MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What are most up-to-date LLM Benchmarks for Agentic Coding
by vladgur | 2025-11-09 20:26:34+00:00
There are a lot of SOTA and smaller models coming out every month and many of them claim great coding output, tool execution, etc at a better cost than their competitor, but i havent been able to find any up-to-date benchmark that would actually confirm and compare these models in terms of speed, quality and price.

For instance: https://gso-bench.github.io/leaderboard.html seems to be a few months behind and is missing few key models like Grok and some others.

How do you decide which model to use for your day-to-day and are there good metrics that help with that decision
by rpdillon | 2025-11-09 20:27:08+00:00
When I think about enduring titles, I think about whether the kind of game that you'd pick up 20 years later and still consider to be a good game. I raised them on a curriculum of games starting with 80s titles and as they got older I progressed them all the way up into the 2020s so they would have a perspective on where particular gameplay mechanics came from. I see your point about the longevity of the Battlefield series and Fortnite, but my impression is people don't go back and play earlier Battlefield titles: I have always viewed them a little bit like the FIFA titles where there is a constant treadmill of needing to buy the latest version of the game. This is not true for Dark Souls, for example -- it's a sort of game you could play in decades and it would be as much of a masterpiece then it is today. I didn't really mean to compare the titles, but rather to use them as examples of titles that I would approve or disapprove of.

My kids choose the games they play, but I exercise judgment in vetoing certain decisions. My example of the From Software titles were not games that I bought for them, or even played (in the case of Elden Ring), but rather titles that my boys were into because of their friend group playing it. They've been playing Night Reign lately and enjoying it. I think people read into my dismissal of Battlefield and Fortnite as indicative of some much larger pattern that they've had a really bad experience with, but I'm not sure that conclusion is warranted.
by QuesnayJr | 2025-11-09 20:27:13+00:00
If you like that kind of thing, you might like looking at the Angband Plus github repository: https://github.com/NickMcConnell/AngbandPlus

Angband is a roguelike that had many variants over the years, and Nick combined all of these variants into one big git repository where each variant is a branch.
by kid64 | 2025-11-09 20:27:14+00:00
It sounds like you get that LLMs are just "next word" predictors. So the piece you may be missing is simply that behind the scenes, your prompt gets "rephrased" in a way that makes generating the response a simple matter of predicting the next word repeatedly. So it's not necessary for the LLM to "understand" your prompt the way you're imagining, this is just an illusion caused by extremely good next-word prediction.
by viraptor | 2025-11-09 20:27:19+00:00
It's not just about transgender people. When you have a tech organisation and say "all our members are old white guys... maybe there's something that keeps others away from us? let's make sure there are no barriers", you're engaging in DEI.

Remember when the government went anti-DEI crazy and started covering displays of influential women and people of colour at places like NSA? That kind of decision maker may be handling the PSF's grant.
by g-mork | 2025-11-09 20:27:46+00:00
Meh, you might be lucky and get XGPON first, at least Virgin is already primarily rolling it out, no idea about Openreach. I'm living abroad and have 350 mbit up by default. It's considered crappy for the area. Max you can get on consumer GPON in UK is 100. It'd certainly suck for you to wait only to get the last rollout of last gen tech
by Spooky23 | 2025-11-09 20:27:57+00:00
Absolutely. They are in the middle both physically and logically. Notice Trump’s big crackdown barely made a dent - mess with India, and Jamie Dimon and his peers are on the phone immediately… finance depends on the outsourcers onshore and offshore to function.

India’s long term positioning of neutrality and strategy with business, education and politics is bearing fruit.
by kragen | 2025-11-09 20:28:26+00:00
These are good and important points, and I'd add that the rapid churn in the software ecosystem, especially in the Python world, further undermines the ideal of reproducibility, both at the most basic PDF level of "Can I see the visual appearance that the author intended?" and the deeper level of "Can I reproduce the calculations the author made from their empirical data?"

This morning I was reading a very valuable paper on eutectic points of evaporite salt mixtures from 01972, 53 years ago. If you publish something today in electronic form, how confident are you that it will be readable in 02078? Plain HTML and PNG will probably be readable, but it might not be ideal to depend on Web Workers, WebAudio, or the darker corners of the PDF spec.
by joquarky | 2025-11-09 20:28:37+00:00
I keep remembering this clip in these discussions:

> I went through this Ford engine plant about three years ago, when they first opened it.

> There are acres and acres of machines, and here and there you will find a worker standing at a master switchboard, just watching, green and yellow lights blinking off and on, which tell the worker what is happening in the machine.

> One of the management people, with a slightly gleeful tone in his voice said to me, “How are you going to collect union dues from all these machines?”

> And I replied, “You know, that is not what’s bothering me. I’m troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles to these machines

- Walter Reuther, Nov. 1956

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-09 20:28:37+00:00
> This is what one-on-one relationships with our employers gets us

Its what an economic slowdown outside of AI gets us, mostly, but yes, unbridled capitalism (with, among other things, neither unionization in the industry under consideration nor strong public protection of labor rights) magnifies that (it also, to be fair, magnifies the upswing in employment on the upward side of the business cycle, but, it also magnifies the adverse consequences of unemployment on either side.)
by linguae | 2025-11-09 20:29:07+00:00
I love Dijkstra’s writings, but, yes, he had very strong opinions that at times were abrasive. Alan Kay said it best when he said, “arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.”

Some famous Dijkstra quotes: “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”

“Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.”

As a UC Santa Cruz masters alum, my favorite Dijkstra quotes come from notes from his visit to UCSC in the 1970s (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD07xx/EWD714...):

“I found the UCSC campus not an inspiring place, and the longer I stayed there, the more depressing it became. The place seemed most successful in hiding all the usual symptoms of a seat of learning. In the four-person apartment we occupied, only one of the four desks had a reading lamp, and the chairs in front of the desks were so low that writing at the desks was not comfortable. Probably it doesn't matter. Can UCSC students write? Do they need to? The notice boards showed ads from typing services "Grammar and spelling corrected.". (One of these ads itself contained a spelling error!)”
by sergiotapia | 2025-11-09 20:29:39+00:00
Blame! is a manga where in the future humans have robots that build, and are controlled by people with Net Terminal Genes. Something happens and those humans die leaving the robots building non-stop procedurally for eons. By the time our protagonist moves about in the world, its said the Megastructure reaches from Earth all the way to Jupiter.

Also, the movie Fracture features these cool marble machines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-v6E9H6nh0

Back when movies were made with unique good scripts and not marvel slop.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-11-09 20:29:41+00:00
What sites they're using is a big part of it. My sites are content from people I know, aggregators like HN that pool together quality content, educational resources, sub-Reddits, and entertainment. The entertainment can be fake and I don't really care if it's good. The sub-Reddits vary considerably in content quality. So, my sites are mostly living people.

It's also how we spend our time. Popular culture encourages people to only do it through devices. I spend most of my time away from devices or only passively using them (eg listening). I mostly focus on people all day at two jobs. My intuition is built on human experiences. There's a lot of variety in that in our area. On specific topics, they mostly converge towards talking points due to media, Hollywood, educational system, views in their physical area, and their religion. Maybe in that order.
by gwbas1c | 2025-11-09 20:29:52+00:00
Their first "Linux" computers were Android (that's based on Linux, right?) and Chromebook.

I honestly don't know if they've ever touched a PC or Mac, (except for the ones we, as parents, have.) They learn how to use them in school.

If they're interested in geeky stuff, I'll show them how to use them. Otherwise, it's important to recognize that "Linux" is often a combination of politics and hobby.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-09 20:29:56+00:00
Terrible ruling. We need these cameras to efficiently deal with crime. Otherwise how do you investigate and actually find suspects? It takes enormous resources and cities often don’t have the resources. The data should only be accessed by authorities with warrants. But making it subject to public access risks everyone’s safety. For example stalkers could use that data.

I understand the risks of mass surveillance but we don’t live in a dystopia. We can require certain process for public agencies to have access to the data (like court approved warrants or imminent harm or whatever) and keep it otherwise private. Just like some other information deemed confidential isn’t subject to transparency laws.
by ghaff | 2025-11-09 20:30:07+00:00
Without delving into all the stats, $50K/year is a pretty mediocre salary--certainly in anything resembling a medium to high cost of living area. Your rent will consume a lot of that after taxes without roommates and even a "paid-off" house will probably not be a whole lot less with taxes, insurance, utilities, etc.

Certainly a trailer home in a lot of places but then not clear how easily you'll get that $50K/yr job.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-11-09 20:31:43+00:00
"TP-Link Systems told The Post it has sole ownership of some engineering, design and manufacturing capabilities in China that were once part of China-based TP-Link Technologies, and that it operates them without Chinese government supervision."

Is that even possible? Or do you always have to be on good terms with the Chinese government to own engineering, design, and manufacturing capabilities in China?
by mpalmer | 2025-11-09 20:31:44+00:00
They are not contradictory. Publicly labeling someone a troll is indisputably speech. You mistake the situation as someone denying you your rights, but really you are just failing to recognize the same rights for that person or group.

The communities that are presumably excluding you are exercising their freedom of association.

You may not (indeed, seem not to) realize, but freedom of association is understood to be part of the set of freedoms generally known as freedom of speech/expression.

It's the freedom of people, collectively or individually, to associate with certain others, or not to associate with them.

You are reckoning with the consequences of how you've chosen to exercise your rights, but you have not been denied them. No one is obligated to include you (in the context of public discourse).
by daemonologist | 2025-11-09 20:31:59+00:00
$50k jobs (in your field) are probably harder to find than $100k jobs. Nobody wants to hire a $50k dev in the US - they'd think there's something wrong with you. In the past you could maybe get something in web dev but that's not exactly a thriving industry these days.

In any case, my impression is that juniors are being hit the hardest. They're the easiest to offshore and the easiest to justify as being replaceable by AI (regardless of how true that actually is).
by alephnerd | 2025-11-09 20:32:28+00:00
> sorts of advantages like tax avoidance (you pay them the expenses - salaries and office cost - and zero profits to pay taxes on)

Nope.

Subsidiaries need to pay domestic taxes which in a lot of cases are significantly higher than those in the US. That said, countries like Czechia, Poland, and India help by covering the cost of each employee per head depending on amount spent.

> you can fire them all if you want

Nope.

In my past experience, we need to follow domestic labor laws and they do not budge on hiring or firing in Czechia, Poland, Israel, or India. Ofc, the financial hit of hiring the wrong person is much lower there than in the US, and unlike the US those jurisdictions provide a single window or tribunal dedicated to disputes foreign investors may face.

Same with the UK and the film industry.

-----------

Basically, American jurisdictions became significantly non-responsive to services businesses after COVID and the 2020 election because white collar industries just didn't matter politically speaking (they represented a fraction of hiring and jobs in most competitive seats).

The same kinds of hand-holding support I mentioned above used to be provided by jurisdictions like NC, the Bay Area, NY, TX, etc, but local politicians don't care anymore and local and state governments are severely backlogged and attritted significant amount of personnel who understood business promotion.
by lanstin | 2025-11-09 20:33:25+00:00
Offshoring is valuable not to save money but to increase the development and operational bandwidth of the organization. This truth may not be known to the decision makers, but it is clear to the workers over time. It does increase the cost of coordination and the difficulty of establishing a common technical vision, but these are mitigatable by for example sending entire software project to one region, with the colocated workers having a higher degree of autonomy to make decisions. One way of partitioning work that fits with the power dynamics is to have all the new shiny things done in North America and mature profitable software is owned by a remote region. Half smiley but this effect is real.
by oulipo2 | 2025-11-09 20:33:43+00:00
Rich people with access to the tech can do it now... who tells you that once this matures, Government is not going to "mandate" some "improvements" over wide swath of the population...

Also guess what, once we have discovered the "gene to increase IQ" (if that exists)... we will also be able to wilfully build "artificially low IQ" people who will never complain, and never be able to defend themselves because they won't have access to an education... guess who will be interested in being able to create such a big population and will force people to have that free labor workforce...

If history told us one thing, is that we shouldn't play "magicians"
by apatheticonion | 2025-11-09 20:34:12+00:00
I'd been taking 3mg slow release melatonin daily for years up until a few months ago. To be honest, I'm not sure it has any significant effect.

Regular exercise and a consistent sleep routine (cardio, weight lifting, going to bed early, and waking up early) has been more effective for me.

According to my fitbit, my average sleep duration is 6hr 30min over the last 2 years, down from 7hr30. When I wake up, there's no going back.

The biggest contributor to my reduction in sleep is my job, which in the last few years added stack ranking and by-annual performance reviews which requires daily book keeping of my "company impact".

I also got an echo-cardiogram last week (unrelated) and it came back in top shape (have a calcium score test coming up). Not saying melatonin isn't a risk for cardio health, but as a male in his early 30s with a family history of heart disease, nothing seems to indicate an increase in damage in my case.
by razingeden | 2025-11-09 20:34:48+00:00
early iterations i could immediately peg as grok content based on its condescending snarky “OOoooOoOo — so much to unpack here sweaty, lets get started” tone.

im open minded and ive fed grok a few requests recently. it was better at doing creative fiction prompts without the “eddie izzard coming down off of a fifteen day coke bender” vibe.

everything i ask it to do is completely made up nonsense so i dont have an opinion about its bias or the quality of its factual content.

snark and clapback made the world go around on xitter. maybe thats what they thought people wanted. savage insulting content to “own” people. i for one, also found it extremely annoying.
by techblueberry | 2025-11-09 20:35:25+00:00
One thing I think is - it’s nearly impossible for the media to be all things to all people; because I think the difference between different groups (say Republicans and Democrats) isn’t what we believe, but how we believe it. The language and arguments we use. I loosely speaking mostly believe in free markets, capitalism, etc. but I only want to hear like professors of economics (right leaning or left leaning) talking about it, trying to talk about the free market with right wing relatives is crazy making, and I think these are the people mainstream media needs to appeal to.

I don’t know why this has changed recently, I’m guessing it’s just the fact that people have more choices, but I’d rather create my own “media organization” by picking and choosing from a variety of writers, than consume everything from say, the New York Times.

Even if I can blur my eyes and see that is objectively a good thing that the New York Times tried to appeal to a wider variety of groups, like, I’m not going to drive myself crazy reading through a bunch of ham fisted articles purely written in an attempt to seem non-partisan.

I want to read dynamic and diverse perspective on COVID vaccines, but informed ones, not an op-ed from RFK jr. on Ivermectin.
by mattkevan | 2025-11-09 20:35:52+00:00
Thanks for your comments, I appreciate it!

Yes a core part of what I’ve tried to do is separate content from presentation. This all started by trying to build an alt-protocol like Gemini or Gopher as a minimal writing and publishing experience. I realised that for it to be useful it needed to be accessible by browsers, so I added the SSG layer. But it still publishes the source content and config alongside the HTML. This means sites can be accessed by more than just browsers - as an experiment I made a CLI client that parses the source directly.

Themes can be imported via a URL or as a zip file and are pretty similar to Jekyll or 11ty themes. My next task is to port a bunch of them over. I’m also planning to create ready-configured template sites that users can copy and configure. Maybe take an Astro or Ghost approach, with a mix of free and paid themes.
by 8note | 2025-11-09 20:36:00+00:00
it the previous hn post, tbe major topic was that the government could claw back its money with any flimsey premise, about anything the organization does or people related to it do, and not specific to the project the grant was for

like, somebody going to a "women in tech" conference could result in suddenly having to find millions in cash to pay back the government.
by evantbyrne | 2025-11-09 20:36:52+00:00
I think you make some solid points, but there are major tradeoffs some of the data is not totally convincing. If US workers are so much more highly paid than foreign workers, then we can reasonably expect the best workers to migrate to the US whenever possible. It's pretty easy for Canadians to cross the border. So one reason to hire American developers is for quality. The other is simply that these companies exist in the US, which means collaboration needs to be done in US time zones, which makes overseas workers far less efficient, not to mention the major negative impacts on worker morale. So there can be reasons to hire out of country, but the tradeoffs are significant even when well executed.
by AuthAuth | 2025-11-09 20:37:05+00:00
I'm struggling to grasp this paper. The title makes it sound like its talking about democratic processes in the real world but then reading makes me think its a technical paper on computing. Then the comments talk about a mix.

Is anyone able to provide a simple overview of whats being covered here? To me it seems impossible to run a government with no leader and humans having to vote on everything and trust each other. It would be very inefficient not having someone to break ties and make executive choices.
by osti | 2025-11-09 20:37:27+00:00
That's the biggest problem I have with the recommendation to buy indices as if indices grow at >8% annually is an natural law.

Many (most) indices of countries in the world performed way less than 8%. US performed exceptionally well over almost a century so people are starting to take it as a natural law. If I buy US index, I'm still putting a directional bet on US stock market performing at an exceptional rate.
by mbreese | 2025-11-09 20:37:52+00:00
> Recently I bought a router with the firm intent of installing OpenWRT, but I received a newer revision that had a different CPU, less RAM, and less flash memory.

This also happened many years ago with Linksys (prior to Cisco). It’s not that uncommon for manufacturers to release new revisions of hardware without necessarily making it clear to the purchaser. If their purpose is to deliver a router and they can shave a few cents off the BOM with less RAM, but it still works with their software, why would they care. And once new revisions have been released into the supply chain, it can be hard to know exactly what version you are buying.

In the Linksys case, IIRC they eventually re-released the first revision WRT54G as the WRT54GL (for Linux), so that people who wanted different firmware could get the exact hardware they wanted.
by techblueberry | 2025-11-09 20:38:06+00:00
But has this changed? (I assert a resounding no) I mean, Fox News is the most watched of the cable news networks, do they lie and hide information the least?

Like what timeline are we talking about here, when is the golden age of media not lying, it’s certainly not the 60’s and the Vietnam war.(hahaha ironically this is exactly when trust in the media and institutions was the highest, early 70’s)

https://www.statista.com/chart/5883/trust-in-mass-media/

Is there a series of things that they’ve lied about that you can point to that doesn’t have a partisan skew?

The only thing top of mind is maybe not going deep enough on the reasons for entering the Iraq war.
by api | 2025-11-09 20:38:10+00:00
How much is intentional and how much is from the fact that far right content tends to be aimed at the amygdala? It’s usually crafted to inspire either outrage or fear. Those emotions have also been shown to maximize attention, and attention is what the algorithm seeks.

It also tends to be polarizing. If you react with disgust because you disagree, the algorithm also picks that up as engagement.

I do see more far right content on algorithmic social media and I’ve always suspected this is why. When I see lefty content it’s almost always when it’s of a similar form: outrage or fear bait.

I rarely see any form of political content on those platforms that is thoughtful or positive, because that doesn’t maximize engagement.

Of course I rarely look at any of those hellscapes anymore. All algorithmic social media is a worthless addictive attention trap.