MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-23 11:53:51+00:00
> Speaking of system instructions, Gemini always forgets them or doesn't follow them. And it still puts code comments nearly everywhere, it drives me nuts.

Yup, I've tried to use Gemini so many times, but the lack of being able to strictly follow system prompts makes it so hard to get useful stuff out of it that doesn't need to be cleaned out. Code comments is short of impossible to get rid of, they must have trained it with only code that has comments, because the model really likes to add them everywhere.

Every agent+model combination has issues right now, I'm personally swapping between them depending on the task.

Gemini is great for stuff you need fast and don't care about the quality, as you can just throw it away.

Claude Code + Sonnet is great in many ways and follows prompts way better, but has a tendency to go off on tangents and really get lost in the woods. It requires handholding and basically interrupt it as soon as you see something weird, to steer it in the right direction. Complex stuff has to be aggressively split into smaller validated sub-tasks manually. Tends to also stop continuing by itself to say "Well, we've done half now, you want me to continue with the other half?"

Codex + GPT-5is the best at following prompts, produces the highest quality code, but is way slower than others, and still struggles with seemingly arbitrary stuff yet able to solve complex tasks by itself without any hand-holding. It can get stuck on something obvious, but at least it won't run off on it's own and it'll complete everything as well as it can, even if it takes 30 minutes.

Qwen Coder seems outright unusable and haven't been able to use it for anything good at all.

Tried AMP for a while as well, nice UI and model seems good, but too expensive (and I say this as someone who currently gives $200/month to OpenAI).
by warpspin | 2025-10-23 11:54:39+00:00
While some of the professional development probably was on host systems, not all of it was.

Especially since the release of Turbo Assembler in 1985, serious development on the C64 was quite comfortable.

Years later in the 90ies, Fairlight enhanced Turbo Assembler with REU support, which made development on the machine itself ridiculously comfortable. Basically the only thing missing I can recall was there was no concept of version management back then.

Of course, this came too late for professional development but it's basically what the demo scene ran on till cross assembling from PCs came in vogue.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-10-23 11:54:45+00:00
My apologies for the much delayed reply as I have recently found myself with little extra time to post adequate responses. Your critiques are very interesting to ponder, so I thank you for posting them. I did want to respond to this one though.

I believe all of my counterarguments center around my current viewpoint that given the rapid rate of progress involved on the engineering side, it is no longer reasonable in deep learning theory to consider what is possible, and it is more interesting to try to outline hard limitations. This emposes a stark contrast between deep learning and classical statistics, as the boundaries in the latter are very clear and are not shared by the former.

I want to stress that at present, nearly every conjectured limitation of deep learning over the last several decades has fallen. This includes many back of the napkin, "clearly obvious" arguments, so I'm wary of them now. I think the skepticism all along has been fueled in response to hype cycles, so we must be careful not to make the same mistakes. There is far too much empirical evidence available to counter precise arguments against the claim that there is an underlying understanding within these models, so it seems we must resort to the imprecise to continue the debate.

Scaling, along one axis, suggests a high polynomial degree of additional compute (not exponential) is required for increasing improvements, this is true. But the progress over the last few years has occurred due to the discovery of new axes to scale on, which further reduces the error rate and improves performance. There are still many potential axes left untapped. What is significant about scaling to me is not how much additional compute is required, but the fact that the predicted bottom at the moment is very, very low, far lower than anything else we have ever seen, and that doesn't require any more data than we currently have. That should be cause for concern until we find a better lower bound.

> We all know that these new LLMs aren't dramatic improvements off their previous versions

No, I don't agree. This may be evident to many, but to some, the differences are stark. Our perceived metrics of performance are nonlinear and person-dependent, and these major differences can be imperceptible to most. The vast majority of attempts at providing more regular metrics or benchmarks that are not already saturated have shown that LLM development is not slowing down by any stretch. I'm not saying that LLMs will "go to the moon". But I don't have anything concrete to say they cannot either.

> We have the math to show that it can be impossible to distinguish two explanations through data processing alone.

Actually, this is a really great point, but I think this highlights the limitations of benchmarks and the requirements of capacity-based, compression-based, or other types of alternative data-independent metrics. With these in tow, it can be possible to distinguish two explanations. This could be a fruitful line of inquiry.
by slightwinder | 2025-10-23 11:54:45+00:00
You wrote that "Closed-source software" is unethical, not "harmful software & services" is unethical. There is a significant difference. Don't shift your goal as you like.

Not all closed-source software is harmful; Obsidian here is a prime example of one which is not harmful and could be even considered as beneficial, despite being closed source, because of how open and supportive it's designed in everything else.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-23 11:55:16+00:00
I don't have a horse in this race outside of general skepticism of official numbers (though inflation is particularly difficult to fake since you can literally just buy/assess the basket of goods the figures represent yourself), but I don't think this is the rejoinder you're looking for. Eggs went from 0.975 to 3.587, a 3.68x increase. CPI went from 1.69 to 3.23, a 1.9x increase. So the price of eggs increased 93% more than nominal inflation.
by adamhp | 2025-10-23 11:55:45+00:00
I built a free app, https://multiborder.io, that lets you add borders to multiple images at a time. I simply use it when I post photography to Instagram, because Instagram prefers 4:5 for maximum viewability, but most of my photos are 2:3. This preserves the aspect ratio for vertical and landscape, and also is aesthetically pleasing (imo).
by perihelions | 2025-10-23 11:56:17+00:00
But the US (who has jurisdiction over Starlink) isn't bound by Mynamar laws, and (IMHO) shouldn't give the time of day to the requests of a junta commiting crimes against humanity, systemic extermination[0] of ethnic minorities.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
by throw0101c | 2025-10-23 11:56:35+00:00
The latter part of the title is a reference to H.L. Mencken's saying: Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

* https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/51436-democracy-is-the-theo...

* https://archive.org/details/littlebookcmajor00mencrich/mode/...
Ask HN: Suggest some IT roles suitable for introverts
by AdityaSanthosh | 2025-10-23 11:56:46+00:00
Background: I have been working as a software engineer in Bangalore, India for 4 years now. My first 2 roles were fine where I was working mostly alone and my managers seemed fine with it, my work did not involve much interaction with my teammates. I switched to a 3rd company last year and there started my problems. Despite being friendly and warm, it seems like I was just not able to gel well with my teammates, plus I was remote as well, people wouldn't respond to slack messages. I ultimately quit that company because one project dragged on beyond original timeline and I felt demotivated to burnt out to even touch it. I changed 2 other companies since then and the common feedback I get is I am not engaging enough with the team. All this while I am approaching my work from the POV of deepness. Like I go hours and hours without talking to anyone all but coding. I only talk when there is a unknown in my tasks or if I need some clarification. I suppose this is a cultural thing. Also because of this nature, I usually get the feedback that I am not leader material or that I can't influence others or I can't work with others. Hearing this feedback constantly over the past one year at multiple roles is depressing me. FYI, I was always told that my coding skills are great, my commitment skills are high and I ask good questions while picking up a task. I am thinking of switching to something like linux system programming or join some GCC
by M95D | 2025-10-23 11:57:03+00:00
And why does it have to be that complicated? Why can't we just

echo "CAP_KILL CAP_SYS_NICE /usr/bin/htop" >> /proc/sys/kernel/some_file echo "CAP_FOWNER CAP_CHOWN /usr/bin/mc" >> /proc/sys/kernel/some_file

or simply

cp /etc/caps /proc/sys/kernel/caps

to apply all of them at once?
by lproven | 2025-10-23 11:57:36+00:00
> the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.

Very hard disagree.

It took me half a dozen installs in VMs before I dared try on hardware. I never managed to get the Arm64 version installed at all, due to the cryptic minimalist info the installer gave me, which wasn't anywhere near enough to go on.

I have it on hardware now. It took a day or 2 of work but now it runs it's totally stable. However, the Byzantine partitioning scheme it uses means that although I gave it 32GB of disk, I don't have enough disk space to install Xfce.

It is on a Thinkpad W500, on a ~250GB SSD, multibooting with WinXP64, and NetBSD 10, and both Crunchbang++ Linux and Alpine Linux.

I tend to find that people who praise the installer tell me that it's never crossed their mind to dual-boot and they find it simple because they single-boot it on a very over-specced system where space restraints don't matter much.
by mannykannot | 2025-10-23 11:58:05+00:00
The question of whether, or to what extent, LLMs understand anything is an interesting one, tied up with our difficulty in saying what 'understanding' means, beyond broad statements along the lines of it being an ability to see the implications of our knowledge and use it in non-rote and creative ways.

The most honest answer to these questions I can give is to say "I don't know", though I'm toying with the idea that they understand (in some sense) the pragmatics of language use, but not that language refers to an external world which changes according to rules and causes that are independent of what we can and do say about it. This would be a very strange state to be in, and I cannot imagine what it would be like to be in such a state. We have never met anybody or anything like it.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-23 11:58:13+00:00
LLMs in general struggles with numbers, it's easy to tell with the medium sized models that struggle with line replacement commands where it has to count, it usually takes a couple of tries to get right.

I always imagined they'd have an easier time if they could start a vim instance and send search/movement/insert commands instead, not having to keep track of numbers and do calculations, but instead visually inspect the right thing happening.

I haven't tried this new feature yet, but that was the first thing that came to mind when seeing it, it might be easier for LLMs to do edits this way.
by dangus | 2025-10-23 11:58:59+00:00
We gotta stop with the Steve Jobs cult. It doesn’t require Jobs’ skills. It requires a company with good management that knows how to determine product vision.

I’m not even asking for Apple to be “revolutionary,” I really think they just need to sit down and map out a buyer persona and take the time to understand who is buying their new product and why.

They obviously didn’t do that with the Vision Pro, they chased technology for technology’s sake out of fear that a new competitor might get their own App Store.
by dkersten | 2025-10-23 12:00:41+00:00
I used to flag obvious scam adverts. A bunch of times I'd even get an email response a few weeks later saying it was taken down. But then I'd see it again (maybe slightly different or by a "different" advertiser, who knows). Its whack-a-mole.

The reality is that google profits from scam adverts, so they don't proactively do anything about it and hide behind the "at our scale, we can't effectively do anything about it" argument. Which is complete horseshit because if you can't prevent obvious scams on your platform, you don't deserve to have a platform. Google doesn't have to be running at their scale. "We would make less money" is not a valid excuse. We'd all make more money if we could ignore laws and let people be scammed or taken advantage of.

There's plenty of ways they could solve it, but they choose not to. IMHO this should be a criminal offence and google executives should be harshly punished. Its also why I have a rather negative view of googlers, since they wilfully perpetuate this stuff by working on adtech while nothing is being done about the normal everyday people getting scammed each day. Its only getting worse with AI, but I've been seeing it for years.
by spicyusername | 2025-10-23 12:00:59+00:00
I just got a car with Android auto for the first time, after owning an old car for quite a long time.

It's an incredible step up in user experience.

I can't possibly imagine the rationale for doing this being anything more than mismanagement.

The only reason I can think of is that GM wants the user data that Android auto or Apple carplay collect, and they're willing to provide a worse user experience to collect it.
by vladms | 2025-10-23 12:02:00+00:00
> God I hate the web. The engineering equivalent of a car made of duct tape.

Most of the complex thing I have seen being made (or contributed to) needed duct tape sooner or later. Engineering is the art of trade-offs, of adapting to changing requirements (that can appear due to uncontrollable events external to the project), technology and costs.

Related, this is how the first long distance automobile trip was done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz#First_cross-countr... . Seems to me it had quite some duct tape.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-23 12:02:11+00:00
To be fair, most of the times, the tools works best with the models trained with those tools in mind, and vice-versa.

Not to mention not all models/inference works the same way so you can't really replicate the same experience. For example, new Harmony format means you can now inject messages while GPT-OSS is running inference, but obviously Claude Code don't support that because their models don't support that.
by brightball | 2025-10-23 12:02:23+00:00
I checked on this and it’s not as cut and dry as you make it out to be.

> That said, there was later controversy in 2023 reports about a 2022 incident where Musk refused to extend or activate Starlink coverage over Russian-occupied Crimea to prevent its use in a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea fleet, citing concerns over escalating the war. Musk has stated this was to avoid complicity in a “major act of war,” and clarified that coverage wasn’t active in that area to begin with, so he declined Ukraine’s request to enable it.
by reactordev | 2025-10-23 12:02:26+00:00
Nope, exactly the same. FM is Frequency Modulation which is what you can do with oscillators and the above mentioned envelope points.

Whether it’s a sine wave, a waveform, a bass line, a kick sample, a sawtooth, a square wave, doesn’t matter.

These things have been solved in the late 70s by Yamaha’s DX7 and Moog.

What most people find confusing isn’t the ADSR but the fact that there are multiple oscillators each with their own volumes and patch bays, inputs and outputs.

At the end of the day, they are all very much the same.

Sound Gen/Sample -> ADSR -> Filter chain -> patch out -> in -> master out.
by incomingpain | 2025-10-23 12:02:26+00:00
>That is indicative of cherry picking the authorities you chose to discuss it with,

Fair to just say anecdotal or they were being polite.

>since the problems with this book and the theories behind it are both well-known and well-documented.

Reading this article, it's exactly what the book was written for, it's exactly what's wrong with "the experts" and it's almost certain that these authors did not read the book.

> that have limited to no evidence (e.g., massage, acupuncture, yoga, community theater, and neurofeedback), according to the latest treatment guidelines by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies

If you read the book, and those authors did not. PTSD experts, including him, had been tracking Traumatic events and the people who almost certainly had PTSD were not getting help from 'the experts'. first responders at 9/11 for example had great benefits and could have seen therapists, had largely gone to chiropractors and yoga to treat their PTSD. Which wasnt something he expected. It wasn't intentional, they simply had body aches and had gone for treatment. But that's how he realized the body connection and how it keeps score.

He wrote the book because 'the experts' discount what works and the lay people dont give 2 shits what the experts think.
by MzHN | 2025-10-23 12:02:27+00:00
> I worried that there might be a lot of iterations where one or two of the options would be things that the person didn't understand, or didn't care about.

I won't disagree here, it would be tedious.

> picking what they understand and don't dislike, then the 'vs' system is there for helping determine the order of those items

Sounds promising to me.
by einsteinx2 | 2025-10-23 12:03:07+00:00
I’m curious what hardware failures you had. In my experience (I’ve had a Dreamcast since they were new and have been a part of the homebrew scene for years) they are absolutely rock solid hardware. Can take a ton of abuse without issue and I’ve never had a single console fail on me, nor have I heard of failures from my homebrew scene buddies…

To be clear I’m not implying you’re lying or anything, I was just extremely surprised to hear this as it goes against all of my experience with the console.
by squarefoot | 2025-10-23 12:03:24+00:00
Problem is that as soon as some technology takes traction, it catches the attention of businesses, and there is where the slow but steady enshittification process begins. Not that business necessarily equals enshittification, but in a world dominated by capitalism without borders soon or later someone will break some unwritten rules and others will have to follow to remain competitive, until that new technology will become a new web, and we'll be back to square one. To me the problem isn't technical, as isn't its solution.
by chrisco255 | 2025-10-23 12:03:25+00:00
This chart seems off, for some reason. It shows the average price for a dozen eggs as hitting $1.20 in 2019. I don't remember ever paying that little in my adult life for eggs, and I've lived in small towns during that time frame too.

Also this should be noted: Large white, Grade A chicken eggs, sold in a carton of a dozen. Includes organic, non-organic, cage free, free range, and traditional.

Egg options in grocery stores today are way more diverse than they were when I was a kid in the 90s. Organic eggs were rare. None were cage free. Today's options include soy-free, cage free, free range, etc. I pay a premium for soy free, free range eggs. This wasn't even an option in 1997 or 2005 or most of the years listed here.
by buran77 | 2025-10-23 12:03:43+00:00
> But the US (who has jurisdiction over Starlink) isn't bound by Mynamar laws, and (IMHO) shouldn't...

Should everyone else be allowed to do anything they want in a country as long as it's from a distance because "your laws don't apply to me"? Is it fine when Russian, Chinese, or NK hackers are operating against the US?

If a country is good enough to sell to and provide a service there, it's good enough to obey its laws.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-10-23 12:04:19+00:00
Is this a rhetoric question? Safari is just a middleman. G offers seemingly free services in exchange of your data and in order to get a market monopoly. Then they can sell you to their advertisers, squeeze out the competition and become the only Sheriff in town. How many free lunches you have got in your career?

”Competition is for losers.” -Peter Thiel
by FooBarWidget | 2025-10-23 12:04:19+00:00
"Better" in what way? Ultra-large frontier model performance? China doesn't need that to achieve strategic objectives, like increased productivity and automation, advanced weaponry, advanced manufacturing, user adoption and deployment at scale.

You're narrowing your claim into something you can defend but is strategically hollow. Advanced weaponry, major productivity improvements, R&D speed etc — at the end of day, those are the things the US bloc actually want to slow down. Ultra-large foundational modals was just (incorrectly) seen as the only way to achieve those objectives.

It's like you're arguing that Chinese fighters are inferior to western stealth fighters. That's true when you compare plane-by-plane on paper. And yet the Chinese airfighting system-as-a-whole was still able to down Rafaels with high precision and without being retaliated on, as shown by the India-Pakistan standoff a while ago. What's the point of arguing "we've slowed China's aircraft engine development speed" when they're still shooting down western jets?
by energy123 | 2025-10-23 12:04:30+00:00
Sure, we don't have to be competitive with China on manufacturing, but that is hardly the fault of neoliberalism, which was the subject of discussion. It's quite squarely the "fault" of anti-neoliberal policies like immigration restrictions and minimum wage. We could have had Chinese workers on Chinese wages on Western soil making widgets for Western firms, basically a neoliberal wet dream, but that was prevented by anti-neoliberal policies.
by fschuett | 2025-10-23 12:04:41+00:00
What inane, impure nonsense. You are still using "execution" and "output", these filthy, contingent effects of reality. Why would you use THREE entire combinators, when you could've just defined ιx = xSK. Pathetic. A true, pure program never needs to run. It just exists as a proof, and by its existence as such it simply reconfigures the consciousness of the user to align with its obvious, Manichaean-esque purity. "Running" the "program", please. What are we, barbarians?
by armchairhacker | 2025-10-23 12:04:48+00:00
We have a “new internet”. We have the indie web, VPNs, websites not behind Cloudflare, other browsers. You won’t have a large audience, but a new protocol won't fix that.

Also, plenty of small and medium businesses are doing fine on the internet. You only hear about ones with problems like this. And if these problems become more frequent and public, Google will put more effort into fixing them.

I think the most practical thing we can do is support people and companies who fall through the cracks, by giving them information to understand their situation and recover, and by promoting them.
by miroljub | 2025-10-23 12:05:26+00:00
There's nothing wrong with it. Stored procedures, Java, Delphi, Ruby, Python, or whatever can be considered as a business logic layer separated from the data storage. Similarly, you consider your Python controller business layer separate from the web UI frontend.

And if you complain that stored procedure language is not so versatile for the business logic, remember that people have been using far worse languages for that, like COBOL, MUMPS, ColdFusion, ...