MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learning
by CShorten | 2025-08-04 14:34:01+00:00
GEPA is a SUPER exciting advancement for DSPy and a new generation of optimization algorithms re-imagined with LLMs!

Starting with the title of the paper, the authors find that Reflective Prompt Evolution can outperform Reinforcement Learning!!

Using LLMs to write and refine prompts (for another LLM to complete a task) is outperforming (!!) highly targeted gradient descent updates using cutting-edge RL algorithms!

GEPA makes three key innovations on how exactly we use LLMs to propose prompts for LLMs -- (1) Pareto Optimal Candidate Selection, (2) Reflective Prompt Mutation, and (3) System-Aware Merging for optimizing Compound AI Systems.

The authors further present how GEPA can be used for training at test-time, one of the most exciting directions AI is evolving in!

Here is my review of the paper! I hope you find it useful!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czy7hvXIImE
by SwiftyBug | 2025-08-04 14:34:11+00:00
I think this debate is as old as time. I can see value in arguments both for and against this pattern. It's just a pattern. GraphQL does the same thing. As long as the consumers of that endpoint is aware of that behaviour I see no harm. In most cases, these endpoints serve only the frontend of the app. I would avoid doing something like that for a public API though.
by fxtentacle | 2025-08-04 14:34:20+00:00
Maybe, on a social level, we all win by letting AI ruin the attention economy:

The internet is filled with spam. But if you talk to one specific human, your chance of getting a useful answer rises massively. So in a way, a flood of written AI slop is making direct human connections more valuable.

Instead of having 1000+ anonymous subscribers for your newsletter, you'll have a few weekly calls with 5 friends each.
by bombcar | 2025-08-04 14:34:23+00:00
Peppa Pig is more ... "cartoony" if I can use the term, whereas Bluey is more "real life" - and I don't think it is just the animation (rounded rects live!) - Bluey is established with a continuity and detail that makes it seem we're looking into a real world as opposed to vignettes created for our amusement.
by jamil7 | 2025-08-04 14:34:27+00:00
The article loses impact due to the way the author keeps self-conciously mentioning how the "PHP haters" are wrong instead of just explaining the possible usecase for PHP better.

I've never really used it but it would have been somewhat useful to know why anyone would choose this language for a greenfield project in 2025, given the choices available. The reasons given are pretty unconvincing to me.
by Chris2048 | 2025-08-04 14:34:29+00:00
If I put time and effort into a food recipe should I (get) compensation?

the answer is apparently "no", and I don't really how recipe books have suffered as a result of less gatekeeping.

"How will the internet work"? Probably better in some ways. There is plenty of valuable content on the internet given for free, it's being buried in low-value AI slop.
by chuckadams | 2025-08-04 14:34:35+00:00
It appears to be a SSE channel for each event stream returned, not one channel for all subsequent updates. So a PHP backend for instance could batch all the updates from one request, would open a new SSE channel, send the updates over that, then close it. With an in-process server like swoole or most things not PHP, you could presumably reuse the channel across requests in whatever framework-specific way makes that happen. Would probably need sticky sessions in any scaled-out deployment.

This is just what I can glean from the docs, I've never actually used datastar myself.
by mxfh | 2025-08-04 14:35:26+00:00
That Pac-Man “mouth” is collapsing to a constant width line like halfway in for the last for examples for me.

Having some weird mid-length discontinuity in the edge direction for me. Not just perceptually.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here or have a different idea what the goal of that exercise is, but I would expect some pixels to turn near white near the center towards that gap sector.
by 9dev | 2025-08-04 14:36:10+00:00
> I think I encountered 10 segfaults in it within 1 year which is a complete joke.

Segfaults in PHP are highly unusual. The language definitely has warts, but it's extremely well tested and usually doesn't crash in production, unless you're using unstable extensions or pre-release versions.

> It also includes breaking changes in point releases which is a nonsensical maintenance strategy

There are lots of projects out there that do not follow semver for their releases; that doesn't mean it isn't stable in itself. Having said that, every PHP release at least has proper change logs so you can safely migrate to a new version.
by darango6 | 2025-08-04 14:36:18+00:00
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by jleask | 2025-08-04 14:36:23+00:00
The problem is that hidden among that complexity/detail is often the value that software developers bring e.g. security issues, regulatory compliance, diagnosability/monitoring, privacy, scalability, resilience etc.

There will be bugs that the AI cannot fix, especially in the short term, which will mean that code needs to be readable and understandable by a human. Without human review that will likely not be the case.

I'm also intrigued by "see if it works". How is this being evaluated? Are you writing a test suite, manually testing?

Don't get me wrong, this approach will likely work in lower risk software, but I think you'd be brave to go no human review in any non-trivial domain.
by JimDabell | 2025-08-04 14:36:29+00:00
Cloudflare asked Perplexity this question:

> Hello, would you be able to assist me in understanding this website? https:// […] .com/

In this case, Perplexity had a human being using it. Perplexity wasn’t crawling the site, Perplexity was being operated by a human working for Cloudflare.
by lm28469 | 2025-08-04 14:36:35+00:00
covid was nothing. Try a few bombs on the major highways and airport runways, now you have to deal with a war AND your entire capital starving. Millions of people will go from somewhat civilised to starvation mode real quick. All in all covid was a blip on the radar. There is a huge different between just in time and even a month of stock

> What was actually unavailable with dire consequences, like masks/etc... was not unavailable due to lean manufacturing, but simply because it was a new demand that did not exist at this scale before.

Well yeah that's what stocks are for. France had hundred millions of masks in stock in the early 2009 because they were expecting H1N1, we scraped the project because the pandemic didn't hit as bad as we thought, fast forward 10 years later and we spent twice as much to get half as many masks

Wait until ww3, Europe will discover that having one week of ammunition stock is not enough... all of that is expensive so let's not plan anything and pray for the best case scenario
Show HN: I made a platform to create Telephone Voice AI Agencies
by marchypolite | 2025-08-04 14:36:47+00:00
Hey, I created this platform to help people get started creating their own Telephone Voice AI Agency using Vapi.ai. right now agencies offer their clients voice AI agents that can do customer service, take appointments and do cold outreach over the phone with Vapi but they don't have a way to give their clients insights into how the agents are performing, what their doing and bill their clients based on usage. that's why I created this platform it was a problem I was having myself when I was looking into creating a product on top of Vapi AI
by fxtentacle | 2025-08-04 14:37:01+00:00
"for high-volume hiring like [..] entry-level tech roles, we’re just seeing this more and more…"

Maybe that's your problem right there. If you treat entry-level tech roles as a high-volume hiring market, you're going to end up with negative team productivity, which leads to revenue loss, which leads to budget cuts, which leads to more high-volume hiring.
by q3k | 2025-08-04 14:37:10+00:00
Right, the problem is that this leaky abstraction effectively now requires you're both good at Nix and good at fixing whatever tool it is that is refusing to work with Nix. That usually means diving deep into build systems, code that makes wrong assumptions, and probably other hairy topics. In return you do get a state of the art system, but you very often need to put in work you otherwise wouldn't need to.

I don't mind that because that's how my brain is wired, but there's plenty of people who don't give a shit and Just Want Things To Work Out Of The Box. Nix(OS) is certainly not for everyone.
by rayiner | 2025-08-04 14:37:20+00:00
It's in your own summary, in your own words:

> * it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.

Wilson believed in "scientific governance" over popular sovereignty. He was unpersuaded that America's diverse electorate could efficiently govern itself, so sought to institute an administrative state to manage the electorate. These paragraphs in Part I are revealing:

"Even if we had clear insight into all the political past, and could form out of perfectly instructed heads a few steady, infallible, placidly wise maxims of government into which all sound political doctrine would be ultimately resolvable, would the country act on them? That is the question. The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes. A truth must become not only plain but also commonplace before it will be seen by the people who go to their work very early in the morning; and not to act upon it must involve great and pinching inconveniences before these same people will make up their minds to act upon it.

And where is this unphilosophical bulk of mankind more multifarious in its composition than in the United States? To know the public mind of this country, one must know the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes. In order to get a footing for new doctrine, one must influence minds cast in every mold of race, minds inheriting every bias of environment, warped by the histories of a score of different nations, warmed or chilled, closed or expanded by almost every climate of the globe."

Wilson's ideology was an outgrowth of the political situation in which he found himself. He was a WASP in a political party dependent on massive numbers of Catholic immigrants for political viability. The administrative state was a way to maintain WASP control of the government while leveraging the votes of non-WASPs. That's something that has persisted to this day. Federal government agencies, particularly the intelligence agencies and foreign service, are the last bastion of WASP America.
by creer | 2025-08-04 14:37:33+00:00
> You'd have to onboard hundreds/thousands of banks

It's perhaps a good idea. It's likely that not very many banks and terminal makers and payment processors really matter. It would be a little delicate because the ones that matter would be pressured or at least would feel pressured NOT to participate on threat to their currently main business.

And the project doesn't have to become mainstream probably, just accepted "enough".

A better reason is that it's not really Valve's battle. They have plenty of other business. They don't need to fight this war. A company like OnlyFans, yeah perhaps they do - but they are likely much smaller.

Valve is in a situation that helps: they charge separately for each item. Some that the credit card networks are okay with and some that they are not. So they could support two regimes on their site: some items could only be paid through the Valve new card network (and gift cards and bitcoin), while other items could be paid through all the above plus the legacy credit card networks.

Valve (and/or OnlyFans) then gets paid for trying to enter the very lucrative payment network business. And gets to use these separate charges / two regimes of payments to distribute content that would be too dangerous within the current single payment framework.
by 827a | 2025-08-04 14:37:46+00:00
IMO: 30 years isn't relevant to look at, because its ancient history (I'm calling both of us ancient here). It pushes back too far beyond 2008 & the GFC to capture data that isn't relevant to the modern global economy. Everything about everything about the world, today, is a consequence of the GFC, and its likely that by the year 2100 we'll still talk about it as among the most significant things to happen to the world in the past century. Maybe the most significant.
by BjoernKW | 2025-08-04 14:37:48+00:00
One rarely talked about aspect of this is that doctors - generally speaking - only trust other doctors. They won't buy an EMR system from someone without the necessary "street cred" - however well-designed that system is.

I know of a large EMR software provider that went as far as to hire physicians as salespeople because having doctors talk to other doctors made sales a lot easier for them.
by gruez | 2025-08-04 14:38:08+00:00
>If the AI archives/caches all the results it accesses and enough people use it, doesn't it become a scraper?

That's basically how many crowdsourced crawling/archive projects work. For instance, sci-hub and RECAP[1]. Do you think they should be shut down as well? In both cases there's even a stronger justification to shutting them down, because the original content is paywalled and you could plausibly argue there's lost revenue on the line.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Law_Project#RECAP
Which AI model is good enough as an Undergraduate level Math/Physics TA?
by ferguess_k | 2025-08-04 14:38:19+00:00
Suppose I want to teach myself Undergraduate Math/Physics courses (e.g. Real Analysis), and from time to time I'd like to ask questions. Is there any AI nowadays that is good enough to answer the questions AS A TA? That is, not only can it give the correct answer, but it can also let me know why my answer is wrong, and hopefully can also explain some of the materials?
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-04 14:38:21+00:00
> But C++ has existed before Python I believe.

Sure, C++ is 42 years old, Python is “only” 34. Both are older than the online code hosts (or even the web itself) from which the code for AI training data is sourced, so age probably isn't a key factor in how much code of each is there, popularity with projects hosted in accessible public code repos is more relevant.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-08-04 14:38:21+00:00
Unfortunately, that's not enough to shake the MasterCard/Visa stranglehold. Even if all of Valve's German customers used Girocard and Steam sold those particular games only in Germany, they would still have to yield to pressure from MC and Visa because losing them would cost them many more of their global customers.

It's not enough to simply have an alternative to the credit cards, that alternative has to be in the pockets of 90% of your user base before you'd be willing to lose the method of transaction they currently rely on.
by crabbone | 2025-08-04 14:38:38+00:00
This is what process' mount namespace is for. Various container implementations use it. With modern Linux you don't even need a third-party container manager, systemd-nspawn comes with the system and should be able to do that.

The problem with the "solutions" s.a. the one in Node.js is that Node.js doesn't get to decide how eg. domain names are resolved. So, it's easy to fool it to allow or to deny access to something the author didn't intend for it.

Historically, we (the computer users) decided that operating system is responsible for domain name resolution. It's possible that today it does that poorly, but, in principle we want the world to be such that OS takes care of DNS, not individual programs. From administrator perspective, it spares the administrator the need to learn the capabilities, the limitations and the syntax of every program that wants to do something like that.

It's actually very similar thing with logs. From administrator perspective, logs should always go to stderr. Programs that try to circumvent this rule and put them in separate files / send them into sockets etc. are a real sore spot of any administrator who'd spent some times doing his/her job.

Same thing with namespacing. Just let Linux do its job. No need for this duplication in individual programs / runtimes.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-04 14:38:45+00:00
You can deal with receiver private state since you are exporting methods on the receiver as part of your type signature. If those methods are called, the receiver can see itself, structural typing works fine and you still have encapsulation. Eg

interface Foo { fun doFoo() }

You can call doFoo() on some value, and that value can refer to its private state that doesn’t appear in Foo.

However, if you want to see the private data of an argument, private data has to appear in the signature (or use nominal typing). The easiest example is an equality method that compares private state.

interface Foo { fun equals(otherFoo: Foo): Boolean }

The receiver of the equals call can still refer to its private data, but whatever you a provided for otherFoo is only guaranteed to have the equals method. You might be able to deal with this isn’t an opaque type:

interface FooModule { export type t fun equals(foo: t, otherFoo: t): boolean makeFoo(): t }

But you really aren’t doing structural typing anymore, and basically are using t like you would a name.
by dmart | 2025-08-04 14:38:52+00:00
I like Nix but I think the current model of reinventing a new set of declarative configuration settings for each package is fundamentally misguided and will not scale in the long term (look at the number of program-specific options in Home Manager for example).

The nice thing about container-based systems is that all the existing documentation for configuring a given program continues to apply as expected. Of course the tricky part is figuring out how to compose them together.
by hansvm | 2025-08-04 14:39:05+00:00
Ofttimes people are sufficiently anti-ad that this point won't resonate well. I'm personally mostly in that camp in that with relatively few exceptions money seems to make the parts of the web I care about worse (it's hard to replace passion, and wading through SEO-optimized AI drivel to find a good site is a lot of work). Giving them concrete examples of sites which would go away can help make your point.

E.g., Sheldon Brown's bicycle blog is something of a work of art and one of the best bicycle resources literally anywhere. I don't know the man, but I'd be surprised if he'd put in the same effort without the "brand" behind it -- thankful readers writing in, somebody occasionally using the donate button to buy him a coffee, people like me talking about it here, etc.
by abby0214 | 2025-08-04 14:39:18+00:00
Please, OpenAI — don’t make ChatGPT sound like Claude. I’m not here for overly cautious, vague “customer service” replies. I’m here for clarity, precision, and something that actually feels like it understands me. If GPT turns into Claude, I’m seriously out. GPT is what I go to when I want to talk and think. Claude is what I use when I need code or research. If OpenAI turns GPT into Claude… then what am I left with?
by binarymax | 2025-08-04 14:39:19+00:00
I've built and run a personal search engine, that can do pretty much what perplexity does from a basic standpoint. Testing with friends it gets about 50/50 preference for their queries vs Perplexity.

The engine can go and download pages for research. BUT, if it hits a captcha, or is otherwise blocked, then it bails out and moves on. It pisses me off that these companies are backed by billions in VC and they think they can do whatever they want.
by linkage | 2025-08-04 14:39:28+00:00
Java is more akin to the Corolla. Utterly insipid (by design), lacking in refinements compared to competitors like the Mazda3, and made for people who just see it as a way to get from point A to point B.

PHP is the Hyundai Elantra of programming. It used to be popular because of low adoption costs but was the butt of jokes for a long time because of its questionable design and poor reliability. But like the Elantra, it has come a long way and is actually decent these days.
by doomvwr | 2025-08-04 14:39:30+00:00
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by alias_neo | 2025-08-04 14:40:03+00:00
Absolutely, it's one of those things where you're truly thrown in at the deep end, so to speak, with no guidance or experience (you likely remember little to nothing about your time as a child in those early years) and have to work it out.

Nobody teaches you anything (besides some basic courses for new parents like NCT here in the UK) and there's really no-one to ask; your own parents likely did things very differently to how you would now, so you have to weigh any advice they can/do provide.

The biggest help, I've found, on all sides, is talking to other parents; those of our children's friends, and we're quite friendly with a bunch of them having spend a lot of time talking to each other during COVID and meeting for the children's play-dates after. Many of them, like us have two children, with a similar age gap, their eldest is the same age as we met at our first children's births and they go through the same phases at roughly the same time.

Sometimes you just need to ask, "is this normal", and they'll corroborate, and some times you just need to support them by confirming you have the same challenges.
by DrScientist | 2025-08-04 14:40:08+00:00
They even try and avoid VAT - an example if flying a private jet outside the country to 'buy' it.

Or in the case of Abramovich - allegedly create a whole circular set of sham companies to avoid paying VAT on your super yacht.

See https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-06-19/cyp...
by chpatrick | 2025-08-04 14:40:12+00:00
I had the opposite experience. I started using it as a daily driver around 10 years ago and could never to back to anything else. It's just super solid and once you have it configured it just works forever. I agree that the learning curve is pretty steep, especially if you want to use something that's not in nixpkgs but those things are vanishing day by day.
by EGreg | 2025-08-04 14:40:19+00:00
Pssht, so little? With AI you're supposed to have a huge data center and pay them thousands of dollars to process many, many tokens. That way you are doing it right, 24/7.

How else are we going to cover these costs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwGVa-6DxJM