MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tw04 | 2025-08-10 00:29:51+00:00
A 4 year college is primarily about teaching you how to think critically. It’s also about proving to a company that you can be responsible enough to show up every day and get you work done. Finally it’s about ensuring you have a base level of knowledge so that all that learning you claim you’ll do in one year on the job can actually occur.

“I didn’t learn anything in college” is either exaggerated arrogance, or you were doing something very, very wrong in undergrad.
by bachmeier | 2025-08-10 00:30:09+00:00
But that doesn't make it a "lottery" as claimed in the post I responded to. Every application gets a score and then the ones with the highest scores get offered admission.

If it was a lottery, they'd do a binary classification of "qualified" and "not qualified", and then they'd randomly choose who gets in. IMO that would be an improvement on the current system. Powerball and other big lotteries don't pay out on subjective criteria, each ticket gives you the same chance of winning, with no other information being used.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-08-10 00:30:53+00:00
Come on, I didn't come up with some 4D chess logic to impute a monetary advantage. In the examples people gave me, it was things like bundling (the oldest trick in the monopolist book) and ensuring that users look at your ads. Do you really think that if Chrome gets sued for blocking uBlock, that discovery won't find 1000 memos from executives and PMs at Google talking about how much money ensuring users have to see their ads would make?
by adir15 | 2025-08-10 00:31:01+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been building a tool to solve a pain I’ve felt myself as a content creator — repurposing long-form videos and podcasts into short-form posts for multiple platforms.

The problem: Creators often spend hours rewatching, transcribing, rewriting, and formatting content just to post it in different places. It’s tedious and breaks creative flow.

What VerbalTide does:

Take 1 video or audio file (YouTube link or upload)

In minutes, generate: blog posts, social captions, email drafts, summaries

Keeps your tone and style (no generic AI filler)

Works for creators, podcasters, coaches, marketers

I’ve set it so anyone can try it once for free — no sign-up or credit card. I’d love feedback from the HN community on:

How well it works on your content

Whether the “one free transformation” idea makes sense

Any feature gaps you see

Link: https://verbaltide.lumenharbor.co.uk/

Thanks in advance — I’ll be around to answer questions and discuss the approach.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-08-10 00:31:33+00:00
Your reasoning is a fallacy of generalization of a bad example. Move to Europe and see how it might work. I pay a lot of taxes, but I do see value in paying them.

> Socialism in practice is actually just wealth redistribution: taking from productive people to give to the poor and unproductive.

This is wrong. Poor people can be productive. If salary inequality is high, the workers earn bare minimum doing most of the job while managers get their bonuses. Landlords may capture significant share of their income despite being absolutely unproductive. In such cases socialist policies may simply minimize inverse redistribution (exploitation).
by augusto-moura | 2025-08-10 00:31:36+00:00
The issue is not that obscurity per se is bad, but relying _only_ on obscurity is absolute the same as not having any security measures at all.

With the public ledger or not, you will still need to implement proper security measures. So it shouldn't matter if your address is public or not, in fact making it public raises the awareness for the problem. That's the argument.
by chromaton | 2025-08-10 00:31:53+00:00
If you're looking for free API access, Google offers access to Gemini for free, including for gemini-2.5-pro with thinking turned on. The limit is... quite high, as I'm running some benchmarking and haven't hit the limit yet.

Open weight models like DeepSeek R1 and GPT-OSS are also made available with free API access from various inference providers and hardware manufacturers.
by cle | 2025-08-10 00:32:05+00:00
What you described is essentially how it works. The LLM has no control over how the inputs & outputs are validated, nor in how the result is fed back into it.

The MCP interface (Claude Code in this case) is doing the schema checks. Claude Code will refuse to provide the result to the LLM if it does not pass the schema check, and the LLM has no control over that.
by Uehreka | 2025-08-10 00:32:06+00:00
This is a genre of article I find particularly annoying. Instead of writing an essay on why he personally thinks GPT-5 is bad based on his own analysis, the author just gathers up a bunch of social media reactions and tells us about them, characterizing every criticism as “devastating” or a “slam”, and then hopes that the combined weight of these overtorqued summaries will convince us to see things his way.

It’s both too slanted to be journalism, but not original enough to be analysis.
by bombela | 2025-08-10 00:32:49+00:00
With all those leetcode acers, why is software slow as molasses? You would think they pattern match for the most efficient algo with all this training.

In my experience the more impressive somebody is at leet code, the worse their production code. Full of bugs, no error handling. Assuming the inputs never stray from the happy path.

Not saying it's always the case of course. But I did interview almost 400 people over my career.

On the other hand, most people cannot code to save their life. So I have no answers. Only more questions.
by emilsedgh | 2025-08-10 00:33:31+00:00
People on our circles are obsessed with model performance. OpenAI's lead is not there and hasn't been there for some time.

They do, however, have a major lead in terms of consumer adoption. To normal people who use llm's, ChatGPT is _the_ model.

This gives them a lot of opportunities. I don't know what's taking them so long to launch their own _real_ app store, but that's the game they are ahead of everyone else because of the consumer adoption.
by joshuamoyers | 2025-08-10 00:33:39+00:00
> companies often over-index on crystallized knowledge over fluid intelligence.

another way to say this: focus on aptitude. in my hiring funnel, this is a core tenet. you need to be able to capture polyglots and systems thinkers. its still pretty hard to design a process that balances this all very well. combine that with an absolute glut of applicants and you have a very challenging problem.
by kvemkon | 2025-08-10 00:34:17+00:00
> ... speaks russian language without an accent because he knows no other language.

At least Belorussians and Ukrainians can speak Russian without an accent despite knowing their own languages.

> Soviets erased his ...

I doubt the USSR had such power solely on its own. It depends mostly on the will of parents (and grandparents) and the type of a young person. If a kid likes art, it's more likely the kid would be interested in national memory, if a kid is more into tech, then it seems not that important, which nevertheless can change later.

Russian Germans (not necessary all of them) consider themselves as Germans even after hundreds of years living in Russian Empire and then in the USSR.
by hansvm | 2025-08-10 00:34:30+00:00
> You seem to suppose that they actually perform addition internally, rather than simply having a model of the concept that humans sometimes do addition and use it to compute results. Why?

Nothing of the sort. They're _capable_ of doing so. For something as simple as addition you can even hand-craft weights which exactly solve it.

> The problem is that the question space grows exponentially in the length of input. If you want a non-coincidentally-correct answer to "how many t's in 'correct horse battery staple'?" then you need to actually add up the per-token counts.

Yes? The architecture is capable of both mapping tokens to character counts and of addition with a fraction of their current parameter counts. It's not all that hard.
by seemaze | 2025-08-10 00:34:57+00:00
The water should be conserved to address long term water security in the face of a decades long drought and ongoing Tier 1 shortage. Tucson exists in an Active Management Area that heavily regulates expanded water usage for agriculture beyond existing grandfathered rights.

If a datacenter is a more valuable proposition (it may be?) then should have the ability to acquire and redirect existing resources being used for agriculture.
by calrain | 2025-08-10 00:35:15+00:00
I'm having some unique problems with GPT-5 that I've not seen with GPT-4.

It seems to lose the thread of the conversation quite abruptly, not really knowing how to answer the next comment in a thread of comments.

It's like there is some context cleanup process going on and it's not summarizing the highlights of the conversation to that point.

If that is so, then it seems to also have a very small context, because it seems to happen regularly.

Asking it to 'Please review the recent conversation before continuing' prompt seems to help it a bit.
by kgeist | 2025-08-10 00:35:30+00:00
Counting letters is a known blindspot in LLMs because of how tokenization works in most LLMs - they don't see individual letters. I'm not sure it's a valid test to make any far-reaching conclusions about their intelligence. It's like saying a blind person is an absolute dumbass just because they can't tell green from red.

The fact that reasoning models can count letters, even though they can't see individual letters, is actually pretty cool.

>Try real-world tests that cannot be covered by training data

If we don't allow a model to base its reasoning on the training data it's seen, what should it base it on? Clairvoyance? :)

> chancey guesses

The default sampling in most LLMs uses randomness to feel less robotic and repetitive, so it’s no surprise it makes “chancey guesses.” That’s literally what the system is programmed to do by default.
by cle | 2025-08-10 00:36:03+00:00
I'd encourage you to read the MCP specification: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/ser...

Or write a simple MCP server and a client that uses it. FastMCP is easy: https://gofastmcp.com/getting-started/quickstart

You are quite wrong. The LLM "chooses" to use a tool, but the input (provided by the LLM) is validated with JSON Schema by the server, and the output is validated by the client (Claude Code). The output is not provided back to the LLM if it does not comply with the JSON Schema, instead an error is surfaced.
by johnfn | 2025-08-10 00:36:05+00:00
For some reason AI seems to bring out articles that seem to fundamentally lack curiosity - opting instead for gleeful mockery and scorn. I like AI, but I'll happily read thoughtful articles from people who disagree. But not this. This article has no value other than to dunk on the opposition.

I tend to think HN's moderation is OK, but I think these sorts of low-curiosity articles need to be off the front page.
by titzer | 2025-08-10 00:36:38+00:00
> in the capitalist countries

Again, you mean the countries that didn't have authoritarian, unaccountable governments, where citizens have not only a history of free expression, but they constitutionally guaranteed rights. Whereas in the communist regimes they universally have been repressive, corrupt, brutal, stupid, and usually self-defeating.

> it was doing it for the most holly purpose of PROGRESS and HEAVY INDUSTRY.

Oh yeah, it was fucked. But the globalist capitalist society of today that can't survive without overconsumption and perpetual exponential growth isn't a whole lot better. It promises everyone that their greed is good and that billionaires are saints. For the time being we're awash in widgets and titillating entertainment, but dwindling resources and shocks to the biosphere will have their consequences. At least the communist regimes have had the good grace to fall apart once in a while.
by Madmallard | 2025-08-10 00:37:30+00:00
A friend of mine works in AI professionally. He told me months ago that it is basically just all a scam and hype to garner investment money. He said the technology and paradigm itself will never lend toward AGI or anything like that.

He sent me all these articles geared toward that end as well. https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/seven-replies-to-the-viral... https://substack.com/@cattelainf/note/c-135021342 https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.06177 https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-ai-2027-scenario-how-r... https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/25-ai-predictions-for-2025...
by calrain | 2025-08-10 00:37:41+00:00
Well, it takes a while to learn Vim and then get value from it.

It also takes a while to learn using an LLM and get value from it.

The keys are how to build prompts, ways of working, and guidelines that help the AI stay focused.

You end up spending much more time guiding and coaching rather than coding, that can take a while to get used to.

Eventually though, you will master it and be able to write secure, fast code far beyond what you could have done by yourself.

Note: Also, prep yourself for incoming hate every time you make claims like that! If you write bad code, it's your fault. If your LLM writes bad code, you're a moron! hah
by kylehotchkiss | 2025-08-10 00:37:46+00:00
Agreed, the hype cycles need vocal critics. The loudest voices talking about LLMs are the ones who financially benefit the most for it. I’m not anti-AI, I think the hype and gaslighting the entire economy to believe this is the sole thing that is going to render them unemployed is ridiculous (the economy is rough for a myriad of other reasons, most of which come originate from our countries choice in leadership)

Hopefully the innovation slowing means that all the products I use will move past trying to duck tape AI on and start working on actual features/bugs again
by dangus | 2025-08-10 00:38:00+00:00
We need to detach from the "jobs at any cost" mentality behind your first sentence.

By that logic ending child labor is "still a net loss of jobs."

I mean, here you are talking about a business owner having issues with the local homeless population who are homeless because their jobs don't pay enough to afford housing.

All these business owners race to the bottom paying their employees scraps and then wonder why they have empty dining rooms with no customers to afford their products sold at record-high profit margins.

Obviously, minimum wage doesn't really fix the economy on its own, but it is a very important tool in a toolbox for ensuring that capitalism is restrained from following its worst instincts.
by mentalgear | 2025-08-10 00:38:16+00:00
Regardless of personal opinions about his style, Marcus has been proven correct on several fronts, including the diminishing returns of scaling laws and the lack of true reasoning (out of distribution generalizability) in LLM-type AI.

These are issues that the industry initially denied, only to (years) later acknowledge them as their "own recent discoveries" as soon as they had something new to sell (chain-of-thought approach, RL-based LLM, tbc.).
by patrickhogan1 | 2025-08-10 00:38:37+00:00
I agree here but also believe it was a way to expose better models to the masses. o3 was so spectacularly good. But a lot of people were still not using it. Even some of my friends who use ChatGPT daily I would say are you using o3 and get a blank stare.

So I think it’s also a way to push reasoning models to the masses. Which increases OpenAI’s cost.

But due to the routing layer definitely cost cutting for power users (most of HN)… except power users can learn to force it to use the reasoning model.
by kylecazar | 2025-08-10 00:39:15+00:00
"People had grown to expect miracles, but GPT-5 is just the latest incremental advance."

This is really the only part of the article I think was worth writing.

-People should expect an incremental advance

-Providers should not promise miracles

Managing expectations is important. The incremental advances are still advances, though, even if I don't think "AGI" is just further down on the GPT trajectory.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-08-10 00:39:32+00:00
> "Try goggle "communism support young americans"."

"According to a new Yale Youth Poll, a survey affiliated with the Yale Institution for Social and Political Studies, voters aged 18 to 21 lean Republican by 11.7 points when asked who they would support in the 2026 Congressional elections, while voters aged 22 to 29 favored Democrats by 6.4 points." from https://www.newsweek.com/republican-support-poll-young-gen-z... Whatever else they might be (and I can think of quite a few unprintable descriptors), I'm pretty sure the Republicans aren't communists or leftists.
by adeptima | 2025-08-10 00:40:00+00:00
same sentiments with an article author - gpt5 looks like a cost-cut initiative.

my personal feeling gpt5-thinking is much faster but doesnt produce the same quality results as o3 which were capable to scan through the code base dump with file names and make correct calls

dont feel any changes with https://chatgpt.com/codex/

my best experience was to use o3 for task analysis, copy paste the result in https://chatgpt.com/codex/, work outside and vibe code from mobile
by throwaway1004 | 2025-08-10 00:40:11+00:00
Very interesting, cognitive atrophy is a serious concern that is simply being handwaved away. Assuming the apparent trend of diminishing returns continues, and LLMs retain the same abilities and limitations we see today, there's a considerable chance that they will eventually achieve the same poor reputation as smartphones and "iPad kids". "Chewing gum for the mind".

Children increasingly speak in a dialect I can only describe as "YouTube voice", it's horrifying to imagine a generation of humans adopting any of the stereotypical properties of LLM reasoning and argumentation. The most insidious part is how the big player models react when one comes within range of a topic it considers unworthy or unsafe for discussion. The thought of humans being in any way conditioned to become such brick walls is frightening.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-10 00:40:11+00:00
> especially because it would have been out-of-state tuition

I'm calling bullshit on this story because MIT is not a public school - there is no in-state vs. out-of-state tuition, and as someone who did a ton of cost comparisons on the private vs. public schools where I was accepted, I have difficulty believing someone who was accepted to MIT would confuse this fact.
by Spivak | 2025-08-10 00:41:16+00:00
Wish granted, you now 1000 spots in your freshman class and 5000 applicants with identical scores and 4.0 GPAs. And there's another 8000 applicants whose scores are within the individual variance of the test. You wouldn't drop their application just because they had a bad day would you? We're a meritocracy here so no cheating and choosing randomly—that's not how you get the very best. What's the next criteria?
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-08-10 00:41:32+00:00
DIY also often has the benefit of being the only option when bureaucratic hurdles are in the way. Sometimes, approvals (from the government or from the landlord) are required, which can be hard, onerous, impossible or time-consuming to get.

Ignoring those requirements is often the most practical way with very limited negative consequences.

It also allows using much cheaper units - from what I've heard in Germany the unit (without the install cost!) will cost 2x as much when installed through an official installer compared to a high quality free-market option, but of course the installer will only install units sold through them so many people may be priced out of the legal route completely.
by balfirevic | 2025-08-10 00:42:29+00:00
I view "heat pump" as a technical term describing how some heaters/coolers/dehumidifiers/clothes driers/fridges work. Wikipedia seems to somewhat agree with me, although article about heat pumps seems focused on space heaters and coolers.

> yet the term air conditioner has a distinct meaning that is silly to try to pretend not to recognize

Well, yes, in US it apparently means "heat pump based space cooler". Where I live it means "heat pump based space heater and cooler".
by MetaWhirledPeas | 2025-08-10 00:44:03+00:00
From the wikipedia article:

> applying syntactic rules without any real understanding or thinking

It makes one wonder what comprises 'real understanding'. My own position is that we, too, are applying syntactic rules, but with an incomprehensibly vast set of inputs. While the AI takes in text, video, and sound, we take in inputs all the way down to the cellular level or beyond.
by uvdn7 | 2025-08-10 00:44:29+00:00
Is the non-trivial amount of time significantly less than you trying to ramp up yourself?

I am still hesitant using AI for solving problems for me. Either it hallucinates and misleads me. Or it does a great job and I worry that my ability of reasoning through complex problems with rigor will degenerate. When my ability of solving complex problems degenerated, patience diminished, attention span destroyed, I will become so reliant on a service that other entities own to perform in my daily life. Genuine question - are people comfortable with this?
by tylerhou | 2025-08-10 00:44:35+00:00
I agree with you that smart people exist, and I have met a few in college as well.

The main thing I want to add is that using IQ to quantify intelligence at the top end of the scale is scientifically bogus and in my opinion harmful because it validates depressed / insecure / chronically online people who use their "160 IQ" as a way to put down other people or to peddle pseudo-scientific nonsense. Those people often need genuine psychiatric help and (in my opinion) such validation only harms them.

I'm sure that Hal Finney was exceptionally smart, though. :)
by kgeist | 2025-08-10 00:45:42+00:00
I asked Qwen3 32b (with reasoning) to count all 3 letter words in your post. Its answer was:

There are 3 three-letter words in the given text: "Can" (first instance) "all" "Can" (second instance)

Sounds about right.

Then I took this answer and asked to count the average number of words inside parentheses. The answer was:

The average number of words in the parentheses from the given example is 2 words per parenthesis. Here's the breakdown: 1. "Can" (first instance): Parentheses contain "first instance" (2 words). 2. "all": No parentheses, so excluded. 3. "Can" (second instance): Parentheses contain "second instance" (2 words). Total words in parentheses: 2 + 2 = 4 Number of parentheses: 2 Average: 4 ÷ 2 = 2.

Correct again. Everything on the first try.
by farsa | 2025-08-10 00:45:56+00:00
Not the person you have asked but at work (we are a CRM platform) we allow our clients to arbitrarily query their userbase to find matching users for marketing campaigns (email, sms, whatsapp). These campaigns can some times target a few hundred thousand people. We are on a really ancient version of ES, but it sucks at this job in terms of throughput. Some experimenting with bigquery indicates it is so much better at mass exporting.
by immibis | 2025-08-10 00:46:23+00:00
Often "heat pump" refers to a reversible AC, which is not every AC, so they're not synonymous. In places where it's always too hot, or always too cold, no need to bother with the reversing option, just install it the way it'll always be used. In places that are typically an alright temperature, which means they're sometimes too hot and sometimes too cold, you want it reversible.
by mjg59 | 2025-08-10 00:47:06+00:00
Hmm actually the Copper probably isn't fast enough for this - it takes about 8 pixel scanout equivalent to update one register, and hblank isn't going to be large enough to update all of them. But Copper's performance is restricted by having to read instructions out of RAM before executing them, so if I just use another core on the Pi to read the scanout location I can have that update the palette during scanout much faster without blocking the main thread from continuing to render the next frame.