MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vbezhenar | 2025-08-10 12:05:51+00:00
There are different use-cases I'm using it with.

Sometimes I can write the code, but I just think it's too tedious and AI can do it faster than me. For example I can write `jq` incantations, but it takes some time and man digging, so for non-trivial cases I can easily spend hour tinkering with it. ChatGPT often do it in one minute and does it correctly. So in this case I can perfectly evaluate the result. Although I've recently started to avoid this kind of usage, because I feel it makes me dumber and my salary is not increased for the time saved, so I don't really have an incentive to work slightly faster at the expense of my mental abilities.

Sometimes I'm using it as a Google replacement. Now this is controversial usage and I certainly can't quickly evaluate if he did a good job. I'm usually inspecting list of "Sources" and double-checking the most important facts. If I feel it missed important sources, I'm going to search myself.

Sometimes I just need an opinion. I work mostly alone and I don't have anyone to talk to. Also I have some mental issues, where I can stuck on very simple issue, like identifier naming and procrastinate over it for a prolonged time. AI had been a saviour for me, because he can present another opinion which I could just follow and move on (because it doesn't really matter, which identifier name to use). So for this case, there's no "right" or "wrong" answer, I just need "some" answer. I could even use RNG but actually ChatGPT makes me feel better by following seemingly reasonable suggestions.

Often I write code and submit it to ChatGPT for review. It spots a lot of irrelevant issues, or issues I don't really care about. However sometimes it finds a bugs, so it helps me a lot by uncovering bugs early. In this case, verification is obvious, I know when the bug is bug.
by voidmain | 2025-08-10 12:06:19+00:00
I think you are right that the asymptotic claims are wrong, but it also seems plausible that hashing a k-byte string (in some way that gives you k prefix hashes) may sometimes be drastically cheaper than k cache misses in a large data structure. My charitable guess is that the author is implicitly using a cost model where only access to unbounded memory has a cost.
by handoflixue | 2025-08-10 12:06:27+00:00
https://claude.ai/share/e7fc2ea5-95a3-4a96-b0fa-c869fa8926e8

It's really not hard to get them to reach the correct answer on this class of problems. Want me to have it spell it backwards and strip out the vowels? I'll be surprised if you can find an example this model can't one shot.
by distances | 2025-08-10 12:07:19+00:00
> Germany seems like a great country to be an employee as long as you're happy with making a fraction of what you'd make in any other country and have no designs of doing anything more with your professional life

Are you trying to just incite reactions? This is a very unfair take. German salaries are among the highest in Europe, sixth highest according to Wikipedia, and for many Europeans and non-Europeans it still is a land of opportunity. Certainly a better place to be a professional than almost "any other country", as you put it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
by ath3nd | 2025-08-10 12:08:05+00:00
There are always gonna be those business that claim that LLMs/Scrum/NFTs/Crypto/web3 is the next coming of Jesus, and that's normal, their survival depends on that. There are also gonna be developers swearing by XYZ, either because it genuinely worked for them (causation is not correlation) or because they don't want to appear clueless in an industry that's vibe based and tells you that if you don't succeed using shiny tool XYZ, you are doing it wrong.

The same way it was modern in some companies to hire a dedicated Scrum master for a full time position within a team, I already can imagine companies having job openings for an "Expert LLM-prompter" (or, to make it sound more legit: "Staff LLM-prompt engineer"). Take it from the funny side: the companies obsessed about productivity and efficiency will most likely be staffed with 100s of scrum masters and 100s of prompt engineers and probably one or two guys that actually do the real work. That's kind of hilarious, you gotta admit.

The emperor has had no clothes for quite some time already, but vibes do be vibing, that's the society we live in. Don't worry, you are not alone in finding the hype hard to bear. I don't think LLMs will become irrelevant as fast or as much like crypto/web3/nfts and Meta's metaverse did, but to me the amount of shouting and clothes tearing for what's essentially a fancy autocomplete (fight me on this) is just such a turn off.
by timhh | 2025-08-10 12:09:32+00:00
I have a lot of experience with pairwise testing so I can explain this.

The reason there isn't an "equal" option is because it's impossible to calibrate. How close do the two options have to be before the average person considers them "equal"? You can't really say.

The other problem is when two things are very close, if you provide an "equal" option you lose the very slight preference information. One test I did was getting people to say which of two greyscale colours is lighter. With enough comparisons you can easily get the correct ordering even down to 8 bits (i.e. people can distinguish 0x808080 and 0x818181), but they really look the same if you just look at a pair of them (unless they are directly adjacent, which wasn't the case in my test).

The "polluted by randomness" issue isn't a problem with sufficient comparisons because you show the things in a random order so it eventually gets cancelled out. Imagine throwing a very slightly weighted coin; it's mostly random but with enough throws you can see the bias.

...

On the other hand, 16 comparisons isn't very many at all, and also I did implement an ad-hoc "they look the same" option for my tests and it did actually perform significantly better, even if it isn't quite as mathematically rigorous.

Also player skill ranking systems like Elo or TrueSkill have to deal with draws (in games that allow them), and really most of these ranking algorithms are totally ad-hoc anyway (e.g. why does Bradley-Terry use a sigmoid model?), so it's not really a big deal to add more ad-hocness into your model.
by roscas | 2025-08-10 12:12:24+00:00
Not a game dev but found out qwen3-coder:30b is a good balance for speed and quality for coding.

Almost don't use perplexity or chatgpt. When qwen3 fails with wrong answer, all others do the same.

But found out sometimes it is better than those online "services". Sure it is way better than gpt-oss:20b and that was a surprise.

Most of the times I just want to get sintaxe or code snippets.

It works also very well with long code and many programs from the same application.

So it runs on Ollama and I use OpenWebUI. It is very fast, way faster then gpt-oss:20b and it runs on old hardware AMD Ryzen 3600x with 10gb 3080 and 32gb of ram.

Never used ChatGPT 5 but the older failed too many times for me. Perplexity is ok, but I end up using search engines myself because the answers were not correct and many times very dangerous.
by misja111 | 2025-08-10 12:13:01+00:00
> My dad doesn't need to know how to do algebra to get his taxes done, he just has an accountant.

This is not quite the same thing. The AI is not perfect, it frequently makes mistakes or suboptimal code. As a software engineer, you are responsible for finding and fixing those. This means you have to review and fully understand everything that the AI has written.

Quite a different situation than your dad and his accountant.
by handoflixue | 2025-08-10 12:13:20+00:00
5 "b"s, not counting the parenthetical at the end.

https://claude.ai/share/943961ae-58a8-40f6-8519-af883855650e

Amusingly, a bit of a struggle with understanding what I wanted with the python script to confirm the answer.

I really don't get why people think this is some huge un-fixable blindspot...
by ghaff | 2025-08-10 12:13:26+00:00
Sure. College mates start companies together. I'm friends with a bunch of people who started a now defunct gaming company more or less out of school. I know others who basically got their jobs because people they knew from undergrad activities were editors or whatnot.

But there's this mythology that the main reason you go to Harvard (which I didn't attend) is to network with movers and shakers isn't generally true in the main.
by codexa174 | 2025-08-10 12:13:46+00:00
I built a simple, free browser-based tool for testing screens without installing anything. You can check for dead pixels, backlight bleed, stuck pixels, and even OLED burn-in with solid color tests (black, white, red, green, blue).

It’s lightweight, works on laptops, phones, and TVs, and has fullscreen mode for more accurate results. I made it mainly for personal use, but I thought others might find it handy too.
by wrcwill | 2025-08-10 12:13:57+00:00
definitely 1!

it seems to truncate your prompt even under the "maximum message length" and yeah around 55k is where it starts to happen.

extremely annoying. o1 pro worked up until 115k or so. both o3 and gpt5 have the issue. (it happens on all models for me not just the pro variations)

with the new 400k context length in api i would expect atleast 128k message lengths and maybe 200k context in chat.
by simonw | 2025-08-10 12:14:13+00:00
As of about three months ago, one of the most important skills in effective LLM coding is coding agent environment design.

If you want to use a tool like Claude Code (or Gemini CLI or Cursor agent mode or Code CLI or Qwen Code) to solve complex problems you need to give them an environment they can operate in where they can solve that problem without causing too much damage if something goes wrong.

You need to think about sandboxing, and what tools to expose to them, and what secrets (if any) they should have access to, and how to control the risk of prompt injection if they might be exposed to potentially malicious sources of tokens.

The other week I wanted to experiment with some optimizations of configurations on my Fly.io hosted containers. I used Claude Code for this by:

- Creating a new Fly organization which I called Scratchpad

- Assigning that a spending limit (in case my coding agent went rogue or made dumb expensive mistakes)

- Creating a Fly API token that could only manipulate that organization - so I could be sure my coding agent couldn't touch any of my production deployments

- Putting together some examples of how to use the Fly CLI tool to deploy an app with a configuration change - just enough information that Claude Code could start running its own deploys

- Running Claude Code such that it had access to the relevant Fly command authenticated with my new Scratchpad API token

With all of the above in place I could run Claude in --dangerously-skip-permissions mode and know that the absolute worse that could happen is it might burn through the spending limit I had set.

This took a while to figure out! But now... any time I want to experiment with new Fly configuration patterns I can outsource much of that work safely to Claude.
Show HN: Play Pokémon to unlock your Wayland session
by anajimi | 2025-08-10 12:15:01+00:00
Hello everyone!

I've created a gameboy emulator to unlock my Wayland session and wanted to share this project to everyone here!

I've been a Linux enthusiast since I was a kid. What always captivated me was the freedom to customize my system exactly the way I wanted. With Wayland, we've reached an incredible level of performance. It's like turning your operating system into a video game! I've always been fascinated by the blend of fun and the serious, technical nature of an OS. That’s what inspired me to create this project.

I started by studying Wayland, its protocol and how to build a compositor. Then I became particularly intrigued by the concept of a locker, which reminded me a bit of an escape game. That’s when I thought: how cool would it be to solve a puzzle to unlock your session, instead of just typing a password? Since I’ve worked with emulators in the past and I’m a huge Pokémon fan, the idea of building the puzzle around that game came to me instantly!

Technically, the locker code and the wayland protocol have been implemented from scratch ( using EGL and wl_keyboard_listeners ). My locker runs a version of the gbcc emulator modded by myself. This emulator waits for one precise value to be set in a given memory address.

I have modded the Pokémon game to my needs: when the password is good, I put the good value in the good memory address so the emulator knows it needs to unlock the session.

Hope you will appreciate this project!
by raesene9 | 2025-08-10 12:16:32+00:00
TBF I didn't ask if it was in their interests, I asked if the consequences of a password related attack were serious enough to warrant the expense of implementing MFA.

Let's look at some common attacks :-

- Single user has their password compromised (e.g. by a keylogger). Here the impact to HN is minimal, the user may lose their account if they can't get through some kind of reset process to get access to it. MFA may protect against this, depending on the MFA type and the attacker.

- Attacker compromises HN service to get the password database. MFA's not really helping HN here at all and assuming that they're using good password storage processes the attacker probably isn't retrieving the passwords anyway.

- Attacker uses a supply chain attack to get MITM access to user data via code execution on HNs server(s). Here MFA isn't helping at all.

It's important to recognize that secure is not a binary state, it's a set of mitigations that can be applied to various risks. Not every site will want to use all of them.

Implementing mechanisms has a direct cost (development and maintenance of the mechanism) and also an indirect cost (friction for users), each service will decide whether a specific mitigation is worth it for them to implement on that basis.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-10 12:18:44+00:00
I get paid to bring my knowledge and skills about computers and systems to bring business value to the company - to make them money or to save them money.

During the past decade, that has been as a “senior” employee of some sort. By senior I don’t mean just “I codez real gud”.

That has meant:

- Being on calls or flying out to a customer’s site to support sales in closing deals when I was working with B2B companies and later full time working at consulting companies.

- Interviewing candidates

- leading teams and come project management work.

- hands on keyboard coding

- DevOps [sic] setting up architecture for empty AWS accounts.

But I’m always up front about tradeoffs to management. If they want me to do one thing on the list, there is an expectation that something else on the list won’t get done. I don’t put in more than around 40 hours a week aside from the infrequent business travel.
by Arch-TK | 2025-08-10 12:19:20+00:00
The thing about debouncing is that debouncing interrupts from input pins connected directly to e.g. switches is universally a bad idea.

Interrupt pins are weird, level change too slowly? You might never see the interrupt trigger or you'll see it trigger more than once. Switch back and forth many times at a high frequency before settling? Again, you might see interrupts for every switch or you might just get nothing at all. (In summary, directly connecting a noisy switch to an interrupt pin will mean you can lose level transition events.)

To make this work reliably you either need to debounce in hardware before it reaches your interrupt pin or forego interrupts entirely in favour of polling the input pin at a specific speed and keeping a state history.

So the term as it originates in electronics is now both misused and if you do translate it back to electronics it's considered a terrible idea.
by sgarland | 2025-08-10 12:20:18+00:00
> We aren't painting sistine chapels, we are running the plumbing in the sistine chapels basement.

Sure, but in plumbing - or any trade - there is a huge spectrum of quality of work. Tons of little details add up that confer the person’s skill level to anyone checking it out in the future.

> It's profoundly disrespectful when we build monuments to our own ego instead of just getting the work done and it speaks to a professional immaturity of the highest order.

When I insist that something must be done a certain way, it’s not for my ego, it’s because I know that a year from now, I will be called upon to fix it during an incident if I don’t do it right this time. I am so absolutely sick of hacky bandaids being thrown on the ever-increasing pile of tech debt. To me, it’s profoundly disrespectful when product tells engineering that yet again, they will not yield time to fix the backlog, and to ship New Feature X.
by kbrkbr | 2025-08-10 12:20:36+00:00
Look, neither did I say there are no mathematical certainties, nor did I anywhere argue about the content of what you said.

The only thing I said is: there are probably no _obvious_ mathematical certainties in reply to what you said, as the history of mathematics shows with plenty of examples.

But it's already too much ink spilled for such a little difference.

I reckon now that you use words like "obvious" (or "categorically" in the last reply [1]) as markers of belief strength or something. That's fine, many people do it.

[1] related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36808333
by ThinkBeat | 2025-08-10 12:21:19+00:00
Delphi is the easiest and most integrated way of writing cross platform UIs and it has been for a lot of years. It might not be sexy, but highly productive.

You can download and use a community edition of Delphi for free. The downside is insane licensing costs if you are making commercial software.

I an not sure how far Lazarus has come but I believe it to have the same or similar abilities and if free and libre.
by ck2 | 2025-08-10 12:21:26+00:00
What does the prompt "no thinking" imply to an LLM ?

I mean you can tell it "how" to "think"

> "if you break apart a word into an array of letters, how many times does the letter B appear in BLUEBERRY"

that's actually closer to how humans think no?

The problem lies in how LLM tasks a problem, it should not be applying a dictionary to blueberry and seeing blue-berry, splitting that into a two part problems to rejoin later

But that's how its meant to deal with HUGE tasks so when applied to tiny tasks, it breaks

And unless I am very mistaken, it's not even the breaking apart into tasks that's the real problem, it's the re-assembly of the results
by jjgreen | 2025-08-10 12:21:33+00:00
I've been on Debian forever and love it to bits. But in an act which can only be described as batshit insanity, they have chosen to patch Python's pip3 in a manner which breaks the --prefix option. On Debian

pip3 install <whatever> --prefix=/usr/local

will install into /usr/local/local, so one has to use the prefix /usr. The same command on, say, OpenSuSE will install into /usr and break your system. Barking mad.

https://sources.debian.org/src/python3.7/3.7.3-2+deb10u3/deb...
by tummler | 2025-08-10 12:21:40+00:00
Anecdotal, but Grok seems to have just introduced pretty restrictive rate limits. They’re now giving free users access to Grok 4 with a low limit and then making it difficult to manually switch to Grok 3 and continue. Will only allow a few more requests before pushing an upgrade to paid plans. Just started happening to me last night.
by dnh44 | 2025-08-10 12:21:56+00:00
One side effect of writing most of my code with an llm for the past six months is that I'm so much better at reading code I didn't write. It's also forced me to split my code up in smaller more modular files to make it easier for me to understand, which has the happy side effect of having a better designed system. It's counter intuitive but I think I've become a better programmer for it because it's forced me to level up my weaknesses.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-08-10 12:23:40+00:00
The “dark web” is a journalistic (AFAICT) coinage arising from a confusion between two terms: a “darknet” (antonym: “clearnet”) is a network that traverses the Internet in such a way that the Internet’s routing infrastructure can’t see the ultimate destination (Tor, but also DN42, your work VPN, etc.); the “deep web” is the part of the web that’s not accessible to search engines and thus only really used by those who already know it exists (Tor hidden services, pirate libraries, private torrent trackers, but also every other registration-gated forum and arguably even Facebook Marketplace—the term is from a more innocent time with much fewer walled gardens).
by maccard | 2025-08-10 12:23:55+00:00
It’s a self contained class that is littered with basic errors and doesn’t actually do what it’s supposed to do. There’s about 15 things wrong - missing pointer checks, uninitialised variables, public variables with private get/set functions, a memory leak, logic bugs that don’t do what the prompt says it’s supposed to do, subtle behavioural issues that come up in edge cases. We’re not looking for every single one, but there is an alarming number of people who cannot identify even the most glaring issues of “there’s a new in the constructor and not a delete in the destructor”.

> Or did they really get by with writing broken C++ all those years without knowing the basics?

Having inadvertently hired a handful of people, it’s this. They write shonky c++, it just about works, but they spend all their time patching up the mess they’ve left behind rather than doing it right in the first place

> I'm not 100% certain it's wrong with just 50 lines of context.

These are blatant issues that we would expect a reviewer to catch in isolation. It’s also an interview, we expect you to ask questions. You’re told as part of the brief to ask questions if you’re unsure. It’s not a trick, we’re looking to see if you can actually write the code or if you just can rattle off some of the rules.

A good example is DIY. How do you install a shelf - you drill a few screws into the wall and stick a piece of wood on it. Being able to tell you that is very different to being able to do that level on a wall. I can tell you “use SQL to select the name of the users who have used X resource without any duplicates”, but I might not actually be able to write that query (“select name from table group by X where Count(X) > 1”)

> I think C++ is a special case when it comes to interviews.

I disagree. Give me a language and I can give you 50-100 lines of code that just about does what it’s supposed to do but is littered with issues. Offhand I could write the same thing for C#, go, python and SQL with very little issue.
by FLHerne | 2025-08-10 12:25:12+00:00
Real "rugged" laptops are far too expensive for schools to buy by the dozen. Also, while robust against the environment they're not so much against deliberate vandalism or theft. The target market for those seems to be construction/industrial and similar, and of course the military.

All school laptop fleets I've seen are simply the cheapest thing they can buy in bulk, when it breaks provision a new one.
by simonw | 2025-08-10 12:25:13+00:00
Pretty much all of the intuition I've picked up about getting good results from LLMs has stayed relevant.

If I was starting from fresh today I expect it would take me months of experimentation to get back to where I am now.

Working thoughtfully with LLMs has also helped me avoid a lot of the junk tips ("Always start with 'you are the greatest world expert in X', offer to tip it, ...") that are floating around out there.
Feature Request: "Copy" Button Should Copy Only Main Output
by vezycash | 2025-08-10 12:26:39+00:00
Here’s the short and direct version:

---

Hello AI teams,

The "Copy" button in AI chatbots always copies extra commentary or suggestions along with the main answer. Users shouldn't have to waste time deleting these extra output.

Please make the "Copy" button copy only the actual response, without additional text.

---

Want me to also make you a slightly sharper, one-paragraph version that reads more like feedback than a formal request? That might get noticed faster.

Ps: the extra text was intentionally left alone