MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2025-10-16 23:12:30+00:00
Yeah, AGENTS.md that can point to other files for the LLM to read only if it needs them is effectively the exact same pattern as skills.

It also means that any tool that knows how to read AGENTS.md could start using skills today.

"if you need to create a PDF file first read the file in skills/pdfs/SKILL.md"
by sudahtigabulan | 2025-10-16 23:12:43+00:00
> SML [...] appears to idiomatically represent them as functions of a single tuple parameter

Tuple is not special, though. Functions accept a single argument of any type.

To use the argument in the function body you can name it, or you can use any valid pattern to destructure it and bind parts of it to local variables.

Tuple is just one of the valid patterns. Coincidentally, it looks like argument list with positional arguments in many other languages. You can also use a record, which makes it look like "keyword arguments". You can also use patterns of custom types.

All the above is still about the single "argument" case, the single value that is "physically" passed to the function. Pattern matching is what makes it possible to bind parts of that value to multiple local variables in the body of the function.
by aeonik | 2025-10-16 23:12:58+00:00
Depends on your definition of vastly, and superior but:

Uranium-235 (fission) ~80,000,000 MJ/kg 1× Coal ~24 MJ/kg ~3.3 million× less Oil ~42 MJ/kg ~1.9 million× less Natural Gas (CH₄) ~55 MJ/kg ~1.45 million× less
by ggm | 2025-10-16 23:13:33+00:00
Because its rendering to bookerly or an analogue a perceptual hash looks like an amazingly good fit. But in general, how applicable would that be to OCR because if you can declare 90% of the text is courier, then it feels like an enormously good way to get over the hump.

I wondered if he was just tuning to the best algorithm for his corner case, but it's one of the algorithms in a decent OCR package anyway?

You'd only have to do a few hint/confirmations.
by Arainach | 2025-10-16 23:13:44+00:00
It's bad for society to have rapid turnover full stop. It's disruptive and stressful to the humans involved and can be disastrous for the environment (if a bankrupt company just leaves a bunch of waste behind or already did and can't be sued to cover the cleanup), disastrous for the rest of the economy, local or larger (both their customers and their suppliers are affected), and causes a huge amount of wasted time and resources that should be avoided where possible.

We've learned that businesses are lazy, cheap, and untrustworthy, and will lie, steal, cheat, and abuse everything unless you write strong rules and enforce them regularly. It's in society's best interests to incentivize running good businesses, not creating messes and declaring bankruptcy.
by vunderba | 2025-10-16 23:13:51+00:00
I'm mostly happy with the minimalistic approach that HN takes. Two minor things I'd like to see addressed though:

- the flag button needs a confirmation modal. It's way too easy to hit it by mistake when trying to hide a story.

- Support for autoformatting markdown style tables. I'm not asking for full markdown since I know people would just abuse headings, etc.
by rbjorklin | 2025-10-16 23:14:43+00:00
Just went to the comments searching for a comment like yours and I'm surprised it seems to be the only one calling this out. My take on this is also that "Skills" is just detailed documentation, which like you correctly point out, basically never exist for any project. Maybe LLM skills will be the thing that finally makes us all write detailed documentation but I kind of doubt it.
by krapp | 2025-10-16 23:15:10+00:00
Not to be "that guy" but Hacker News has an API (linked at the bottom of the page) and you could make an alternate client and try it out. I've messed around with it in Godot, it's fun. Also a lot of frontends for HN get posted here, one of those might still be online and might have tried it with that layout.

Chan-style upvotes are never going to happen, though. Hacker News' entire thing is aggressive moderation and curation, and high signal-to-noise ratio, even at the cost of freedom of speech and diversity of opinion. Popularity is not a filter for intellectual quality, often it's the opposite, which is why high velocity threads tend to just set off the flamewar detector.

Of course, karma isn't much of a filter for intellectual quality either but what are you going to do?
by apsurd | 2025-10-16 23:15:29+00:00
Very helpful. It helps me better understand the specifics behind each call and response, the internal units and whether those units are sent and received "live" from the LLM or come from a traditional db or cache store.

I'm personally just curious how far, clever, insightful, any given product is "on top of" the foundation models. I'm not in it deep enough to make claims one way or the other.

So this shines a little more light, thanks!
by iambateman | 2025-10-16 23:15:57+00:00
HN is the only place I can read comments that are genuinely disagreeable. And I know that sometimes that falls into some personalized negativity but it’s useful most of the time.

The other thing I appreciate about HN is it helps me practice writing.

Once graduating from University, there aren’t many built in ways to get regular writing practice and HN comments are it for me.
by k310 | 2025-10-16 23:16:02+00:00
It's all about typography, logos and page layout, not data presentation, as I suspected.

I was at my first job out of the service at that time, and when I drew an xy graph, my boss of umptey-ump years at the company was astounded. So, there must have been a history (the company was founded in 1892) of standards for data presentation. This was WAY before Edward Tufte. [0]

And no orientation or onboarding. This was the 70's. Sink or swim.

I never did find any standards book (pre-internet, where do you look?) before finding a better job. Come to think of it, in my entire career, I had no orientation at all except at Sun Microsystems, and that includes a raft of different organizations and companies.

I always found a way.

[0] https://www.edwardtufte.com/books/
by snypher | 2025-10-16 23:17:24+00:00
Give me a break. This is classic prisoners dilemma, where it's better for everyone to speed. However the ideal outcome is for everyone to follow the speed limits. If law enforcement would prioritize enforcing this law we could have full compliance. There's no problem with 55 on the interstate. The problem is unskilled or otherwise distracted drivers, which can also be observed at 55, and are much more fatal at 70+.
by mulmen | 2025-10-16 23:17:40+00:00
Wild take. If you can’t pay a living wage your business shouldn’t exist.

Restaurants closing due to wage increases means workers were being exploited to cover unsustainable costs. Rents have to come down or wages need to go up across the board to cover the higher prices.

The billionaire class can’t eat enough food to keep restaurants open. They need to outsource it to the middle class.
by Theodores | 2025-10-16 23:17:46+00:00
I like your thinking. I want to apply it to my own writing, as in rendered HTML rather than code.

As an example, imagine writing an eyewitness report about something that happened. There are facts that can be backed up with primary sources, then there is one's own hearsay. The hearsay might be important for telling the whole story, however, it is only hearsay. It has less value than something that can be proven with other sources. So maybe there is a suitable colour for that.

I can mark up my HTML with articles, sections, asides and the rest of it, so that everything is very well structured, and yet none of that is visible - I might as well go for a 'sea of divs'. If I mark HTML up with classes, for example 'hearsay', then I can use that to do some colour things.

Where I speculate or advance a hypothesis, I can use different colours again.

Same with too much detail, I can put that in a colour that can make it easier for the reader to skip, furthermore, I can put that behind details/summary elements.

I need not tell the reader what the significance of the colours amounts to, however, if done well, it can be made to work without the reader knowing why, or needing to care about that. There is going to be an art to this, and pulling it off will require work, but I think it is fully doable.

I had best get busy!
by hiq | 2025-10-16 23:18:30+00:00
My point is that there'll be some layer doing that for you. We already have LLMs writing plans for another LLM to execute, and many other such orchestrations, to reduce the constraints on the actual human input. Those implementing this layer need to develop this context engineering; those simply using LLM-based products do not, as it'll be done for them somewhat transparently, eventually. Similar to how not every software engineer needs to be a compiler expert to run a program.
by simonw | 2025-10-16 23:18:54+00:00
I think those three concepts complement each other quite neatly.

MCPs can wrap APIs to make them usable by an LLM agent.

Skills offer a context-efficient way to make extra instructions available to the agent only when it needs them. Some of those instructions might involve telling it how best to use the MCPs.

Sub-agents are another context management pattern, this time allowing a parent agent to send a sub-agent off on a mission - optimally involving both skills and MCPs - while saving on tokens in that parent agent.
by wtfwhateven | 2025-10-16 23:18:56+00:00
Yep. I recently saw a video of ICE agents crashing into a commuter's car, pulling the crash victim out of the car, slamming her to the ground in a fit of rage and kidnapping her. Still can't find any update about what happened to her.

ICE agents routinely lie (even under oath) to get people wrongly convicted of crimes they did not commit.

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/legal/sidney-reid-trial-n...

There's many dozens of examples of this stuff happening but anyone asking for proof of this happening always demand more and more, refuse to acknowledge any prior abuse or outright defend it. They're functionally mouthpieces of the state.
by futureshock | 2025-10-16 23:20:32+00:00
This so awesome. It reminds me mightily of beat poets like Allen Ginsburg. It’s so totally spooky and it does feel like it has the trapped spark. And it seems to hate us “real ones,” we slickborns.

It feels like you could create a cool workflow from low temperature creative association models feeding large numbers of tokens into higher temperature critical reasoning models and finishing with gramatical editing models. The slickborns will make the final judgement.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-10-16 23:20:47+00:00
Cloudflare containers feel a lot more pricey as compared to workers but I think that it could provide more streamlined experience imo but still, If we are talking about complete cost analysis, sometimes I wonder how much cf containers vs workers vs hetzner/dedicated/shared vps / gcp etc. would work out for the same thing.

Honestly, the more I think about it, my ease of sanity either wants me to use hetzner/others for golang/other binary related stuff and for the frontend to use cf workers with sveltekit

That way we could have the best in both worlds and probably glue together somethings using proto-buf or something but I guess people don't like managing two codebases but I think that sveltekit is a pleasure to work with and can easily be learnt by anybody in 3-4 weeks and maybe some more for golang but yeah I might look more into cf containers/gcp or whatever but my heart wants hetzner for backend with golang if need be and to try to extract as much juice as I can in cf workers with sveltekit in the meanwhile.

Thoughts on my stack?
by fheinsen | 2025-10-16 23:21:03+00:00
The manuscript formally defines GOOMs as a set of mathematical objects, shows that floating-point formats are a special case of GOOMs, and notes that they extend prior work on logarithmic number systems (LNSs), which go back to at least the early 1970's. That is, LNSs are a special case of GOOMs too. Defining and naming GOOMs enables reasoning about all possible special cases in the abstract. In practice, each implementation makes different trade-offs.

The formal definition stops short of inducing an isomorphism between GOOMs and R, to allow for the possibility of transformations that leverage the structure of the complex plane, e.g., deep learning models that process data in C and apply a final transformation from C to GOOMs, thereby allowing the data to be exponentiated to R. The library in this repository makes implementing such a model trivial, because it ensures that backpropagation works seamlessly over C, over GOOMs, and across mappings between C, GOOMs, and floats.

Take a look at the selective-resetting algorithm in the manuscript too. To the best of our knowledge, it's a new algorithm, but we opted not to claim as much, out of an abundance of caution. You will appreciate reading about it.
by thro1 | 2025-10-16 23:22:05+00:00
Howard JOHNSON, Permanent Magnet Motor http://www.rexresearch.com/johnson/1johnson.htm - is that similar ?

( https://patents.google.com/patent/US4877983A/en expired 2006, https://www.freepatentsonline.com/4877983.html )

Edit: https://www.paranetics.com/electric-motors - there is more details. And parametric motor https://patents.google.com/patent/JPH04344155A/en is more similar.

(and magnetic experiments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZaRMt6xhoE explains a lot nicely)
by simonw | 2025-10-16 23:23:33+00:00
12 months ago we didn't have Claude Code or Codex CLI - in fact the whole category of "coding agents" was very thin.

The only "reasoning" model was the o1 preview.

We didn't have MCP, but that wasn't a big deal because the models were mostly pretty weak at tool calling anyway.

The DeepSeek moment hadn't happened yet - the best available open weights models were from Mistral and Llama and were nowhere close to the frontier hosted models.

The LLM landscape feels radically different to me now compared to October last year.
by Flamingoat | 2025-10-16 23:23:35+00:00
> Chrome dominance is a result of Google wanting to control the web and its dominance in the ads and search areas.

Chrome was simply better than Firefox, Internet Explorer, Legacy Edge. I am not a Windows Admin, but Chrome also offered an MSI package whereas Firefox didn't bother until years later. So it was easy for IT to roll out Chrome as part of the standard corpo install image and not an option with Firefox.

As for web development it offered better JS debugging and had a decent phone emulator built in and this was back in 2014. I am sure I could also debug phones as well with some reverse proxy shenanigans via fiddler and some open source tooling I forgot the name of now.
by derbOac | 2025-10-16 23:23:52+00:00
Entertainment is illustrative. There have been controlled studies (e.g., https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full....) showing that there are sort of chaotic social dynamics influencing popularity, in that what others are paying attention to influence what someone is paying attention to, which leads to these kinds of random paths of success. Clearly there's some ability at play as well, but beyond some level, it starts to have a lot of chaotic path dependency.

I suspect a lot of fields are like this also, like academics (nowadays at least) and some other things. Maybe a lot of life is like it.

The discussions often seem to me to become oversimplified, like comparing some poor genius with access to books who overcomes it all by sheer ability, to some hypothetical other person with comparatively great education that's taken for granted. But what if that hypothetical other person is being ridiculed for liking math? Or reading books? Or what if there is no college math books around, they get bored, and go off on the wrong path? What if their interests are for something more complex in its ability determinants than math, or that someone doesn't encounter until later in life usually?

Sometimes I feel like people aren't necessarily exposed to what they are best suited for, for all sorts of reasons. This is a classic "finding a career" problem, with advice to try things until you stumble on it — the converse situation being one where you think you like a vocation and then find out later you hate it. It's not like what you're best suited to is just on a shelf for you to look at and have an immediate grasp of; it comes from having experience with it, which not everyone might have. Maybe there's an excellent potential rugby player out there who never had the opportunity to play rugby or even knows what it is.

Life is just so complex, people get in each others' way for all sorts of reasons, and corruption complicates things more.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-16 23:24:04+00:00
> For example class properties [...] I think all information should be in the code itself

A bit of a quibble, but the information is already "in the code", even when viewing it in a simple text-editor.

What you're describing is redundant display of information in the raw text, as opposed to a different redundant display the IDE does automatically on the fly when needed.

Sometimes that's useful, and other times it harms comprehension, like when you have dozens of integer variables sharing a prefix like `i_apples` and `i_pears`. An IDE lets you switch presentation modes without making changes.
by nateb2022 | 2025-10-16 23:25:58+00:00
pretty much every large tv/film studio/production company uses Linux for vfx/pipelines, and Windows is more common than macOS. macs are much more widely used by independent/solo creatives, and smaller outfits. ARM (both Apple Silicon and Windows on ARM) is still relatively new to the scene, and is definitely still the underdog in terms of usage.
by dannyobrien | 2025-10-16 23:26:42+00:00
Fun fact: this is one of the few situations in the US where a prosecutor could claim that this is criminal speech (though I hope and trust they would not, and if it did it would get thrown out by any court respecting the First Amendment).

Not a civil issue, like libel or fraud, but the sort of talk that can get a policeman to come and drag you off to jail. If you've ever wondered why DRM is so roundly hated by engineers of a certain age, it's because not only it dumb makework that they are required to implement, not only is it extremely irritating to discover it interfering with your own computer, but if you do effectively point out how dumb, irritating, and eminently circumventable it is, they made it against the law to even tell anyone.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/licensing-scheme-fair-use...
by lschueller | 2025-10-16 23:27:22+00:00
Imo the author is missing crucial point, by making comparisons of things which are not comparable. You can not say, Person A is brilliant at xyz, why is Person B not brilliant at it, even though the circumstances and resources might be identical. The difference is, people who push themselves or are pushed to be good or great at something will barely come as far as those people who get drawn to something, because it means the can avoid suffering, grieve or else. Imo this is the strong driving force here, with the examples of Erdös and Ramanujan. I claim Ramanujan didn't became a great mathematician, because he wanted to be good at math, but mathematics gave him a space, where he could forget about his devastating circumstances of poverty and inequality. And the deeper he got into math the more he felt aligned to it and at home.
by shkkmo | 2025-10-16 23:29:25+00:00
This isn't a debate about whether to offer a trial period or how of one to offer. This is a debate about forcing people to give you payment info for a free trial.

Requiring a credit card for a free trial is a technique to trick people into paying for a subscription when they normally wouldn't have chosen do do so after the trial period.

Not taking VC funding doesn't make this kind of dark pattern any less scummy. Fundementally you are trading some voluntary customers (people who don't like these tactics) or involuntary customers (distracted, busy or lazy people who forget to cancel.) When I see a company that does this, it tells me that they care about extracting value from the market than providing value to customers.
by janice1999 | 2025-10-16 23:31:10+00:00
While the modern "chemtrails" conspiracy makes no sense, it's interesting how like many conspiracies there is a grain of truth, however twisted, at the center. During the Cold War the US (and Canada and the UK and others) carried out experiments on large population centers by, among other things, dispersing chemicals from planes to simulate nuclear fallout and biological weapon attacks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_LAC

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray
by Terr_ | 2025-10-16 23:32:05+00:00
You can't call it a "Jedi mind trick" when the victim can't even tell what you want them to do. :p

Anyway, what does "sometimes you can bullshit people with bad math" have to do with progressive-vs-flat taxation?

> The 10 boxes left have 149 on average in them

> 5 of these boxes have 352 on average

"A portion weight more than the whole." -> "Uh, no."
by laurencerowe | 2025-10-16 23:32:50+00:00
Much of this is a result of the way health insurance and spending is classified, with only 35% paid for by government in Switzerland rather than 80% in most other EU countries and 55% in the US.

Adjust for that and government spending would be around 39%, still low for a rich European country, but not so far off of somewhere like the Netherlands or UK (about 44%).
by hiq | 2025-10-16 23:32:56+00:00
There's a wild difference in features and ecosystem when using an iPhone, as well as quite some friction in changing, to the point that it's way more than simple brand recognition. iPhones tend to be more expensive, yet they are bought by a wide range of consumers who value them and the Apple ecosystem, the customer support etc. If brand recognition were the main reason for consumers to choose Apple devices, they'd have all switched to Android once they realized they can just pay half.

This friction to switch is just not there for chatbots offering substantially equivalent features. That's why ChatGPT is still mostly free: most users would leave the moment they impose stricter limits. If you know nothing about smartphones but they cost a significant amount of your income, well you try to know more before you buy anything. There's no reason to do that for chatbots yet given that they're free to use, just try it out and stick to the first one you tried until they make it bad enough for you to want to switch.
by starchild3001 | 2025-10-16 23:33:13+00:00
1. I find Gemini 2.5 Pro's text very easy and smooth to read. Whereas GPT5 thinking is often too terse, and has a weird writing style.

2. GPT5 thinking tends to do better with i) trick questions ii) puzzles iii) queries that involve search plus citations.

3. Gemini deep research is pretty good -- somewhat long reports, but almost always quite informative with unique insights.

4. Gemini 2.5 pro is favored in side by side comparisons (LMsys) whereas trick question benchmarks slightly favor GPT5 Thinking (livebench.ai).

5. Overall, I use both, usually simulatenously in two separate tabs. Then pick and choose the better response.

If I were forced to choose one model only, that'd be GPT5 today. But the choice was Gemini 2.5 Pro when it first came out. Next week it might go back to Gemini 3.0 Pro.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-10-16 23:33:52+00:00
It is also another good option but I find HN better in the sense that there are usually more chances of somebody responding to your comment/ ask post in HN in a similar minded way as compared to blogging if you are like me who has interests in lots of things.

Also, I haven't really started a blog, or atleast I haven't stick to one (I make multiple mataroa accounts etc.) but its just that HN comments feel easier to me to type into and they are also generally more preferable to me atleast right now.