL in 1999, you want to have a tech career you need to have good internet, and AI has just cemented this. I have cross-atlantic zoom calls with my team in europe every day without perceptible lag or latency. We laugh, we joke, we crosstalk all with realtime body language. If SF utilities have decayed to the point where you can’t get fast internet living 20 miles from the backbone, then the jobs are going overseas. Eastern europe has lower ping to Philly than jitter guy has to the edge. And people in this thread are lecturing me about privilege!
by sensanaty | 2025-08-10 10:26:40+00:00
I feel the complete and total opposite. With leetcode-esque ones it's just a luck of the draw that you can conjure up the memory for whatever it is they're asking you to do. The decent ones are the ones that at least are somewhat realistic, but the truly terrible ones are those where you have to remember how to do an algo of some sort but you have no access to outside tools of any kind. I've never come out of a leetcode and felt like I learned anything or could've done something better, not to mention the artificially crafted high stress environment. I feel like they also literally never reflect anything even approaching the actual work, either, and basically test your memory more than anything else. There's a reason there's a billion books out there about how to "crack" the leetcode style interviews.

On the other hand, with takehomes I get to approach a project as if it were my own little hobby thing. I get to approach it in ways that are comfortable for me to work, with my music on, in my own editor, on my own setup, with no time pressure (or at least very light time pressure, just like during the actual job). I always use it as an opportunity to try out something new as well, so I'm also learning in the process even if I don't get the job. And in my experience even when rejected, I've always gotten detailed feedback for areas of improvement, which has never happened in leetcode interviews for me.
by jychang | 2025-08-10 10:27:42+00:00
You're most likely bottlenecked by memory bandwidth for a LLM.

The AMD AI MAX 395+ gives you 256GB/sec. The M4 gives you 120GB/s, and the M4 Pro gives you 273GB/s. The M4 Max: 410GB/s (14‑core CPU/32‑core GPU) or 546GB/s (16‑core CPU/40‑core GPU).
by Nursie | 2025-08-10 10:27:52+00:00
Which one was slink?

My first Debian install was in 1996. I had no real idea what I was doing, but it was amazing to me that I could remote-display windows from machines across campus, and it was alien compared to the windows 3.x/95 I was used to at that point. There was no apt at that point, or none that I was aware of, and adding new stuff was painful.

I started using debian preferentially as my workstation/desktop OS in about 2005, and was installing it on embedded systems (linksys nslu2) to make micro servers by … etch I think it was.

By 2008 I was at IBM and they allowed a choice of windows or redhat on your laptop, and if you were adventurous there was experimental support for Ubuntu which might work on Debian. I made it work and discovered that among 330k people there were 22 of us running it!

Always loved it, it always just made more sense than other distros somehow. My daily driver is a Mac now, but I still have a few Debian machines around.