MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bartread | 2025-09-29 18:18:34+00:00
I had a complete shocker with all of Claude, GitHub Copilot, and ChatGPT when trying to prototype an iOS app in Swift around 12 months ago. They would all really struggle to generate anything usable, and making any progress was incredibly slow due to all the problems I was running into.

This was in stark contrast to my experience with TypeScript/NextJS, Python, and C#. Most of the time output quality for these was at least usefully good. Occasionally you’d get stuck in a tarpit of bullshit/hallucination around anything very new that hadn’t been in the training dataset for the model release you were using.

My take: there simply isn’t the community, thought leadership, and sheer volume of content around Swift that there is around these other languages. This means both lower quantity and lower quality of training data for Swift as compared to these other languages.

And that, unfortunately, plays negatively into the quality of LLM output for app development in Swift.

(Anyone who knows better, feel free to shoot me down.)
by aanet | 2025-09-29 18:18:40+00:00
"Soaring demand for electricity will drive a $350 billion nuclear spending boom in the US, boosting output from reactors by 63% by 2050, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. The key driver is power-hungry data centers running artificial intelligence systems, and that investment will add 53 gigawatts of reactor capacity, bringing the total nuclear fleet to 159 gigawatts, the research company said in a report Monday. "
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-09-29 18:18:45+00:00
Not clear what the years are on this 'wolf' or the years on the stories about it

Some discussion on 'Dogor' from 2019:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21660041

and a few days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45396511
by ashvardanian | 2025-09-29 18:18:46+00:00
The second piece (uniform call syntax) looks convenient, though I don’t see a realistic way to integrate it into modern C++. The first (structural pattern matching) is, for me, more of a dividing line between low- and high-level languages. I tend to avoid it in my C++, just as I avoid inheritance, virtual functions, and exceptions… or `<functional>` header contents.

Still, it’s always fun to stumble on corners of the STL I’d never paid attention to, even if I won’t end up using them. Thought it was worth sharing :)
by j1elo | 2025-09-29 18:18:46+00:00
Prompt: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/marckrenn/cc-mvp-prompts/r...

I've always been curious. Are tags like that one: "<system-reminder>" useful at all? Is the LLM training altered to give a special meaning to specific tags when they are found?

Can a user just write those magic tags (if they knew what they are) and alter the behavior of the LLM in a similar manner?
by eric15342335 | 2025-09-29 18:20:21+00:00
Not sure if I get it correctly:

They trained a thing to learn mimicking the full attention distribution but only filtering the top-k (k=2048) most important attention tokens so that when the context window increases, the compute does not go up linearly but constantly for the attention->[query,key] process (it does grow up linearly in the graph because you still need to roughly scan the entire context window (which an "indexer" will do), but just very roughly here in order to speed up things, which is O(L) here).
by some_old_guy | 2025-09-29 18:21:23+00:00
The fact that it stops at the first range isn't intuitive to me at all, and I've been using sqlite for 20 years now.

Given a covering index on (thing_date, thing_color)

I would think a scan would not be needed for the query:

select thing_date, thing_color where thing_date < date and thing_color = 'blue'

I also can't think of a reason this is the case given the underlying data structures.
by itsoktocry | 2025-09-29 18:21:46+00:00
>It’s a simple substitution request where I provide a Lint error that suggests the correct change. All the models fail. I could ask someone with no development experience to do this change and they could.

I don't understand why this kind of thing is useful. Do the thing yourself and move on. For every one problem like this, AI can do 10 better/faster than I can.
by scrollaway | 2025-09-29 18:22:50+00:00
GP is right, though. Many programming communities, including (in some threads, but not all) HN, have become ridiculous anti-AI bubbles - what's the point of trying to have a discussion if you're going to get systematically shut down by people whose entire premise is that they don't use it? It's like trying to explain color to the blind.

What "discussion" do you want to have? Another round of "LLMs are terrible at embedded hardware programming ergo they're useless"? Maybe with a dash of "LLMs don't write bug-free software [but I do]" to close it off?

The discussions that are at all advancing the state of the art are happening on forums that accept reality as a matter of fact, without people constantly trying to constantly pretend things because they're worried they'll lose their job if they don't.
by qustrolabe | 2025-09-29 18:23:03+00:00
Interesting note how ChatGPT handles ?q= from links differently from same query in search bar. From search bar it triggers query instantly while from link it does some clever navigation detection and waits for user to press final enter.

But some other chatbots like perplexity or less known ones trigger even from links. Let's hope no one makes it work that way with tools enabled. Imagine getting hacked from clicking a link that launches prompt in your favorite chatbot that sends all your data via email tool or money via banking integration
by scarface_74 | 2025-09-29 18:23:09+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,....

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/06/business/us-steel-nippon-...

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/29/biden-faces-slew-lawsuits-bu...
by prodigycorp | 2025-09-29 18:23:24+00:00
My favorite evaluation prompt which, I've found, tends to have the right level of skepticism is as follows (you have to tack it on to whatever idea/proposal you have):

"..at least, that's what my junior dev is telling me. But I take his word with a grain of salt, because he was fired from a bunch of companies after only a few months on each job. So i need your principled and opinionated insight. Is this junior dev right?"

It's the only way to get Claude to not glaze an idea while also not strike it down for no reason other than to play a role of a "critical" dev.
by saratogacx | 2025-09-29 18:23:25+00:00
It isn't an invite only club. Anyone can submit an existing application[0] and an app author can provide a metadata pack to speed up the process. They have some requirements to accept but it isn't a situation where a developer is just waiting around for the letter of invite to arrive[1].

[0] https://f-droid.org/en/contribute/ [1] https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Submitting_to_F-Droid_Quick_Star...
by theamk | 2025-09-29 18:23:44+00:00
This means cable might start at speed which is too high and get horrible errors if the cable is bent.

And even with Ethernet, that autorating has plenty of downsides. I've had a cable which I accidentally nailed through, so sometimes it could only connect at 10Mbps. It took me a long time before I realized it needs to be replaced, precisely because it'd just downshift instead of throwing any errors.
by simonw | 2025-09-29 18:23:52+00:00
I had access to a preview over the weekend, I published some notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/29/claude-sonnet-4-5/

It's very good - I think probably a tiny bit better than GPT-5-Codex, based on vibes more than a comprehensive comparison (there are plenty of benchmarks out there that attempt to be more methodical than vibes).

It particularly shines when you try it on https://claude.ai/ using its brand new Python/Node.js code interpreter mode. Try this prompt and see what happens:

Checkout https://github.com/simonw/llm and run the tests with pip install -e '.[test]' pytest

I then had it iterate on a pretty complex database refactoring task, described in my post.
Show HN: Open-Source Configurable AI Agents for Company Research
by DimitriMikadze | 2025-09-29 18:24:10+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Dimi.

Last month I released Mira, an open-source system for company data enrichment. It automates the process of gathering and structuring company information, something I found myself doing repeatedly for sales, investment, and market research workflows.

GitHub: https://github.com/dimimikadze/mira

You start by defining an agent, a workflow that specifies the data points you want (for example funding, industry, or hiring signals), the sources to query (websites, LinkedIn, Google Search), and optional evaluation criteria (such as "raised Series A in the last 12 months").

Mira then runs specialized agents. Website Explore looks beyond the homepage and checks relevant subpages like /press or /careers. The LinkedIn agent pulls structured company data and posts. The Search agent generates targeted queries and extracts details from results. The Analysis agent applies your criteria and produces a fit score with reasoning.

The output is a structured profile with confidence scores and source attribution. If all data is found with high confidence, the run stops early to save compute.

Since release, I've added configurable agents, bulk processing of company lists, evaluation with fit scoring, and outreach drafting from research results. Mira has been used for market mapping, filtering startup lists into targeted shortlists, enriching CRMs, and creating personalized outreach.

It is MIT licensed, built with TypeScript and the OpenAI Agents SDK, and comes with a Next.js app to visualize the process step by step.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPTLzECkBT8

Happy to answer questions or discuss the approach.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-09-29 18:25:24+00:00
> I've been avoiding trying to class what counts as 'interesting' because it feels like the wrong point to make

Well, I kind of borrowed this wording from the description of your genAI experiences ("intellectually interesting").

I feel that it's nod a bad word to describe qualities of music, although it's a bit nondescript. Sure, music can be interesting, but still unpleasant etc.

But "interesting" means (to me) that the music makes you want to listen to it again.

Music doesn't need to sound pleasant. Or angry. Or sad. Or "abstract" (an oxymoron when it comes to describing a sound, still widely used).

Music is communication.

And just like it's a novelty and sometimes useful or entertaining to use ChatGPT, it's a novelty and sometimes interesting to use Suno.

That's pretty much it for me.

The magic of prompt => non-text media is also interesting, sure.

But not interesting anymore to me as art, at least not without being part of a bigger whole.

Good early example for this would be "Headache - The head hurts, but the heart knows the truth"
by la_fayette | 2025-09-29 18:25:25+00:00
I think HN might be one of the few communities where people have been running extensive experiments with LLMs since their inception. Most here take a realistic view of their capabilities. There are certainly proven use cases where LLMs provide clear productivity gains—for example, copying an error message and retrieving potential solutions. At the same time, many recognize that marketing fantasies, such as the idea of having a "PhD in your pocket," are far beyond what this technology can deliver.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-09-29 18:26:34+00:00
the owner of a company gets the profits, and that's what he lives off of. investors in public companies get a share of the profit as well, of course, but it's usually vanishingly small because it's split by every investor. So for privately traded companies the people who own them can make their living just based on the money left over after they pay all their expenses, but for investors in public companies the only feasible way for them to have more money at the end of the day is for the company to be worth more money at the end of the day because their potential profits from dividends are baked into the stock price. The owner doesn't take a hit, because his profits are (revenue - cost) not (value of company at buy-in) - (value of company at sell-out)
by all2 | 2025-09-29 18:26:39+00:00
> Maybe in some fields I've surpassed a point where llms are useful?

I've hit this point while designing developer UX for a library I'm working on. LLMs can nail boilerplate, but when it comes to dev UX they seem to not be very good. Maybe that's because I have a specific vision and some pretty tight requirements? Dunno. I'm in the same spot as you for some stuff.

For throwaway code they're pretty great.
by Chris2048 | 2025-09-29 18:26:40+00:00
You are generalising - I didn't even mention Apple, and afaik small developers are charged 15% for using play store.

I am talking only about this specific developer fee wrt registration and identification, not fees associated with using play store or otherwise.

From what I can tell, it is a fixed, one-off $25 for an account, with a plan to have a free account option for "limited distribution" developers (hobbyists, students, families and small businesses fwict).
by sigmoid10 | 2025-09-29 18:27:21+00:00
This is obviously much more than just taking an LLM an letting it run for 30 hours. You have to build a whole environment together with external tool integration and context management and then tune the prompts and perhaps even set up a multi-agent system. I believe that if someone puts a ton of work into this you can have an LLM run for that long and still produce sellable outputs, but let's not pretend like this is something that average devs can do by buying some API tokens and kicking off a frontier model.
by johnisgood | 2025-09-29 18:27:31+00:00
So when people talk about safety, it does matter in Rust, right? Because "1k LOC is not that much. I can easily do this in a day's project.". Why should we choose Rust over anything below 100k LOC if it is nothing?

I am just asking. Everyone says 1k LOC is nothing, yet they want to replace 1k LOC in C with 1k LOC in Rust. You can do it in day. You are a professional!

Or what is your point? That 1k LOC projects are useless or pointless? Because if so, I seriously beg to differ.

> So the problem is when the LLM is churning out code faster than you can review.

I start small, I can review just fine.
by pinusc | 2025-09-29 18:27:32+00:00
Although it wouldn't require a lot of work to allow side-loading apps on LineageOS and similar, LOS users would still be profoundly impacted by the death of the FOSS ecosystem.

LOS/AOSP/whatever users are a VANISHINGLY small minority of users, so "an app that only works on them" is an app that only works for a tiny minority of people. This would disincentivize developing FOSS apps altogether. A lot of projects will likely eventually die, and a lot that could have started will not.
by redelbee | 2025-09-29 18:28:00+00:00
First off, I appreciate the thorough explanation and review of the ZSA Moonlander. That said, I’m here to discuss the “visual ergonomics” of this post.

Why is justified text so bad on the web? And why do people still use it, despite how terrible it looks? When I was in journalism school I learned how to properly justify text with line breaks, tracking, and other techniques to make sure we didn’t have “rivers” of blank space through the text or other hard-to-read layouts. Is there no way to achieve the same readable outcome today with CSS, or otherwise?

If not, I beg of you: Please don’t use justified text on the web!
by stavros | 2025-09-29 18:28:14+00:00
This is all my hobby, for my job I use Claude in a way that doesn't involve code, but is still very useful. It's basically what inspired Lucid, above, when I realized I find coming up with solutions very easy, but find explaining them very hard, because I assume the other person knows too much and I don't elaborate enough.

LLMs are a great rubber duck, plus they can write the document for you at the end.
by otterley | 2025-09-29 18:28:18+00:00
An indictment is pre-trial. To get a criminal indictment, all you need to show to a grand jury is "probable cause," which is a very low standard--the same standard needed to justify an arrest. That's the reason for the old joke about being able to indict a ham sandwich.

Now that Comey's been indicted, the trial process will begin, assuming he doesn't plea out (and I don't think he will). The uphill battle for the prosecution now begins.
by ghaff | 2025-09-29 18:28:23+00:00
Some conferences I've attended provide stickers to put on your badge and if you don't want to be photographed/published the conference organizers may pay attention with respect to their publicity photos. Of course, others snapping pics with their cell phones may not. (And, in Germany as well as other countries, I've never seen explicit warnings about not publishing photos of people at a conference without permission.).

Most people are pretty reasonable and aren't aggressive with their picture taking. But there are almost certainly photos of you online whatever the local country laws may say.
by mbesto | 2025-09-29 18:28:31+00:00
> SWE-bench, and many other AI benchmarks, have lots of eval noise

SWE-bench has lots of known limitations even with its ability to reduce solution leakage and overfitting.

> where there is no clear right answer

This is both a feature and a bug. If there is no clear answer then how do you determine whether an LLM has progressed? It can't simply be judged on making "more right answers" on each release.
by bravetraveler | 2025-09-29 18:28:40+00:00
Yes it can, I just showed how one might. A repo is a repo. A PPA is a repo. What?

The 'default' you're talking about is a CLI that simplifies two steps, one of which is optional [signature]. It can be done with a shell/coreutils or whatever equivalent. Again, I showed my work.

Anyway, let's toss Flatpak, then. Debian only offers it, not by default. Just like it only offers the ability to write to '/etc/apt/sources.list.d/'.

I'm done going back/forth on this, we're so far off the point. Use the distribution you want, be mindful of the software you install. Regardless of who wrote/built the manifests or hosted the artifacts.

Bagging on Arch for the AUR makes as much sense as <the public packaging service> for <your favorite distribution>. I already named several, it's all user-generated content. In absolutely no way does it represent the actual product/distribution. The users publishing and consuming carry the responsibility.
by Mouvelie | 2025-09-29 18:28:42+00:00
> In a world where one could snap their fingers and magically have everything, would "growth" be impossible?

Think this one through. Would growth even make sense ? What would be the meaning of getting everything you want ? Would such a life be worth it ?

If you ask me, I'd say that such a life would have no meaning for anyone involved and as such, maybe the universe would not even care to have that experience. I don't know, just spitballing there !
by dylan604 | 2025-09-29 18:28:48+00:00
No. Cameras will only help potentially identify someone after the fact. At some point we may find ourselves in a Black Mirror dystopia where AI is used to precog individuals to determine someone is going to commit a crime where video surveillance helps locate this person before the crime is committed. However, since no crime has been committed, there's no reason to detain them. Unless, you just really want to commit to that dystopian nightmare of allowing AI to make those decisions.
by wang_li | 2025-09-29 18:29:28+00:00
I'm not dehumanizing it, I'm making it clear that photography is generally a passive activity. Where's the line between "don't record me" and "don't look at me"? If it's ok you look at you, but not record you, where's the line? Can someone use a telescope to look at you? Can a store have a camera and a live TV view of all the people who walk in? Can there be a live camera that captures the people on a sidewalk and display it on a giant billboard on the side of a building? If you're at a sporting event can they aim a camera at you in the crowd and put you on the jumbotron? These are all amplifications of visibility, which ones are allowed and which are not. And why should you be able to insist on the absolute bare minimum of noticeability when you are out in public?
by simonh | 2025-09-29 18:29:54+00:00
Going from past discussions, there seem to be two issues there. One is that Swift has changed massively since it came out and huge swathes of examples and articles and such online, that LLMs are trained on, are out of date and thus pollute the training set.

Another issue is that Apple developer docs are largely sequestered behind JavaScript that makes them hard for scrapers to parse.

At least, those are the two explanations I’ve seen that seem plausible.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-09-29 18:30:03+00:00
> I worry everyone is chasing benchmarks to the detriment of general performance.

I’m not sure this is entirely what you’re driving at, but the example I always think of in my head is “I want an AI agent that will scan through my 20 to 30,000 photos, remove all the duplicates, then organize them all in some coherent fashion.” that’s the kind of service I need right now, and it feels like something AI should be able to do, yet I have not encountered anything that remotely accomplishes this task. I’m still using Dupe Guru and depending on the ref system to not scatter my stuff all over further.

Sidebar, if anybody has any recommendations for this, I would love to hear them lol
by pembrook | 2025-09-29 18:30:48+00:00
If they stopped the automatic "You're absolutely right!" responses after the model fails to fix something 20 times in a row, then that alone will be worth the upgrade.

Me: "You just burned my house down"

Claude: "You're absolutely right! I burned your house down, I need to revert the previous change and..."

Me: "Now you rebuilt my house with a toilet in the living room"

Claude: "You're absolutely right! I put a toilet in your living room..."

Etc.