MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quantdev1 | 2025-08-08 19:07:01+00:00
*zero experience

Short answer: No idea. Because I don't trust my existing sources of feedback.

Longer answer:

I've only gotten feedback from two sources...

AI (multiple models) and a friend that's a SWE.

Despite my best efforts to shut down AI's bias towards positive feedback - it keeps saying the work is ridiculously good and thinks I need to seriously consider a career change.

My friend - who knows my lack of experience - had a hard time believing I did the work. But he's not a believable source - since friends won't give you cold, hard feedback.

I'm thinking about sharing it on here when it's done.
by nialse | 2025-08-08 19:07:13+00:00
Striking up a voice chat with GPT-5 it starts by affirming my custom instructions/system prompt. Every time. Does not pass the vibe check.

”Absolutely, happy to jump in. And you got it, I’ll keep it focused and straightforward.”

”Absolutely, and nice to have that context, thanks for sharing it. I’ll keep it focused and straightforward.”

Anyone else have these issues?

EDIT: This is the answer to me just saying the word hi.

”Hello! Absolutely, I’m Arden, and I’m on board with that. We’ll keep it all straightforward and well-rounded. Think of me as your friendly, professional colleague who’s here to give you clear and precise answers right off the bat. Feel free to let me know what we’re tackling today.”
ChatGPT-5 Can't Do Basic Math
by MarcellusDrum | 2025-08-08 19:07:18+00:00
ChatGPT-4 can solve it them. Even using GPT-5 from the API gives the correct result. Something with the ChatGPT frontend prompt seems to be the issue.

Example:

Prompt: Solve 5.9=x+5.11

Answer:

To solve the equation:

5.9 = x + 5.11

Subtract 5.11 from both sides:

5.9 - 5.11 = x

-0.21 = x

Final answer:

\boxed{x = -0.21}
by dcrazy | 2025-08-08 19:07:19+00:00
The counter argument is that’s just a training problem, and IMO it’s a fair point. Neural nets are used as classifiers all the time; it’s reasonable that sufficient training data could produce a model that follows the professional standards of care in any situation you hand it.

The real problem is that we can’t tell when or if we’ve reached that point. The risk of a malpractice suit influences how human doctors act. You can’t sue an LLM. It has no fear of losing its license.
by dragontamer | 2025-08-08 19:08:14+00:00
You don't need an LLM to run a Pick and Place machine, a lathe or a PCB line.

EDIT: https://youtu.be/SRu02F6AOmg?si=LZHZhbuB1ITjVdkw

While the USA spent a $trillion on LLMs, China spent the past two decades mass making chip shooters and pick and place machines like above.

Your LLMs aren't even fast enough to process or compete vs 15year old technology.

Now USA has pick and place machines and other such equipment. But we are slower and we don't have nearly as many. And despite better software here in the USA out setup costs are far higher (jlcpcb orders are prewired up with premade libraries because of huge volumes of orders. USA has fewer orders and thus requires a human to setup each line).
by DannyBee | 2025-08-08 19:08:24+00:00
If they prompt the same and ..., They should.

But they definitely don't taking into account whatever prompts the tools are really using (or ms is using a neutered version to reduce cost). So I would agree with the suggestion. Using sonnet through copilot seems very very different than cursor or cline or Claude code.

Using the same exact model, Copilot consistently often fails to finish tasks or makes a mess. It is consistent at this across ides (ie using the jetbrains plugin generates nearly identical bad results as vscode copilot). I then discard all it did and try the exact same (user) prompt in cursor or Claude code or cline with the same model and it does the same task perfectly.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-08 19:08:37+00:00
> There are cost tradeoffs for the different models when building on them, but for chatgpt, it's less clear to me why one would move between selecting different models.

The same tradeoffs (except cost, because that's roled into the plan not a factor when selecting on the interface) exist on ChatGPT, which is an app built on the underlying model like any other.

So getting rid of models that are stronger in some areas when adding a new one that is cheaper (presuming API costs also reflect cost to provide) has the same kinds of impacts on existing ChatGPT users established usages as it would have on a businesses established apps except that the ChatGPT users don't see a cost savings along with any disruption in how they were used to things working.
by sixtyj | 2025-08-08 19:09:14+00:00
AI reads your “prompt”, but you have to very specific and to know what and how you want achieve it.

Typical example is when you’ve asked about JSON once then Claude or ChatGPT starts to think that you want everything with JSON. :)

I have spent last two months using Google Gemini with 1 mil token window, and I have to say - inaccurate assignment leads to inaccurate result. And time really runs by days.

On the other side, I wouldn’t be able to have anything without it, as I am solo plus a bad coder :)

But you have spend a lot of time with writing and refining the assignment.

Sometimes it was better to start over than to end up in a dead end after 2-3 hours of wrangling the code from ai.

AI probably knows all main documentation. But in case you want to give more documentation before starting a project, just upload it as markdown.
by duxup | 2025-08-08 19:09:21+00:00
>Currently, the data suggest that reduced labor supply is likely the key driver

It's interesting as far as people I know looking for jobs, they're supply ... and having a hard time finding jobs. Reduced supply you'd hope you'd get a job.

Granted the article addresses this both in the types of jobs and:

>The stability of the unemployment rate masks effects of the low-hiring, low-firing labor market.

I do wonder, if this continues and a sense of economic slowdown or worse continues, would lowering a rate really fire up hiring? I know small businesses who can't eat /dance around tariffs like big companies, some are seriously terrified / facing hard decisions, others fine.
by MarkusQ | 2025-08-08 19:09:52+00:00
The computers, yes. The experience of using them, no.

There is a joy to having a tool that lets you do what you never could before that has been buried along the way in layers of petty annoyances and digital micro aggressions. As you say, computers today are better by so many metrics—including, unfortunately, their ability to tracks us, sell us things we neither need nor want, outrage and distract us.
by braooo | 2025-08-08 19:10:10+00:00
Running LLMs at home is a repeat of the mess we make with "run a K8s cluster at home" thinking

You're not OpenAI or Google. Just use pytorch, opencv, etc to build the small models you need.

You don't need Docker even! You can share over a simple code based HTTP router app and pre-shared certs with friends.

You're recreating the patterns required to manage a massive data center in 2-3 computers in your closet. That's insane.
by lazyweb | 2025-08-08 19:10:15+00:00
I did the exact opposite. And by that I mean physically moved my homelab into their colo earlier this year. Runs like a charm, costs about 500€ per month total.

Sounds like a lot, but I was almost paying the same before - 220€ for power at home, 110€ for a dedicated Hetzner server, 95€ for a secondary internet connection (as not to interfere with the main uplink used for home office by my partner and me).

Not having to deal with the extra heat, noise and used up space at home anymore has been worth it as well.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-08 19:10:39+00:00
> Maybe it's time that we have compulsory licensing the way that radio can license music to play.

I fear this will be forced on us all.

I fear it because right now, it's already true that if you object to your works being used to train AI, then you can't publish your works (especially not on the web). A growing number of people are going that route, reducing the works available to us. But there is still a sliver of hope that a solution could be found at some point and it would be safe to publish again. If compulsory licensing happens, then even that small hope is lost.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-08-08 19:10:43+00:00
From what I've been told by fixed wing pilots, flying a plane isn't really that hard. At least one baggage handler stole a commercial passenger aircraft recently and flew it out, including acrobatics.

Flying one in a safe manner and following all the rules can be pretty difficult however. For example there is an area near me that is from the air as boring as any other part of Texas. It's controlled airspace because it is the Bush Family Ranch. The secret service will investigate you if you fly over it.
Show HN: HackMaster Pi – A $30 Flipper Zero Alternative Built with Raspberry Pi
by 1ping | 2025-08-08 19:11:18+00:00
Please upvote on GitHub to support!

Tired of Flipper Zero's $169 price tag, so I built an alternative with Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.

Features: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, RFID, IR testing Interface: Web UI (no more tiny buttons!) Cost: ~$30

For authorized penetration testing. Open source MIT license.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-08 19:11:36+00:00
AI training on copyrighted materials for scientific reasons is borderline legal. Scientific progress is generally considered a decent reason to skirt around copyright issues. AI can exist in a legal sense (assuming nobody torrents content, thereby spreading the content rather than just pirating it).

The problem with AI industry is that they took the scientific exception intended for the betterment of mankind and then tried to turn that into a profit model. Many if their base models are borderline legal, but using those for making money requires some kind of regulation or deal.

I expect this to get resolved by having mandatory AI royalty fees that are added to every AI subscription, to be handed out to the creative industry. It's how my country and a few others responded when tape made it possible to record songs from the radio. It'll satisfy the huge companies (because they'll be paid more the more works they have) and spit in the face of smaller creatives or mere hobbyists.

It'll cost a couple of billion to grease the wheels, but if these companies work the same way the cryptocurrency industry paid off the Trump campaign, it won't be a difficult problem to solve.
by minimaxir | 2025-08-08 19:11:54+00:00
So there may be something weird going on with images in GPT-5, which OpenAI avoided any discussion about in the livestream. The artist for SMBC noted that GPT-5 was better at plagiarizing his style: https://bsky.app/profile/zachweinersmith.bsky.social/post/3l...

However, there have been no updates to the underlying image model (gpt-image-1). But due to the autoregressive nature of the image generation where GPT generates tokens which are then decoded by the image model (in contrast to diffusion models), it is possible for an update to the base LLM token generator to incorporate new images as training data without having to train the downstream image model on those images.
by mlinhares | 2025-08-08 19:13:17+00:00
Title is clickbait (we all know why) but its a great read. Its so many shocks to the economy at the same time, and with no goal other than to cause harm that I don't think anything the FED does will have any real impact in the real world.

The author goes for an OR between reasons but I really don't see it like that, its an AND, all jumbled together and pushing the economy down.
by jlarocco | 2025-08-08 19:14:41+00:00
Can't you say that about anything, though? And why would having a multi-mellenia history have anything to do with it?

Do people really own land? Or is it just a legal fiction to make things easier?

Is a contract really a thing? Or is it a legal fiction?

Times change. IP is a thing now. It's kinda funny to see somebody on a software developer forum arguing IP doesn't exist.
Ask HN: Does No Response Mean a Bad Idea?
by samehsbs | 2025-08-08 19:15:02+00:00
I've posted on Ask HN a couple of times, asking for feedback or thoughts on ideas I'm exploring, but I get no real interaction. No upvotes, no comments.

I'm wondering: does that generally mean the idea is just not interesting, or is it more about timing or wording?

Would love to hear how others interpret silence on HN. How do you know if it's your idea that didn’t resonate, or just a quiet post?
by jjani | 2025-08-08 19:15:28+00:00
No, they do change deployed models.

How can I be so sure? Evals. There was a point where Sonnet 3.5 v2 happily output 40k+ tokens in one message if asked. And one day it started with 99% consistency, outputting "Would you like me to continue?" after a lot fewer tokens than that. We'd been running the same set of evals and so could definitively confirm this change. Googling will also reveal many reports of this.

Whatever they did, in practice they lied: API behavior of a deployed model changed.

Another one: Differing performance - not latency but output on the same prompt, over 100+ runs, statistically significant enough to be impossible by random chance - between AWS Bedrock hosted Sonnet and direct Anthropic API Sonnet, same model version.

Don't take at face value what model providers claim.
by d-mz | 2025-08-08 19:15:52+00:00
The funny thing to me is that now more than ever structured data is important so that AI has a known good data set to train from, and so that search engines have contextual and semantically rich data to search.

AI isn't a solution to this; on the contrary, whatever insufficiency exists in the original data set will only be amplified, as compression artifacts can be amplified in audio.

We also can't trust any data that's created recently, because an LLM can be trained to provide correct-looking structured data that may or may not accurately model semantic structure.

The best source of structured, tagged, contextually-rich data suitable for training or searching in the future will be from people who currently AREN'T using generative AI.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-08-08 19:16:48+00:00
That is fairly cool. I was talking about this on X yesterday: another angle however, I use a local web scraper and search engine via meilisearch the main tech web sites I am interested in. For my personal research I use three web search APIs, but there is some latency. Having a big chuck of the web that I am interested in available locally with close to zero latency is nice when running local models, my own MCP services that might need web search, etc.
by NeutralCrane | 2025-08-08 19:17:53+00:00
Langchain the company makes three different main products, all of which are differing levels of bad in my experience.

LangGraph, for agent/workflow orchestration is the least bad of the three, but has solid alternatives these days, such as OpenAI’s own Agents SDK, or Pydantic AI.

LangSmith, the platform for prompt authoring/experimentation/observability isn’t great but is useable. I would much prefer Langfuse over it at this point.

Langchain, the library for interfacing with LLMs, is absolutely terrible. There is virtually nothing good to say about it, and in fact is so bad that the fact that LangSmith more or less requires you to use Langchain to some degree is probably the biggest knock against it. Langchain doesn’t even need an alternative, literally just interfacing with the LLMs directly through their clients are often simpler, more flexible, and preferable to using Langchain.
by MattGaiser | 2025-08-08 19:17:58+00:00
> We ought to treat their output with significant detachment and objectivity, especially when it gives personal advice or offers support.

Eh, ChatGPT is inherently more trustworthy than average if simply because it will not leave, will not judge, it will not tire of you, has no ulterior motive, and if asked to check its work, has no ego.

Does it care about you more than most people? Yes, by simply being not interested in hurting you, not needing anything from you, and being willing to not go away.
by faizshah | 2025-08-08 19:18:14+00:00
> I've had cases where it completely misinterpreted what I was asking for, a very strange experience which I'd never had with the other frontier models (o3, Sonnet, Gemini Pro).

Yes! This exactly, with o3 you could ask your question imprecisely or word it badly/ambiguously and it would figure out what you meant, with GPT5 I have had several cases just in the last few hours where it misunderstands the question and requires refinement.

> It was related to software architecture, so supposedly something it should be good at. But for some reason it interpreted me as asking from an end-user perspective instead of a developer of the service, even though it was plenty clear to any human - and other models - that I meant the latter.

For me I was using o3 in daily life like yesterday we were playing a board game so I wanted to ask GPT5 Thinking to clarify a rule, I used the ambiguous prompt with a picture of a card’s draw 1 card power and asked “Is this from the deck or both?” (From the deck or from the board). It responded by saying the card I took a picture of was from the game wingspan’s deck instead of clarifying the actual power on the card (o3 would never).

I’m not looking forward to how much time this will waste on my weekend coding projects this weekend.
by its-summertime | 2025-08-08 19:18:23+00:00
> There’s also no way to make imports of the form from module import * lazy

I'd say if you see

from typing import Final [...] __all__: Final = ("a", "b", "c")

Its probably 99% safe to pull that from a quick run over of the AST (and caching that for the later import if you want to be fancy)

Of course, should one be doing a star import in a proper codebase?
by resource_waste | 2025-08-08 19:18:28+00:00
Well, like, thats just your opinion man.

And probably close to wrong if we are looking at the sheer scale of use.

There is a bit of reality denial among anti-AI people. I thought about why people don't adjust to this new reality. I know one of my friends was anti-AI and seems to continue to be because his reputation is a bit based on proving he is smart. Another because their job is at risk.
by rpcope1 | 2025-08-08 19:18:40+00:00
I really don't get why people like the Minisforum stuff over alternatives. I've unfortunately been given one, and honestly I'm really unimpressed between crap firmware, no real expandability and just all of the other compromises that come with buying Aliexpress hardware. For the same money you can either pick up a used entry model Dell/HP/Lenovo server (and if they're E3/W/other entry level Xeon, they're usually not terrible on power) or get a good ATX chassis and power it with some off lease Supermicro hardware. Then you don't need to compromise on things like OOB management, hot swap bays, a real SAS card, real 10G nics, ECC ram, etc. etc. Maybe people are just afraid of doing a little bit of putting hardware together? I've seen and have systems that use the above gear that have been going for well over a decade now, with basically no hiccups, and even the old Sandy Bridge era E3 stuff both punches above probably even RPi5 and N100 and doesn't draw more than 30-40W when you don't have spinning disks in there. I'm sure if you avoid AMD and go find a newer T variant Intel chip, you can both have your cake and eat it.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-08 19:18:53+00:00
I have a js proxy project that auto-persists changes out live, as you change the object, rathre like this. I really need to get back to it.

The advantage of being able to see state easily is incredible. It's so scriptable. I only demo'ed it for myself, but I've also run a git-auto-commit program on the data as it changes over time, which is much more useful commits to look at over time than seeing data in a huge JSON file change.

I really really hope we can start using the hierarchical file system to hold data. For transport, its convenient to have data glommed together, but I think we're really missing out on end user programming and malleable systems by having these rich data formats everywhere and keeping the filesystem dumb.
by pradn | 2025-08-08 19:19:32+00:00
Just complaining that the world is bad is a good way to waste your energy and end up being a cynic.

So why is not all information organized in structured, open formats? Because there's not enough of an incentive to label/structure your documents/data that way. That's if you even want to open your data to the public - paywalls fund business models.

There have been some smaller successes with semantic web, however. While a recipe site might not want to make it easy for everyone to scrape their recipes, people do want Twitter to generate a useful link preview from their sites' metadata. They do that with special tags Twitter recognizes, and other sites can use as well.

The good news is that LLMs can generate structured data from unstructured documents. It's not perfect, but has two advantages: it's cheaper than humans doing it manually, and you don't have to ask the author to do anything. The structuring can happen on the read side, not the write side - that's powerful. This means we could generate large corpuses of open data from previously-inaccessible opaque documents.

This massive conversion of unstructured to structured data has already been happening in private, with efforts like Google's internal Knowledge Graph. That project has probably seen billions in cumultative investment over the years.

What we need is open data orgs like Wikipedia pick up this mantle. They already have Wikidata, whose facts you can query with a graph querying language. The flag example in the article could be decomposed into motifs by an LLM and added to the flag's entry. And then you could use SPARQL to do the structured query. (And that structured query can be generated from LLMs, too!)

LLMs and structured data are friends.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-08 19:19:40+00:00
I don't think you can assume that no response means the idea is bad. When I pass on these, sometimes it's that, but sometimes it's that the idea is something that may be good, but isn't something of interest to me, or isn't something I know anything about, or isn't something I have an opinion on. Sometimes, I don't feel like I understood what was said well enough to have a comment about it. Sometimes, it's about the title: if the title doesn't tell me the topic, or is clickbaity, then I'm not even going to read the post. Sometimes the idea is something that is not actually relevant to what HN is about.

And sometimes it's just timing -- as in, I never saw it.
by rich_sasha | 2025-08-08 19:19:59+00:00
Without in any way drawing a direct comparison, my impression is that everyone is stressed out by whatever is next on their Maslov pyramid. If it's food and housing, it will be food and housing. If it is achieving great showbiz success rather than moderate, it will be that.

Of course it's not the same, and being well fed and rested makes whatever psychological stress easier to bear.

But look at all the rich people seeing their shrinks. Or look at poor people in the UK, who really have it tough, but at no point seek to think, gee, we're better off than 90% of the world population, arent we lucky.

I am not equating the objective lack of basic life necessities to far fetched flights of fancy, but I have a feeling (huh) the subjective psychological feeling might feel the same.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-08 19:20:09+00:00
> with no goal other than to cause harm

My read is not that it is to cause harm / break things down per sé, but instead to deglobalize. At various times, the left and the right have made globalization the bogeyman and something to fight, so this idea has been in the ether.

For many reasons (economic, geopolitics, peace), globalization is a great thing.

Even if deglobalization were a great idea, then the execution is haphazard, incompetent, rushed.