MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jesse__ | 2025-11-07 15:07:09+00:00
> Well. That’s a bit misleading.

Uhh .. wut?

The game appears to be similar to a point-and-click adventure game, which were popular in the 80s, and ran just fine.

In 1988, a CRAY Y-MP supercomputer had "64 megawords of memory". I have no idea how large a word was on those machines, but by todays standards, that means 128MB. Let's go with that. The Y-MP was the size of two massive fridges.

Now, the Macbook air OP owns, which is smaller than a toaster, has 128 TIMES as much memory in it as a supercomputer did back in 1988. Similar story for processing power, storage, etc. Point and click adventure games haven't changed all that much, and even back then didn't require a supercomputer to run.

> But for diagnosis? Yeah, “it’s the hardware” is the right answer.

Given the above, how you came up with this is beyond me.
by akerl_ | 2025-11-07 15:07:55+00:00
> Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers.

It's not clear to me what you're suggesting here?

1. Are you saying that the developer shouldn't be able to ship updates to their game if those upgrades break 3rd party mods?

2. Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after they ship something based on how many people use it or how much society likes it?
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-07 15:08:35+00:00
On the surface this feels right, "Oh look, the kids can see through the bullshit".

But this assumes that the kids have a stable honest reference point, and from there are calling out the bullshit.

That is almost certainly not the case. What is far more likely, is that kids are getting their news from random tiktoks that are farming views with credible bullshit, and from that totally deranged reference point, the kids are calling the news bullshit.

You will find few people more hostile towards contemporary journalism than me, and you will find no one more hostile towards "self proclaimed social media news producer" than me. I could write essays about the people in my life who left behind journalism produced news to go completely off the deep end getting "the truth" from tiktok.
by JohnFen | 2025-11-07 15:08:42+00:00
> There isn't some magical nebulous state where "okay it's a crime even though you're not guilty".

So you're saying that juries never convict innocent people? I don't think that's supportable by the evidence.

> so we can't get people like you who try claiming he's a criminal even though he's been found not guilty.

I didn't claim that he's a criminal. I said he obviously performed the act. No need to get personal. As I said, I agree with the jury and if I were on the jury I would have voted "not guilty" as well.
by gyulai | 2025-11-07 15:09:22+00:00
Profits as a measurement of success, at this point, seems like a meme from yesteryear.

The left is perfectly happy to burn money to save the environment, feed the poor, educate the stupid, whatever. The right has joined the money-burning party, pushing for deglobalization, propping up dying companies and industries, re-establishing industries that haven't been viable in a long time. Who still cares about profits? Surely investors do? No, not really, certainly not in tech. Investors will happily throw money at tech companies who never make a dime, as long as they are vaguely saying the right kinds of things, being attached to the right kinds of hypes, and fitting in with the right kinds of herd dynamics.

Generating or destroying money is not going to help or hurt anyone's career these days. Being on the currently-career-promoting side of the "woke" issue. Now there is something to take seriously.
by pizlonator | 2025-11-07 15:09:28+00:00
> If they were ok with it being 2-4x slower, they would just write ordinary Python or Javascript.

Python and JavaScript are much more than 4x slower than C/C++ for workloads that are git-like (significant amount of compute, not just I/O bound)

> C (and C++) are fundamentally important because of their use in performance sensitive contexts like operating systems, browsers and libraries

That's a fun thing to say but it isn't really true. C/C++ are fundamentally important for lots of reasons. In many cases, folks choose C and C++ because that's the only way to get access to the APIs you need to get the job done.
by BruiseLee | 2025-11-07 15:10:16+00:00
Does not work for me

curl -X POST -H 'Authorization: Bearer ***' \ https://challenge.sphinxhq.com/api/mortys/portal \ -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d'{"planet": 0, "morty_count": 2}' {"error":"planet must be an integer"}
by tomhow | 2025-11-07 15:10:24+00:00
This is really where the flamewar began. Re-reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45791773, I don't think it was as hostile and judgmental as you assumed. The parent commenter didn't think it was, and replied in a normal, conversational way. It was only from this comment onwards that the subthread became so toxic.

Even if that user had been as bad as you assumed, it's still not OK to respond in a hostile and escalatory way.

The guidelines ask us in several different ways to avoid this kind of commenting:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.

Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45791773 and marked it off topic.
by freedomben | 2025-11-07 15:10:47+00:00
Risky. If I interview somebody and their resume is inflated or wrong, at best as a candidate you wasted my time reviewing your resume and scheduling interviews and what not, and now you're starting from a disadvantage because my first impression of you is one of being misled. We're a high-trust organization and anything that causes doubt on your integrity puts you at a disadvantage. If I'm interviewing you, it's because I considered you against the torrent of other applicants, and I likely excluded one that is more qualified than you based on your misrepresentation. That also doesn't work in your favor.

If you are a truly exceptional dev in your previous field and can convince me of that, along with an up-front and transparent explanation of why you lied to me as our first interaction, it is possible to overcome this. However, that is a pretty small pool of people.

Though, it definitely can work at some companies.
by threetonesun | 2025-11-07 15:10:51+00:00
Print book sales are down, although not as much as people want to believe. Book stores are making a comeback but in terms of number of books on shelves I'd say the average one is ~50% less. We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines. We have not returned to that, and certainly books that you'd pick up on a whim like an end-cap item have reasonably suffered for it, or increased their prices to fairly insane levels.
by D-Machine | 2025-11-07 15:10:56+00:00
> No there isn't. There are individual sources that are better

You immediately contradict yourself here. My impression is that anyone intelligent and informed under, say, about 40 or so only trusts particular individuals, whether they are podcasters, bloggers, substackers, or particular journalists active on e.g. Twitter or whatever other social media platform.

> but popular podcasters as a group are far more manipulative than mainstream media

This is false logic, because no one follows the entire group, they only follow individuals. It remains to be seen whether this is more pernicious than mainstream media, but I heavily suspect it will not be, as it is easier for mainstream media to be controlled than it is to control every single individual that can say something without the support of some controlled mega-conglomerate. (Though obviously de-platforming could easily render this the same, eventually).
by wat10000 | 2025-11-07 15:11:17+00:00
I've found LLMs to be extremely useful for writing helper scripts (debugger enhancements, analyzing large disassembly dumps, that sort of thing) and as a next-level source code search. Take a large code base and you get an error in component A involving a type in component B and it's not immediately obvious how the two are connected. I've had great success in giving an LLM the error message and access to the code and asking it how B got to A and why that's an error. This is something I could certainly do myself, but there are times when it would take 100x longer.

The key is that these are all things I can verify without much difficulty: read over the script, spot-check the analysis, look at the claimed connection between A and B and see if it's real. And I don't really care about style, quality, maintainability.

You certainly can run this locally, but anything that will fit into reasonable local hardware won't be as good.

I don't need to trust it to process as it says it does, because I'm verifying the output.

And as far as I'm concerned, "needs privacy" is always true. I don't care if the code will be open source. I don't care if it's analyzing existing code that's already open source. Other people have no business seeing what I'm doing unless I explicitly allow it. In any case, I work on a lot of proprietary code as well, and my employer would be most displeased if I were exposing it to others.
by pwndByDeath | 2025-11-07 15:12:11+00:00
Software is the one discipline we can have perfection. In every other engineering there are tolerances, unknowns we have to yield to nature. In software we are god. We're just a lazy and stupid god.

Anecdotal, I had a coworker working on a new feature in a huge code base. I was trying to ignore the pseudocode planning they put on the board. After a moment of frustration I wrote down 6 conditionals that simplified what would become hundreds of new lines, to those 6 statement, and capture a few more corner cases they had not worked out yet.

Months later I got a green light on a total overhaul of the larger code base and we turned a massive code base into a fully automated and effectively bullet proof distributed system because I took the time to apply engineering principles to.the problem. The code wasn't always the most proper (I did things downright sinful) but the system was organized like an engineering project with interdependent subsystem instead of a rube Goldberg kludge of new.function on old. That overhaul too less time than any of the prior incremental feature updates prior.
by zzzeek | 2025-11-07 15:12:12+00:00
OK, so you reject the claim that systemic racism had any effect that can be meaningfully attributed (I guess sort of like how you cant blame climate change for the exact nature of a specific hurricaine). I see you carefully sidestep the instantly-disqualifying claims of "genetic inferiority" as the cause of racial disparity and instead claim..... "group preference"? or "what does Black really mean, anyway?" (what was the Civil Rights movement about, exactly? What does "Colored" mean in this sign? https://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/22/opinion/greene-racial-sig... who really knows, right? ) Black people "preferred" to live in poorer neighborhoods and to not buy houses in Levittown back when everyone was doing so?
by naasking | 2025-11-07 15:12:43+00:00
> Why would the good models (that are barely okay at coding) be big, if it was currently possible to build good models, that are small?

Because nobody tried yet using recent developments.

> but there is no reason to assume that people who work on small models find great optimizations that frontier models makers, who are very interested in efficient models, have not considered already.

Sure there is: they can iterate faster on small model architectures, try more tweaks, train more models. Maybe the larger companies "considered it", but a) they are more risk-averse due to the cost of training their large models, b) that doesn't mean their conclusions about a particular consideration are right, empirical data decides in the end.
by Zigurd | 2025-11-07 15:12:46+00:00
A lot of it is hilariously outdated looking. A man in a suit and a woman with a $300 hairdo saying innocuous things feels like time travel to the 1990s. It would be like designing a car with real chrome bumpers that rust.

Even on YouTube, if I start playing a documentary and it's got dramatic background music and a stentorian voiceover, straight to YT jail.
by hajile | 2025-11-07 15:13:03+00:00
Even if we had perfect information at one instant in time, modeling a chaotic system going into the future becomes increasingly difficult.

We have far from perfect information and very flawed models too.

Interestingly, there seems to be some success with AI models that almost completely skip the science and jump straight to pattern recognition. It's interesting to think of modern 10-day weather forecasting going back to its old almanac roots.
by JohnFen | 2025-11-07 15:13:36+00:00
I don't know anything about your friend so I can't speak to his perspective. For all I know, he's a pacifist.

A rather large difference between products that were made with slave labor and the military is that the overt, express purpose of the military is to kill people. Products made with slave labor are companies behaving badly, not companies fulfilling an express purpose.

> And the totality of their work doesn't matter?

If you find the purpose of the military objectionable, then no, that they also do some good isn't that important. Speaking generally, doing good deeds doesn't erase or forgive bad ones you have done.

It sounds to me like this is a case where you and your friend have fundamentally different moral codes with this sort of thing. It shouldn't affect your friendship. You could both just acknowledge that you have different opinions about this and let it go. Nobody agrees with anybody else about everything.
by rebelchrisycom | 2025-11-07 15:13:43+00:00
Hi ,

Author here, first time hearing this broetry. Get it!

I talk to llm with my genuine story, it adapts to a format what it thinks people wanna read.

Still my story, just suck at formatting as English is not my native language.

Ill try and iterate on the next one.

Cheers
by ghaff | 2025-11-07 15:14:05+00:00
I've generally had 10+ year tenures other than a return to school that was basically always in my plan and dot-bomb (leaving a company I wasn't really a fit with anyway). But, yeah, I've always been ready to move on at about that ten year point which is actually fairly long by a lot of people's standards in the tech industry.

I do disagree though that, unless there's some actionable change that would specifically benefit you like more money, my answer outside of private conversations with people I know well is going to be some variant of "time for a change." Anything else just invites arguments and conversations I don't want to have.
Show HN: Linguistic RL – A 7B model discovers Occam's Razor through reflection
by drawson5570 | 2025-11-07 15:14:13+00:00
Author here. I built a system where a small language model (qwen2.5:7b) learns through reflection rather than weight updates.

The unexpected finding: the model discovered Occam's Razor on its own.

Starting accuracy: 51.3% (zero-shot baseline) After learning: 78.0% (+26.7 percentage points)

But the numbers don't tell the full story. The learning journals reveal something profound:

Phase 1: The model hallucinated complex solutions ("use interval trees!", "apply graph theory!"). Accuracy stayed low (~35%).

Phase 2: Journal entries started showing doubt: "Since the problem is straightforward, focusing on basic interval checking..."

Phase 3: The breakthrough - the model wrote: "This suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of how to handle overlapping intervals."

It admitted it was wrong. From that moment, everything changed.

The distillation process acts as evolutionary selection: simple ideas that work survive, complex ideas that fail get filtered out.

Key advantages: - Fully interpretable (read the complete thought process) - Runs on consumer hardware (no GPU training) - Strategies are transferable text documents - Models learn to doubt themselves (AI safety implication)

All code and papers are open source. The experiment takes ~40 minutes to reproduce on a laptop.

Happy to answer questions about the approach, results, or implementation!
What Makes a Good QA?
by backtr4ck | 2025-11-07 15:14:25+00:00
(this is an old post I did in LinkedIn but wanted to bring the discussion here too. AI used only for spell-checking, english isn't my first lang)

The old rhetoric of hiring an external QA team on the other side of the world to test your application is obsolete. A group of people with little technical depth, no knowledge of your product, your customers’ needs, or your internal development cycles will never deliver the validation and insight you actually need. This approach damaged the reputation of QA so much that many developers I know would rather avoid working with them altogether.

So, what makes a good QA?

The formula is straightforward: an in-house QA with full ownership of tests and automation, who validates features as they are actively developed, combined with responsibilities that traditionally belong to Product Managers: writing tickets, suggesting improvements, and taking ownership of new features and refactors. A deep knowledge of the product, its goals, and customer expectations creates the perfect ecosystem for delivering not only bug-free software, but also features that truly add value. This kind of QA bridges the gap between development and product, ensuring quality at every level and multiplying the impact of the entire team.

A good QA isn’t just a gatekeeper who says “this works” or “this doesn’t.” They are a partner in building the product. Someone who understands the vision, anticipates user needs, and ensures quality at both the technical and strategic level. One strong QA like this can provide as much value as a team of ten traditional QAs, because their impact is multiplied by product knowledge, ownership, and alignment with business goals.

When QA thinks like a PM, quality stops being a checkbox and becomes part of the culture. And when it becomes culture, quality scales with the product, not against it.
by afavour | 2025-11-07 15:14:50+00:00
> Are you saying that the developer shouldn't be able to ship updates to their game if those upgrades break 3rd party mods?

Reading between the lines I think OP is suggesting backwards compatibility is retained when publishing updates.

> Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after they ship something based on how many people use it or how much society likes it?

I'm assuming OP's answer is something along the lines of "because it's good for society". Why shouldn't society do things that are good for society, even if they increase a burden on a profit making company? Obviously every case is different but the principle is sound, IMO. Like copyright expiry. At the very least it's an interesting thought exercise.
by 9rx | 2025-11-07 15:14:55+00:00
> Then why do they have locks on the doors?

Because the customer eventually decided it was worth paying for. Emphasis on eventually. It took over 30 years from the first car having optional door locks to locks becoming a standard feature.

> MSFT did nothing to stop spyware for at least a decade.

More like half a decade. The first real instance of spyware was recognized in 1999. Microsoft began working on their anti-spyware software in 2004.
by localghost3000 | 2025-11-07 15:15:00+00:00
“Don’t let your work self, be your best self.” Is a turn of phrase my boss said to me one time. He was describing his own father’s total inability to be present at home while over achieving at work. That really stuck with me. And is a mantra I repeat to myself quite often.

The struggle is real. Therapy helps. Meds might be worth checking out too as this sounds like ADHD.
by pizlonator | 2025-11-07 15:15:01+00:00
> The performance drop and specially the GC of Fil-C do limit the usage however. I read there are some ideas for Fil-C without GC; I would love to hear more about that!

I love how people assume that the GC is the reason for Fil-C being slower than C and that somehow, if it didn't have a GC, it wouldn't be slower.

Fil-C is slower than C because of InvisiCaps. https://fil-c.org/invisicaps

The GC is is crazy fast and fully concurrent/parallel. https://fil-c.org/fugc

Removing the GC is likely to make Fil-C slower, not faster.
by tomhow | 2025-11-07 15:15:08+00:00
OK, fair enough. Re-reading your initial comment in isolation, without the rest of the subthread to influence the perception of it, I can see how it was more neutral and benign than others perceive it to be.

You were still a player in the flamewar and you could have done more to defuse the situation rather than inflame it, but I can see that it was the others who escalated first.

I've re-attached your comment and the healthy part of the subthread and detached it where it became a flamewar.
by noir_lord | 2025-11-07 15:15:25+00:00
This is the most HN of HN takes.

Saying it's your (the consumers) fault because you didn't read the crystal ball for what was coming in the future.

The price a product is offered at is the price for the product at that time, you don't get to say well I sold it for $10 but it's worth $20 so I'll just sell your data until I recoup that $10 I "lost".
by galangalalgol | 2025-11-07 15:15:51+00:00
Pure functional programming languages do not allow mutable state. They can simulate it with monads, and they typically have impurities to allow io sode effects, but a for loop is an inherently imperative construct. Mostly functional languages like ocaml have things like ref. Functional languages aren't just about functions being composable and having no side effects, they also require that once a value is bound to a name, that it does not change. That isn't just pedantry either, it is what allows safe concurrency by default.
by ptsneves | 2025-11-07 15:16:07+00:00
I had the same issue and now I have a much calmer job I can actually be a stabilising force home.

I crave for my side projects and as soon as I get invested and want to pump code and deliver I notice myself being irritable and a piece of crap person. Since I became aware of it I just stop my side projects as soon as I notice it. I am sadly resigned that I am unable to accomplish everything I want. I am relaxed and happy in everything else though.

There is no trick, but a choice: one’s family or ideas of accomplishment. I wish I could do better but I feel much happier when my family is happy then when I accomplish my technical goals mostly small things in the big picture.

Another important point is that obsessive energy was profitable and now I can live slower without much financial limitation for all our family.
by freedomben | 2025-11-07 15:16:17+00:00
Hard agree. In fact I think doing the manager/IC transition back and forth several times is what makes you really great at both things. Understanding both sides of the equation from lived experience can be incredibly powerful at making you more effective. At a minimum, your ability to empathize with and understand the motivations/pressure on your manager or reports will help you navigate the tricky spots much better.
by bn-l | 2025-11-07 15:16:31+00:00
> This approach has excelled in several areas, including: Bumping dependencies in build files, such as in a Maven Project Object Model (POM) files Updating configuration files, such as deployment manifests Executing simple code refactors, like removing or replacing a deprecated method call

> While it is great for simple, repeatable tasks, making complex code changes is a challenge we’ve never fully solved.