MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sdoering | 2025-10-14 08:14:06+00:00
What specific improvements are you hoping for? Without them (in the original forum post) giving concrete examples, prompts, or methodology – just stating "I write good prompts" – it's hard to evaluate or even help them.

They came in primed against agentic work flow. That is fine. But they also came in without providing anything that might have given other people the chance to show that their initial assumptions was flawed.

I've been working with agents daily for several months. Still learning what fails and what works reliably.

Key insights from my experience: - You need a framework (like agent-os or similar) to orchestrate agents effectively - Balance between guidance and autonomy matters - Planning is crucial, especially for legacy codebases

Recent example: Hit a wall with a legacy system where I kept maxing out the context window with essential background info. After compaction, the agent would lose critical knowledge and repeat previous mistakes.

Solution that worked: - Structured the problem properly - Documented each learning/discovery systematically - Created specialized sub-agents for specific tasks (keeps context windows manageable)

Only then could the agent actually help navigate that mess of legacy code.
by zozbot234 | 2025-10-14 08:15:29+00:00
> Cgroups and namespaces were added to Linux in an attempt to add security to a design (UNIX) which has a fundamentally poor approach to security (shared global namespace, users, etc.)

Namespacing of all resources (no restriction to a shared global namespace) was actually taken directly from plan9. It does enable better security but it's about more than that; it also sets up a principled foundation for distributed compute. You can see this in how containerization enables the low-level layers of something like k8s - setting aside for the sake of argument the whole higher-level adaptive deployment and management that it's actually most well-known for.
by Mashimo | 2025-10-14 08:16:27+00:00
Apparently it's even hard to make molds in the US. China seems to be the top dog in the production chain. From design, to mold, to production, to packaging.

Fstopper has one or two nice videos about it. Can't even buy US made glass bottles that fits his needs in the US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xewpuM1eJRg
by shevy-java | 2025-10-14 08:16:50+00:00
Old languages died or are barely in use anymore.

I think it is more interesting to see which languages are still used today and how popular these are. Because this is also tied to the human user/developer.

For instance, I used BASIC when I was young - not as a professional but as a hobbyist. I liked it too. I wouldn't use BASIC today because it would be entirely useless and inefficient.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-14 08:17:35+00:00
I can accept some temporary geoengineering as long as we stop burning dinosaur juice. My reservations lie in unintended and non-reversible side effects like ecosystem disruptions.

Europe and even China show that renewable energy can be done. Greenhouse gas emissions stopped increasing after Paris agreement (I failed to find the article), and we can do iteratively better as long as we want to.
by mkl | 2025-10-14 08:17:36+00:00
All of that stuff takes time and resources. Self-improvement may not be easy, e.g. if they end up in a local maximum that doesn't extend, and it probably won't be cheap or fast (if it's anything like frontier LLMs it could be months of computation on enormous numbers of cutting-edge devices, costing hundreds of millions or billions, or it may not even be possible without inventing and mass-manufacturing better hardware). Another company achieving a slightly different form of AGI within a few years will probably be at least competitive, and if they have more resources or a better design they could overtake.
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-14 08:18:43+00:00
> Did he start the fire knowing it could kill people?

Leaving aside the fact that we don't know yet if he actually started the fire: anyone who starts any fire without appropriate control measures (like extinguishers or containing the fire in something made to contain it) can theoretically be charged under the law for negligence - and practically will, if things go south.

And in a time where there's ample fuel for fires on the ground and the weather conditions are favorable to large fires (e.g. hot, low humidity, clear skies and strong winds) any kind of fire (even smoking - cigarette butts thrown out of car windows are a particularly bad fire source in Croatia) can quickly escalate into a full blown forest fire. Even things that one would not even perceive to be dangerous can cause fires... an all too common occurrence is a diesel car with a freshly regenerated DPF that's being parked on a parking lot that used to be overgrown with weed that's now dried out. The heat from the DPF is massive enough (> 500 °C) to lead to ignition of dried-out weeds (~ 300 °C).

So, it's not a stretch to assume that anyone starting an open fire should know it might escalate into a deadly disaster. And even the reckless cases that I mentioned (smokers, car drivers) can be charged as manslaughter here in Europe.
by nebula8804 | 2025-10-14 08:20:04+00:00
Of course its third world in some ways, but take those Chinese people I spoke about, swap them into the same spot as the people currently living there and I GUARANTEE you that they will turn those places around and probably make a whole super competitive region that could go toe to toe with any of the urban areas of the country.

It goes back to my point. These people in those areas think they are in for bad times but they have not seen REAL pain yet and yet they are playing games right now because they think they have nothing to lose.

Imagine if your theory comes true and the government has to cut services to the bone. No more medicare/medicaid/maintaining their infrastructure(however shit it is now it gets worse)/state subsidies for states like Nebraska.

There are probably horrors that im not even thinking of.
by roenxi | 2025-10-14 08:20:48+00:00
And would you accept then that capitalism as an ideology is no longer implemented anywhere? Because there aren't many modern nations more capitalist than the Dutch. And those that arguably are are only marginally more capitalistic. Like, if you do a search for "capitalistic countries" you can find [0] people who consider them to be in the top 10.

Must admit I'm having trouble getting over the idea that the Dutch of all people are being held up as different than the capitalists. Good bad or otherwise this conversation is going to be a high point of the week. What's next? Socialist Switzerland?

[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/capitalis...
by 2b3a51 | 2025-10-14 08:21:10+00:00
A bit of googling suggests that the model for the mathematician in the film was George Dantzig, and he was actually studying mathematics at college level.

The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan fits your sentence, although early 20th C. He studied mathematics from a revision book he had access to in a small place in India then wrote a letter to GW Hardy a professor at Oxford with a range of new and strange results but expressed in the idiom of the revision book.
by jjav | 2025-10-14 08:23:04+00:00
A wall street friend has been predicting the big crash "next month" for about nine months now, but we're still in a mad rally.

I tend to agree a big crash is in the cards, but as they say, the market can be irrational for a very long time. The "irrational exhuberance" speech was in 1996 but the market rallied hard for many years after that until the eventual inevitable crash. If you sold in 1996 you messed up real bad.
by npteljes | 2025-10-14 08:23:15+00:00
I'm a bit sad that this question is downvoted, because it's a valid question, even if a bit pointed.

First, we don't really know what's there. Because the entirety of the rest of the world is there, and that's a lot!

Second, it's also a bit of a cold war-like thing. A kind of power can be asserted from space. This power can be used for military purposes (just like any other power), and the possibility of this power is real, so, existing, capable powers must ensure that they don't lose their power to the power coming from this new territory. So basically, defense is another purpose.

Third, research doesn't often have an immediate commercial or welfare goal attached to it. Simply because we don't know what we'll find, and how that'll be useful. In this way, one could argue that research is pointless, but I think that would lead to the pointlessness of life itself, philosophically.

Fourth, successful space missions elevate morale, by providing inspiration. It's also a tool for diplomacy, a way to connect nations via a joint effort.
by KronisLV | 2025-10-14 08:23:40+00:00
> I think what we should really ask ourselves is: “Why do LLM experiences vary so much among developers?”

Some possible reasons:

* different models used by different folks, free vs paid ones, various reasoning effort, quantizations under the hood and other parameters (e.g. samplers and temperature) * different tools used, like in my case I've found Continue.dev to be surprisingly bad, Cline to be pretty decent but also RooCode to be really good; also had good experiences with JetBrains Junie, GitHub Copilot is *okay*, but yeah, lots of different options and settings out there * different system prompts, various tool use cases (e.g. let the model run the code tests and fix them itself), as well as everything ranging from simple and straightforward codebases that are dime a dozen out there (and in the training data), vs something genuinely new that would trip up both your average junior dev, as well as the LLMs * open ended vs well specified tasks, feeding in the proper context, starting new conversations/tasks when things go badly, offering examples so the model has more to go off of (it can predict something closer to what you actually want), most of my prompts at this point are usually multiple sentences, up to a dozen, alongside code/data examples, alongside prompting the model to ask me questions about what I want before doing the actual implementation * also sometimes individual models produce output for specific use cases badly, I generally rotate between Sonnet 4.5, Gemini Pro 2.5, GPT-5 and also use Qwen 3 Coder 480B running on Cerebras for the tasks I need done quickly and that are more simple

With all of that, my success rate is pretty great and the statement about the tech not being able to "...barely follow a simple instruction" holds untrue. Then again, most of my projects are webdev adjacent in mostly mainstream stacks, YMMV.
by gwd | 2025-10-14 08:23:50+00:00
FWIW all my coding with LLMs is very hands-on. What I've ended up doing with LLMs is something like the following:

1. New conversation. Describe at a high level what change I want made. Point out the relevant files for the LLM to have context. Discuss the overall design with the LLM. At the end of that conversation, ask it to write out a summary (including relevant files to read for context next time) in an "epic" document in llm/epics/. This will almost always have several steps, listed in the document.

Then I review this and make sure it's in line with what I want.

2. New conversation. We're working on @llm/epics/that_epic.md. Please read the relevant files for context. We're going to start work on step N. Let me know if you have any questions; when you're ready, sketch out a detailed plan of implementation.

I may need to answer some questions or help it find more context; then it writes a plan. I review this plan and make sure it's in line with what I want.

3. New conversation. We're working on @llm/epics/that_epic.md. We're going to start implementing step N. Let me know if you have any questions; when you're ready, go ahead and start coding.

Monitor it to make sure it doesn't get stuck. Any time it starts to do something stupid or against the pattern of what I'd like -- from style, to hallucinating (or forgetting) a feature of some sub-package -- add something to the context files.

Repeat until the epic is done.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is. As xkcd's "Uncomfortable Truths Well" said, "You will never find a programming language that frees you from the burden of clarifying your ideas." LLMs don't fundamentally change that dynamic. But they do often come up with clever solutions to problems; their "stupid questions" often helps me realize how unclear my thinking is; they type a lot faster, and they look up documentation a lot faster too.

Sure, they make a bunch of frustrating mistakes when they're new to the project; but if every time they make a patterned mistake, you add that to your context somehow, eventually these will become fewer and fewer.
by adrian_b | 2025-10-14 08:23:59+00:00
But you put in a $1500 PC (with 128 GB DRAM).

Still, a PC with a 5090 will give in many cases a much better bang for the buck, except when limited by the slower speed of the main memory.

The greater bandwidth available when accessing the entire 128 GB memory is the only advantage of NVIDIA DGX, while a cheaper PC with discrete GPU has a faster GPU, a faster CPU and a faster local GPU memory.
by anupsingh123 | 2025-10-14 08:24:18+00:00
I think there's some confusion about what justcopy does - it's for cloning YOUR OWN projects, not scraping other people's websites. Built it out of frustration when I tried to fork one of my projects for a different idea and it took a full day even with Claude Code and Cursor. Lots of manual config updates, dependency changes, renaming stuff, etc. The $200 mistake was about agent orchestration, not the ethics of the product. But appreciate the feedback - clearly need to communicate the use case better.
by magicalhippo | 2025-10-14 08:25:04+00:00
> Android allows apps to call other apps? While remaining in the foreground? How does that work?

From the paper:

Recall from Section 2.1 that when a caller activity sends an intent to a callee activity, Android moves the callee activity to the foreground (along with its task’s back stack if android:-launchMode="singleTask") and moves the caller activity to the background.

However, despite no longer being in the foreground, the caller activity is still allowed to send intents that start additional activities from the background. For example, the caller activity can send another intent to launch a second callee activity.

In this case, the second callee moves to the foreground, while the first callee is moved to the background. Further, SurfaceFlinger treats the window of the second callee as being overlaid in front of the window of the first callee.

In our framework, the attacker app leverages this behavior to layer a stack of semi-transparent activities in front of a newly launched victim activity. In the following, we describe how the attacker uses this stack and SurfaceFlinger’s APIs to isolate, enlarge, and transmit individual pixels from the victim activity.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-14 08:25:23+00:00
As someone born and raised playing demo discs on my dads PS1 growing up, feels like half the popular games in the 90s were made or published by Psygnosis. Destruction Derby was probably my favorite one, together with The Adventures of Lomax. Wipeout coming close 3rd, mainly because of the out-of-this-world soundtrack.
by theevilsharpie | 2025-10-14 08:25:40+00:00
I have seen no credible explanation on how current or proposed technology can possibly achieve AGI.

If you want to hand-wave that away by stating that any company with technology capable of achieving AGI would guard it as the most valuable trade secret in history, then fine. Even if we assume that AGI-capable technology exists in secret somewhere, I've seen no credible explanation from any organization on how they plan to control an AGI and reliably convince it to produce useful work (rather than the AGI just turning into a real-life SHODAN). An uncontrollable AGI would be, at best, functionally useless.

AGI is --- and for the foreseeable future, will continue to be --- science fiction.
by lloeki | 2025-10-14 08:25:46+00:00
> On a PS4 controller you'd just fire the secondary mode all the time because there would be no way to find the threshold on a trigger without this functionality.

Just don't mash the trigger all the way? You don't have the haptic feedback of such a trigger wall but claiming it's "impossible" is a bit extreme. A nice threshold mapping could arrange for that e.g 0-10% dead zone, 10%-80% main mode, 90%-100% secondary mode, _ factor in rate of press to avoid misfiring main mode. Which is probably the logic that it implements already, except with probably a bit more leeway thanks to the haptic feedback.

"Impossible" would be playing a typical† dual stick game with a gamepad that has none (e.g original PS1 gamepad)

† like a FPS that uses the now classic stick layout for quick yet precise movement + orientation

Honest question as I'm curious and don't have access to a PS5: what about PS5-only games that happen to exist on other platforms that don't have such features? Can they be played with a PS4 controller?

Oh and to be clear: it's not a Xbox vs PS thing, I find them both equally guilty of excessive e-wasting / platform locking, just in different ways.
by binaryturtle | 2025-10-14 08:25:49+00:00
But is that a problem of the language itself, or is it just a problem of available toolchains? E.g. if the gcc compiler collection would come with BASIC support and you just could type something like "gbasic -O3 foobar.bas -o foobar" to get a properly optimised executable out of your BASIC source code file then some may would still use BASIC today, I guess?

I started with BASIC too. Also enjoyed BlitzBasic2 for a long time on the Amiga. That's where I learned programming… back then when programming was still fun.
by lxgr | 2025-10-14 08:26:12+00:00
I've had agents find several production bugs that slipped me (as I couldn't dedicate enough time to chase down relatively obscure and isolated bug reports).

Of course there are many more bugs they'll currently not find, but when this strategy costs next to nothing (compared to a SWE spending an hour spelunking) and still works sometimes, the trade-off looks pretty good to me.
by JCM9 | 2025-10-14 08:26:23+00:00
Folks aren’t seeing measurable returns on AI. Lots written about this. When the bean counters show up, the easiest way to get out of jail is to say “Oh X? Yeah that was last year, don’t worry about it… we’re now focused on Y which is where the impact will come from.”

Every hype cycle goes through some variation of this evolution. As much as folks try to say AI is different it’s following the same very predictable hype cycle curve.
by impossiblefork | 2025-10-14 08:26:29+00:00
It's true though, they can't. It really depends on what they have to work with.

In the fixed world of mathematics, everything could in principle be great. In software, it can in principle be okay even though contexts might be longer. When dealing with new contexts in something like real life, but different-- such as a story where nobody can communicate with the main characters because they speak a different language, then the models simply can't deal with it, always returning to the context they're familiar with.

When you give them contexts that are different enough from the kind of texts they've seen, they do indeed fail to follow basic instructions, even though they can follow seemingly much more difficult instructions in other contexts.
by afandian | 2025-10-14 08:26:34+00:00
Seriously, I don't understand how this is meant to work, even on the 'happy path'. I've never done any Santa stuff in my family except stockings with small presents + fruit, so the stakes for make-believe are low.

Do the children ask for stuff and then the parent is on the hook to buy it? What if it's too expensive or unavailable? Just a massive disappointment on the day? Does the child expect that it's some kind of binding contract?

Children's imaginations are wonderous, flexible things. As an adult I have sometimes found it a weird experience to play along with my child because my brain keeps trying to delineate between reality and imagination. So who knows how the it's perceived when you're writing a letter.

But if this really does sound realistic, isn't it in danger of leaving the imagination space and setting an expectation?

< old-man-shouts-at-clouds.gif >
by imtringued | 2025-10-14 08:27:14+00:00
Rotations:

SO(3) is the special orthogonal group for 3 dimensions, which is the set of rotation matrices. Rotation matrices have the determinant 1, which means that they keep the length of a vector the same (forcing it to change direction). Orthogonal group means that the rotation R times its transpose R^T yields the identity matrix aka R^T R=RR^T=I. This means that rotations are trivially reversible. You can obtain rotation matrices either by explicit use of cosine/sine along your desired axis or you can use the Rodrigues rotation formula to describe a rotation along an axis with an angle.

so(3) is the Lie algebra to the Lie group SO(3). The capitalization here is critical. In particular, so(3) is the set of skew symmetric matrices. 3 by 3 skew-symmetric matrices essentially describe the cross product a x b for a constant a. Given a skew symmetric matrix and a rotation angle theta you can use the exponential function to map so(3) to SO(3) through e^(theta S). Note that the exponential is a general mapping from a Lie algebra to its Lie group.

Transformations:

SE(3) is the special euclidean group for 3 dimensions. Its structure consists of T = [[R, t], [0, 1]].

if R = I, then T is a pure translation by t. If R != I and t = 0, then it is a pure rotation.

When you have both a rotation R and a translation t transformation then translating first and rotating second will give you T, but rotating first and translating second will give you T' = [[R, Rt], [0, 1]].

se(3) is the Lie algebra to the Lie group SE(3). One way to represent so(3) is through twists.

Revolute joints are represented by a vector Xi = [ omega, q cross-product omega] where omega is a vector that represents the parameters of a skew symmetric matrix and q is a 3d point on the axis of rotation.

Prismatic joints are represented by Xi = [0, v] where v is pointing in the direction of the movement. The transformation of a twist can be obtained as usual through the exponential function: exp(theta Xi)=T.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_rotation_group

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_group

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_group

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_theory
by lexszero_ | 2025-10-14 08:27:43+00:00
I haven't heard about Optane before, but the concept of persistent memory reminds me of PhantomOS[0], which is based around the idea that from the app perspective everything is already in memory and the kernel/runtime (JVM-ish, so object-aware) takes care of {,de}serialization to a non-volatile storage by virtue of a highly sophisticated virtual memory manager so the app programmer doesn't have to think about it. I remember seeing it being presented at some conference around 2012 and the live demo running Tetris game slowed down to a crawl and crashed after a few blocks due to bugs in GC.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_OS
by nebula8804 | 2025-10-14 08:28:44+00:00
There is a demographic implosion coming soon. You look at a video like this and count how many humans there are to make this $20-30 speaker and you realize that this $20 speaker is not going to be automated, its just going to go away as an option.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U
by CapsAdmin | 2025-10-14 08:28:47+00:00
I work on this typed lua language in lua, and sometimes use llms to help fix internal analyzer stuff, which works 30% of the time for complex, and sometimes not at all, but helps me find a solution in the end.

However when I ask an llm to generate my typed lua code, with examples and all, on how the syntax is supposed to be, it mostly gets it wrong.

my syntax for tables/objects is: local x: {foo = boolean}

but an llm will most likely gloss over this and always use : instead of = local x: {foo: boolean}