MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by swyx | 2025-10-16 19:02:00+00:00
(coauthor) main charts/evals here https://x.com/cognition/status/1978867021669413252

you can try the https://playground.cognition.ai/ here

i wrote a longer explainer here https://x.com/swyx/status/1978874342743343254 but saving you the click

this was a perspective cut from the blogpost, but let me explain why subagents kill long context

Like you can spend $500m building 100 million context models, and they would be 1) slow, 2) expensive to use, 3) have huge context rot. O(n) is the lower bound.

Cog's approach is something you learn in day 1 of CS50 - divide and parallelize. Embeddings are too dumb, Agentic Search is too slow. So train limited-agency (max 4 turns), natively parallel tool calling (avg parallelism of 7-8, custom toolset) fast (2800tok/s) subagents to give the performance of Agentic Search under an acceptable "Flow Window" that feels immaterially slower than Embeddings.

The benefit of this is threefold:

- 8 ^ 4 toolcalls cover a very large code search space. can compound subagent calls if more needed.

- predictable cost & end to end latency

- subagent outputs "clean" contexts, free of context failure modes like context poisoning and context rot

we originally called this Rapid Agentic Search, to contrast with RAG. but Fast Context rolls off the tongue better.

-- Second perspective --

The Fundamental Equation of Coding Agents is:

Coding Agent Performance = Ability to Read the Right Files * Ability to Generate the Right Diffs

Fast Context is Cognition's first solution for the Read. As codebases get larger and and tasks get more complex, Reads get more important. the average production codebase first query in Cascade is >60% just searching and reading files.

But if this were just about speed, it might not be that exciting. I think there are unappreciated effects in performance as well when you have very good context. In other words:

Context Engineering is Actually Very Important. Too important for humans and hardcoded rules.

The swe-greps are the first dedicated context engineer agent models.
by dotancohen | 2025-10-16 19:02:02+00:00
Doesn't mean that he's wrong, just that he knows it is an unpopular position. I can think of other positions that become fashionable or not with no relation to being correct or incorrect.

I personally don't know if he's right or wrong, I don't live in Europe, but the need to use a throwaway account is not evidence for being wrong.
by lovich | 2025-10-16 19:02:05+00:00
With the way our society is set up to tie a large number of benefits necessary to live to employment, then yes you are actually harming someone by ending their employment.

Severance might outweigh that harm, but it depends on the amount, if any is given. Also I want to point out that the vast majority of companies give 0 severance. I’ve gotten it once in my life and I’m fairly certain it was “shut the fuck up” money as they had done some shady shenanigans to a bonus I was entitled to.
by ClimaxGravely | 2025-10-16 19:02:33+00:00
Worked at many game development studios, only one truly bad experience. Granted I probably got extremely lucky but there are good studios/jobs out there.

My current company is a 4 day work week, fully remote and good pay. I feel I get more work done in a 32 hour week than I did at another company where I had hit ~90 hour weeks a few times. I'm not going back and fixing code I wrote while sleep deprived.

Also worked outside games in STEM, education and a couple startups. I wouldn't say they were particularly better.
by MacSourcePorts | 2025-10-16 19:02:36+00:00
Yeah for better or worse something I discovered was that the number of projects that fit the standard pattern of projects derived from the original's source code is actually pretty small, and the reverse engineering efforts are more common than I thought.

On the wiki on my build system I have a categorization thing happening, perhaps I should incorporate that into the site. https://github.com/MacSourcePorts/MSPBuildSystem/wiki

One thing I try to avoid though there are some examples on the site is recompilation efforts. Those can get into dodgy territory.
by spragl | 2025-10-16 19:02:45+00:00
Then you really should be angry at Apple and Google, not the hardware.

The preparations for eIDAS 2.0 (the EU thing) has been heavily inspired by SSI. If they keep up the good work, and implement it properly, security and privacy will be top notch. And that is only possible by using TPM (or really SE when we talk about mobile phones).

Yes, I know that eIDAS might end up not meeting the early promises. We will have to see. But in that case it will be despite the possibilities that the hardware provides, not because of them.
by jmkni | 2025-10-16 19:03:10+00:00
Different prompts/approaches?

I "grew up", as it were, on StackOverflow, when I was in my early dev days and didn't have a clue what I was doing I asked question after question on SO and learned very quickly the difference between asking a good question vs asking a bad one

There is a great Jon Skeet blog post from back in the day called "Writing the perfect question" - https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2010/08/29/writing-the-perfect-...

I think this is as valid as ever in the age of AI, you will get much better output from any of these chatbots if you learn and understand how to ask a good question.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-10-16 19:03:16+00:00
Anthropic talks about ‘progressive disclosure’.

If you have a large number of skills, you could group them into a smaller number of skills each with subskills. That way not all the (sub)skill descriptions need to be loaded into context.

For example, instead of having a ‘PDF editing’ skill, you can have a ‘file editing’ skill that, when loaded into context, tells the LLM what type of files it can operate on. And then the LLM can ask for the info about how to do stuff with PDF files.
by themafia | 2025-10-16 19:03:48+00:00
I disagree. This is a way of looking at _where_ the government funding comes from or it's a way at looking at the _share_ of burden by source. The overall tax rates don't actually matter in this case and only implicate how that share is distributed within the group.

The point I'm trying to make is businesses used to carry a more significant fraction of federal spending during a period where they had less overall influence relative to the citizen.

Now we're inverted. Businesses have excepted themselves from most of the costs leaving that burden to the citizen, but we live in a country where business needs are put well ahead of the citizens.

The bigger picture is what matters here.
by klntsky | 2025-10-16 19:04:47+00:00
I vibed something like this for markdown extraction just a week ago: https://github.com/promptware/readweb

Opensourced it just now.

More specifically, it works like this:

suggestPreset: HTML -> Preset (via LLM) applyPreset: HTML + Preset -> Markdown (programmatically)

Where preset is:

type Preset = { // anchors to make this preset more fragile on purpose. // Elements that identify website engine layout go here. preset_match_detectors: CSSSelector[]; // main content extractors main_content_selectors: CSSSelector[]; // filter selectors to trim the main content. // banners, subscription forms, sponsor content, etc. main_content_filters: CSSSelector[]; };

suggestPreset uses a feedback loop that enhances + applies preset until the markdown is really clean
by devilbunny | 2025-10-16 19:04:48+00:00
You have to be very reliable on a lot of fronts for peritoneal dialysis to work. Sterility is hard to maintain; you can't just wipe it off with alcohol like we do with small IV's because replacing a PD catheter involves going to the hospital for surgery. You have to remember to place and drain your dialysate. And so on.

For someone with meticulousness, educability on maintaining the pieces that go into PD, and a good living situation, it's far better than hemodialysis. But people like that are rarely the ones whose kidneys fail.
by fabrice_d | 2025-10-16 19:04:57+00:00
On the web, if your server is compromised it's game over, even if the publisher is not malicious. In app stores, you have some guarantee that the code that ends up on your device is what the publisher intended to ship (basically signed packages). On the web it's currently impossible to bootstrap the integrity verification with just SRI.

This proposal aims at providing the same guarantees for web apps, without resorting to signed packages on the web (ie. not the same mechanism that FirefoxOS or ChromeOS apps used). It's competing with the IWA proposal from Google, which is a good thing.
by themafia | 2025-10-16 19:05:21+00:00
> In a global economy higher business taxes just cause large international corporations to incorporate in a different jurisdiction, which gives them an advantage over smaller purely domestic corporations, which is bad.

This is the common wisdom. I doubt it. The legal system in the USA is worth paying for. If these companies really want to submit to European law, then, they're welcome to it. I don't think that loss actually hurts domestic businesses but helps the massively.
by beyarkay | 2025-10-16 19:05:40+00:00
> Do you have to read everything in a dataset with your own eyes to make sense of it?

I mean, if you don't read it yourself, you're going to have to rely on _something/someone_ to filter/summarise the output, and at that point you might as well just accept that you'll never truly understand the entire thing?

I'll agree that we can do meaningful work (like reducing bias) without reading the entire dataset ourselves, but that doesn't reduce the fact that we cannot read everything that's going into these machines.
by Tade0 | 2025-10-16 19:05:51+00:00
Over here it functions as follows:

When you're buying an item you declare you need an invoice on it and punch in your tax id.

Later, when you're filling your monthly taxes, you include that invoice in an XML file (plenty of generators available along with the free government-issued one), sign it with your digital ID and send that to the Ministry of Finance servers (MF servers for short). The MF servers then compare your entry to what all the people that sold you stuff entered.

This exists largely to prevent VAT manipulation, but at the same time gives all involved parties a clear, regular indicator that everything is fine in terms of taxes.

I'm a contractor and do this little dance every month using an accounting SaaS.
by tasuki | 2025-10-16 19:05:57+00:00
> EA employees and the Communications Workers of America union have issued a statement against the proposed private acquisition of the company, claiming they were not represented in the negotiations and any jobs lost as a result would "be a choice, not a necessity, made to pad investors' pockets".

Are the employees claiming the company will be more profitable without them?

What a disingenuous thing to put forward! I'd have expected the employees to claim that letting them go will tank the value of the company.
by dusted | 2025-10-16 19:06:22+00:00
> This is quite the reduction, ...

Thank you, that spawned this notion in my head, I wonder why. It’s funny, I think, how quickly people dismiss the subjective experience of a crackhead having an ecstatic conversation with God or the universe — yet insist that the depth of their own experience of love, religion, or meditation can’t possibly be reduced to neurotransmitters.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-16 19:06:33+00:00
> The longer a chat goes, it gets worse very quickly.

This has been the same for every single LLM I've used, ever, they're all terrible at that.

So terrible that I've stopped going beyond two messages in total. If it doesn't get it right at the first try, its more and more unlikely to get it right for every message you add.

Better to always start fresh, iterate on the initial prompt instead.
by alecco | 2025-10-16 19:06:36+00:00
I completely disagree. For me the best for bulk coding (with very good instructions) is Sonnet 4.5. Then GPT-5 codex is slower but better guessing what I want with tiny prompts. Gemini 2.5 Pro is good to review large codebases but for real work usually gets confused a lot, not worth it. (even though I was forced to pay for it by Google, I rarely use it).

But the past few days I started getting an "AI Mode" in Google Search that rocks. Way better than GPT-5 or Sonnet 4.5 for figuring out things and planning. And I've been using without my account (weird, but I'm not complaining). Maybe this is Gemini 3.0. I would love for it to be good at coding. I'm near limits on my Anthropic and OpenAI accounts.
by gary_0 | 2025-10-16 19:06:44+00:00
Some of SSE is required as part of the x86_64 ABI, and also new versions of Windows (infamously, now) add required CPU extensions so software will often base its requirements on that. And SSE4x is ubiquitous enough (99% of PCs) that some software/games will just require it and simply crash if it can't use those instructions.
by 0x457 | 2025-10-16 19:06:48+00:00
Depends on your definition of good.

I think Swift (and even ObjC) is perfect for AppKit & UIKit. I think those frameworks are pretty good and I like using them. Languages have great integration, Swift literally made around them. Those toolkits have great integrations with the macOS.

I find C# a pretty nice language for GUI, I assume it has good (maybe not great) integration with at least one of MS GUI toolkits.

I find Rust good for GUI, but right now story is meh. Wrapper style frameworks always suffer from Rust not being whatever it wraps. Pure Rust framework miss a lot of features compared to wrapper frameworks.
by hephaes7us | 2025-10-16 19:07:29+00:00
Tokens are expensive, sure, but I don't even _want_ Ollama to run inference for me.

Ollama gives me, essentially, a wrapper for llama.cpp and convenient hosting where I can download models.

I'm happy to pay for the bandwidth, plus a premium to cover their running this service.

I'm furthermore happy to pay a small charge to cover the development that they've done and continue to do to make local-inference easy for me.
by ajayvk | 2025-10-16 19:08:25+00:00
There has been lots of discussions about the issues with YAML and other config languages. This post looks at the experience with using Starlark as the configuration language for infrastructure deployment using OpenRun.

Starlark can result in much more concise and flexible config for end-users. It does require extra work on the part of the developers who are writing the code which reads the Starlark based config.
by bangaladore | 2025-10-16 19:08:27+00:00
Some of these questions are odd at best. But I guess this is what I'd expect out of a recruiter who had very surface level knowledge of a subject:

Firmware Resilience for a Voice-Activated Device The home assistant prototype just hit the lab, and its latest voice command triggers a rare crash—barely reproducible, but critical. Debug traces hint at a race condition when processing real-time audio and sensor interrupts under low-power standby. Today, you examine how the interrupt service routines interact with the scheduler, ensuring audio capture stays seamless even as the device maintains privacy guarantees and maximizes battery life. Firmware must not leak sensitive audio fragments after a crash. The hardware platform is arm-cortex based and will see hundreds of millions of users relying on every subsystem working as one.
by neilv | 2025-10-16 19:08:34+00:00
> How useless are you for that cool startup?

> [...] after noticing how hard it is to get honest feedback when applying to a YC startup or something else entirely.

> It's a custom 5-minute challenge that roasts you after.

That's OK.

I've been working long enough in software engineering, to see the interviews turn... from collegially getting a sense of what it would be like to worth together, on the product and as part of the team... into frat hazings, negotiation negging opportunities, general corporate dysfunction, and fluffing some incumbent's ego.

So I think workers are all set, without roasting.

You know who could use a dose of humility, though?
by epistasis | 2025-10-16 19:08:37+00:00
Well it's important, because the particular new lead for drug targeting is not super valuable, they are a dime a dozen, easier to find than a startup idea. Actually driving a successful drug development program is an entirely different matter that can only be established with $10-$100M of early exploration, with a successful drug costing much more to get to market.

It could also be that particular prioritization method that uses Gemma is useful in its own, but we won't know that unless it is somehow benchmarked against the many alternatives that have been used up until now. And in other benchmark settings, these cell sentence methods have not been that impressive.
by chews | 2025-10-16 19:09:34+00:00
I'll go one step further, because the company I used to work at built browser extensions. Google built ChromeFrame (https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-get...) a tool that would allow IE to load chrome as an activex component and transparently replace the rendering engine of IE.

But building the software wasn't enough, they used some scammy browser toolbar company (one of our competitors) to deploy this software silently and without any user intervention, all of a sudden millions of users overnight switched to chrome. It was deployed as a proxy botnet and Google knew full well what was happening. I sent a note to the humans at Firefox because we had a top 10 extension at the time and were in the midst of porting it to Chrome. They called their contacts and sure enough our suspicions were correct.

Google would later go on to buy that company because they were pushing so much traffic to Google's ad partners (Ad Meld being another acquisition).

We got screwed and were never able to recover from the run-around. I became friends with the folks on the Chromium team and we talked about how google used a botnet to launch Chrome over beers in a SF dive bar.
by stevenwoo | 2025-10-16 19:09:36+00:00
Safeway in the Bay Area regularly comes up very close to the same cost as Whole Foods, unless one regularly uses the app and clips the saving coupons for Safeway.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Whole-Foods-vs-Safeway-W...

Ranch 99 and the little De Martini's produce shop undercut Safeway prices on produce in Mountain View. The comparable items work out to be less expensive at Trader Joe's versus Safeway, too, last time I looked. Produce at Costco is regularly less than all of the above but I only buy a few produce items that I can freeze for later use there. For me the two advantages to Safeway are the extended hours of operation and the locations being convenient.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-10-16 19:10:12+00:00
In China, they use E-bikes, I'm not sure why that wouldn't work here? Autonomous E-bikes shouldn't be that hard to manage, ya, they would need to balance themselves like segways, but I'm sure the tech is already there for it. There is no need for them to be full sized cars, even for crash safety...since it is just food that would get damaged in an accident.
by xp84 | 2025-10-16 19:10:49+00:00
Go look at the financial results of H&R Block and tell me your guess of how many people are spending a ton of money getting taxes done. (Intuit too, but we might not know how much is TT vs QuickBooks).

And I suspect the #1 most common tax form H&R does for retail clients is the 1040EZ, the one that should take anyone with a $2 calculator a total of 10 minutes to get through. For the privilege of having H&R do it for you, you get to pay about $75 and they'll generously loan you your own few thousand dollar (due to EITC) refund on the spot, at an effective APR of like 7,000%
by colpabar | 2025-10-16 19:11:32+00:00
Yes! There is no character limit here. It drives me bonkers when I read comments like that one. What is anyone supposed to get out of it? It has the same meaning as "lol".

Comments like that are why I left reddit - they do not foster discussion, they are low-effort attempts at getting updoots. If the only meaning that can be extracted from a comment is "I disagree", it shouldn't be a comment, it should be a downvote. It's a waste of an indentation level.
by mtone | 2025-10-16 19:12:10+00:00
Recently llama.cpp made a few common parameters default (-ngl 999, -fa on) so it got simpler: --model and --context-size and --jinja generally does it to start.

We end up fiddling with other parameters because it provides better performance for a particular setup so it's well worth it. One example is the recent --n-cpu-moe switch to offload experts to CPU while filling all available VRAM that can give a 50% boost on models like gpt-oss-120b.

After tasting this, not using it is a no-go. Meanwhile on Ollama there's an open issue asking for this: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/11772

Finally, llama-swap separately provides the auto-loading/unloading feature for multiple models.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-16 19:12:15+00:00
> Actually-healthy companies cosplaying as struggling companies, as an excuse to justify layoffs

This is a negotiation. You’re seeing one side message.

The union didn’t have a say in whether EA got acquired. But it does have the ability to make it a mess. Part of that ability is in public messaging.

So you’d expect to see , if the union is savvy, public grandstanding and threats paired with private negotiations for better terms for union members, whether that be immunity from lay-offs or some other wins.
by bangaladore | 2025-10-16 19:12:15+00:00
Yeah, it's unclear if this is something like TODO or an internal Jira tracking bugs.

Either way though, this is not a small company. DoD/Navy utilizes this all over their systems. TODO shouldn't be getting pushed to main, nor should there be security issues swept under the rug for later.

Maybe they disclosed this to some vendors previously, but I doubt.
by JyB | 2025-10-16 19:12:16+00:00
I'm super confused as well. This seems like exactly that, just some default prompt injections to chose from. I guess I kinda understand them in the context of their claude chat UI product.

By I don't understand why it's a thing in Claude Code tho when we already have Claude.md? Could also just point to any .md file in the prompt as preamble but not even needed. https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...

That concept is also already perfectly specd in the MCP standard right? (Although not super used I think?) https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/ser...
by unregistereddev | 2025-10-16 19:12:25+00:00
I wholeheartedly disagree. Grocery stores in the US are typically much larger than grocery stores abroad. A Kroger, Publix, Piggly Wiggly, Schnuck's, or HyVee will typically have just as many healthy food options as a grocery store abroad. The difference is these US grocery stores also stock a much larger variety of unhealthy options.

As someone else in this thread used sweet yogurt as an example, it is trivially easy to find unsweetened yogurt in nearly any grocery store in the US. The difference is that there's also a very large selection of sweet flavored yogurt.
by tasuki | 2025-10-16 19:12:26+00:00
> We are calling on regulators and elected officials to scrutinise this deal and ensure that any path forward protects jobs, preserves creative freedom, and keeps decision-making accountable to the workers who make EA successful.

If it's the workers that make EA successful, the investors would be stupid to let them go! Not only do they lose these great workers who make the company successful, also they potentially get new competition from them.

> As such, workers have launched a petition in a "fight to make video games better for workers and players - not billionaires".

Afaik the AAA games that EA makes are already plenty bad for the players...

> Effectively, Saudi Arabia's vast fossil fuel-derived state wealth is controlled by one person, which isn't good for human rights, or business either.

Finally something I can agree with in the whole article...