MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-12-18 18:30:10+00:00
In all my unpublished tests, which focus on 1. unique logic puzzles that are intentionally adjacent to existing puzzles and 2. implementing a specific unique CRDT algorithm that is not particularly common but has an official reference implementation on github (so the models definitely been trained on it) I find that 5.2 overfits to the more common implementation and will actively break working code and puzzles.

I find it to be incorrectly pattern matching with a very narrow focus and will ignore real documented differences even when explicitly highlighted in the prompt text (this is X crdt algo not Y crdt algo.)

I've canceled my subscription, the idea that on any larger edits it will just start wrecking nuance and then refuse to accept prompts that point this out is an extremely dangerous form of target fixation.
by yencabulator | 2025-12-18 18:30:44+00:00
The whole point of "no nullability bombs" is to make it obvious in the type system when the value might be not present, and force that to be handled.

Javascript:

let x = foo(); if (x.bar) { ... } // might blow up

Typescript:

let x = foo(); // type of x is Foo | undefined if (x === undefined) { ...; return; } // I am forced to handle this if (x.bar) { ... } // this is now safe, as Typescript knows x can only be a Foo now

(Of course, languages like Rust do that cleaner, since they don't have to be backwards-compatible with old Javascript. But I'm using Typescript in hopes of a larger audience.)
by adam_arthur | 2025-12-18 18:30:53+00:00
Local tools/skills/function definitions can already invoke any API.

There's no real benefit to the MCP protocol over a regular API with a published "client" a local LLM can invoke. The only downside is you'd have to pull this client prior.

I am using local "skill" as reference to an executable function, not specifically Claude Skills.

If the LLM/Agent executes tools via code in a sandbox (which is what things are moving towards), all LLM tools can be simply defined as regular functions that have the flexibility to do anything.

I seriously doubt MCP will exist in any form a few years from now
by cycomanic | 2025-12-18 18:30:58+00:00
> I previously worked in fraud/risk at a major ecommerce platform. On my biggest day I closed 60,000 accounts. In one day. I knew other agents who'd done 10x that.

> The scale of this work is unfathomable to those who have only been on the consumer side of it.

> #1 is doable but would destroy our ability to combat fraud. "Here's how not to get banned next time" is not an email anyone in this space would consider sending.

Just imagine laws would work that way.

> #2 is simply impossible. Fraudsters consume every available resource you can put into the appeals process. This is their full time job, they can afford to call repeatedly, all day long, until they find an agent they can trick. Regular users won't benefit.

That argument doesn't pass the smell test. Apple makes more profits than the scammers whole revenue, so just from a resources standpoint Apple could starve them. You just need to make the process so it can't be easily automated (e.g. require going into an apple store with your ID)

> #3 is what small claims court is already for. We should make this easier, I agree.

So in #2 you say it would overwhelm the process and now your argument is that essentially the public should pay for the process?

If small claims courts can deal with the issues than why can't a trillion dollar company.
by kqr | 2025-12-18 18:31:06+00:00
It doesn't help that many of the popular methodologies focus entirely on failures. They ask a bunch of questions in the style of "how likely is it that this part fails?" "what happens if it fails?" "how can we reduce the risk of it failing?" etc. But software never fails[1] so that's the wrong approach to start from!

Much better to do as you say and think about the software and its role in the system. There are more and less formal ways to do this, but it's definitely better than taking a component view.
by abathur | 2025-12-18 18:31:21+00:00
I've been tasked with doing a very superficial review of a codebase produced by an adult who purports to have decades of database/backend experience with the assistance of a well-known agent.

While skimming tests for the python backend, I spotted the following:

@patch.dict(os.environ, {"ENVIRONMENT": "production"}) def test_settings_environment_from_env(self) -> None: """Test environment setting from env var.""" from importlib import reload import app.config reload(app.config) # Settings should use env var assert os.environ.get("ENVIRONMENT") == "production"

This isn't an outlier. There are smells everywhere.
by postalcoder | 2025-12-18 18:31:27+00:00
It has become very quickly unfashionable for people to say they like the Codex CLI. I still enjoy working with it and my only complaint is that its speed makes it unideal for pair coding.

On top of that, the Codex CLI team is responsive on github and it's clear that user complaints make their way to the team responsible for fine tuning these models.

I run bake offs on between all three models and GPT 5.2 generally has a higher success rate of implementing features, followed closely by Opus 4.5 and then Gemini 3, which has troubles with agentic coding. I'm interested to see how 5.2-codex behaves. I haven't been a fan of the codex models in general.
by mccoyb | 2025-12-18 18:31:30+00:00
If anyone from OpenAI is reading this -- a plea to not screw with the reasoning capabilities!

Codex is so so good at finding bugs and little inconsistencies, it's astounding to me. Where Claude Code is good at "raw coding", Codex/GPT5.x are unbeatable in terms of careful, methodical finding of "problems" (be it in code, or in math).

Yes, it takes longer (quality, not speed please!) -- but the things that it finds consistently astound me.
by epcoa | 2025-12-18 18:31:32+00:00
The term Metabolic Syndrome X has been around for more than a few years, unless nearly 40 is few (and I absolutely relate to that sentiment), just saying that concept was revved up in the 90s and of course has been an academic discussion going back to the early 20th century.

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/01.atv.0000111245.75...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3056758/
by al_borland | 2025-12-18 18:31:47+00:00
Some states have laws that gift cards never expire, like California. A lot of companies will just go with the most strict rule, rather than micromanaging state by state. The side effect of this is the company "keeps" the money that isn't spent. It may be earmarked at gift card money, but it will never be spent.

I am terrible at spending gift cards. I have some that are from 2007, 18 years old. Two years ago I decided I should check them all and actually spend them. Of the dozen or so cards (several of them for Apple), only 2 of them had an issue, all the others were still active with the original balance.

One of the issues was easily solved, it was a Visa gift card that had an expiration date... I reached out to the company and they issued a new card with an extended date. The other seemed to be so old that the underlying company was sold and pivoted, and changed systems (I assume multiple times) along the way. What was a card for a local restaurant chain now seemed dedicated to Dick's Sporting Goods... at least that's where the phone number went. I haven't yet tried going to the actual restaurant to see what happens.

This reminded me I did an awful job of actually spending them. I guess I need to try again.
by fishywang | 2025-12-18 18:31:50+00:00
lol I have another story regarding Apple gift cards.

Many years ago we had an iMac at the house as the shared desktop computer. After a few years, it started to have the signs that the harddisk is going to fail, and also we were mostly moved away from Apple's ecosystem, so we decided to trade it in and replace it with something else that's not from Apple.

Since we don't have anything immediate to buy from Apple, we traded it in with Apple gift cards.

Later, my partner needed to trade in an old iPad for a new one, so we used that gift card with credit card for the trade in. For that trade in, you first pay the full price with gift card+credit card, then they refund you the trade-in value after the trade-in is finalized.

The trade-in value of the old iPad is less than the value we paid via credit card, so we would reasonably assume that they would refund the total trade-in value to our credit card. But nope. They actually calculated the original gift card vs. credit card split ratio, and refunded according to that ratio.

A simplified example is say we paid $200 via gift card plus $300 via credit card for an $500 iPad, with trade-in value of $200 for the old iPad. Instead of refunding $200 to our credit card (so it's eventually $200 via gift card and $100 via credit card), they refunded us $120 to credit card and gave us another $80 gift card. So we have to find ways to spend that gift card again, and it cannot involve any trade-in (otherwise we're not going to be able to use it fully).
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-18 18:31:51+00:00
The article notes the kid was (1) wearing a military costume and (2) then using his clarinet to simulate a weapon.

I don't know about the AI's decisions, but he would have caught the eye of a casual human observer. My point is: it was a bit more involved than just a 5yo pointing his finger and shouting "POW! I got you!".
by reactordev | 2025-12-18 18:31:52+00:00
This actually works really well with custom user scripts to do the initial setup. It’s also trivial to do this with docker/podman if you don’t want it to take over the machine. Batching/Matchmaking is the hard part of this, setting up a fleet is the fun part of this.

I’ve also done Microsoft Orleans clusters and still recommend the single pid, multiple containers/processes approach. If you can avoid Orleans and kubernetes and all that, the better. It just adds complexity to this setup.
by djeastm | 2025-12-18 18:32:14+00:00
Please do a write up of the best practices you've found. I tried htmx a few years ago for a side project and while I appreciated the simplicity of a lot of it, I had trouble understanding how/when to use it and in what ways. I think I was trying to contort it too much into my understanding of api/spa. That or my interactivity needs were too complex for it, I can't tell.

These days, I admit, though, the ship has sailed for me and htmx. My main app frontend is React and since the LLMs all know much more than I do about how to build out UIs and are 100x faster than me, I'll probably be sticking with React.
by takinola | 2025-12-18 18:32:20+00:00
I obviously don’t know your specific situation but having brought up kids in a similar environment, I may be able to offer some possible explanation for what you are living through.

First, never underestimate the impact of your environment on your way of thinking. We all like to think we’re independent thinkers but really we’re much more influenced by the people we interact with than we could even realize. Once you have a kid, a lot of your social circle will consist of other parents so you will unconsciously absorb their values and motivations as well, including the desire to put your kids through all these hoops.

Second, many professional class parents believe that the key to future success lies in getting their kids into the right school. Hence, it’s never too early to start the kid on the path to great grades, background experiences, scholarships, etc. I’ve seen parents stress out about preschool enrollments because of the “advantages” these schools provided.

Lastly, this is very often the default path for parents. It’s just what you are supposed to do. Everything is set up in that direction. Defaults are powerful and govern our behavior much more than we all realize.

Final last point, the truth is no one knows what works when raising kids. For every story of a free-range kid becoming self-reliant, there’s a story of a latchkey kid that became a bum. Therefore, parents are generally risk-avoidant with their kids (there’s no do-overs) and tend to do “good” and “respectable” approaches in child rearing (like signing them up for sports, extra curriculars, etc)
by rnewme | 2025-12-18 18:32:30+00:00
My approach used to be similar few months ago before I figured out a way to automate and paralleize part of this process. However the part I'm still curious about is how to get into consistent and sustainable 4 digit LOC daily (assuming up to 8h of work). I can have 10k PR today but debug it and refine it whole week and it'll still be weak code long term..
by nyeah | 2025-12-18 18:32:33+00:00
Sure, but for me the standard isn't whether it's visually realistic. Plenty of good stuff isn't particularly realistic. Traditional Chinese landscapes aren't realistic, but a lot of them are great. David Hockney has a lot of good work that isn't realistic and uses primitive-looking technique. The standard is not realism or which style was used. The standard, for me, is whether the artist was any good at art. Hockney is. (Usually.)

I'm not particularly basing my opinion on the examples in this article. It's easy to see that a lot of surviving European medieval art sucks. Maybe "surviving" is the problem. Maybe the good stuff got all smokey from being displayed and only the leftovers and student paintings, in storage, have survived.

On illustrations, everybody can see the difference between Durer and most medieval stuff. It's not simply style or taste.
by alphazard | 2025-12-18 18:32:43+00:00
This exactly. You have to be honest about why you are building something. If the answer is that you actually want to use it, then yes, quality and maintainability are important. It might even be a good idea to use no AI whatsoever.

But if you are building it because doing so is in the long chain of cause and effect that leads to you being fed and having shelter, then you should minimize the amount of your time that is required to produce that end result. Do you get better food, and better shelter if the software is better? It would certainly be nice if that was the case, but it's not.

> Not everything is about money.

Except for your job, which is primarily about money. Making it take less time, means that you have more time to focus on things that really are not about money.
by collinmanderson | 2025-12-18 18:32:59+00:00
Yes. It's hard to explain the experience of hosting a website since 2023.

A crazy amount of really dumb bots loading every url on the website in a full headless browser, with default Chrome user-agent string. All different ip addresses, various countries and ASNs.

These crawlers are completely automated and simply crawl _everything_ and don't care at all if there's value in what they're crawling or if there's duplicate content, etc.

There's no attempt at efficiency, just blindly crawl the entire internet 24/7. Every page load (1 per second or more?) is from a different ip address.
by nunodonato | 2025-12-18 18:33:23+00:00
I'm gonna call bs on these kind of comments. "better" on what? Coding models shouldn't even be compared isolated. A big part of making it work in a real/big codebase is the tool that calls the model (claude code, gemini-cli, etc). I'll bet claude code will still keep stealing your lunch every day of the week against any competitor out there
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-18 18:33:26+00:00
Skills can be just instructions how to do things.

BUT what makes them powerful is that you can include code with the skill package.

Like I have a skill that uses a Go program to traverse the AST of a Go project to find different issues in it.

You COULD just prompt it but then the LLM would have to dig around using find and grep. Now it runs a single executable which outputs an LLM optimised clump of text for processing.
by robinhood | 2025-12-18 18:33:29+00:00
Clearly you haven't used something like HTMX. Do you understand what "returning HTML by the server" mean? You are basically sending back a view, like you would in any other framework actually. This would be the exact same pattern as displaying or dynamically adding a new component from either React or Vue. It doesn't create any styling issue at all, nor any unintended consequences.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-18 18:33:41+00:00
And under that model the publishers would also do all the scummy things you're familiar with if you've been say a cable TV subscriber. For example bundling four crap things with one good thing and saying that's a 5-for-1 offer when actually it's just an excuse to increase the price of the thing you actually wanted.

This isn't the golden age we might have hoped for, but open access is actually a desirable outcome even if as usual Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible price.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-18 18:34:14+00:00
In this case society is paying (out of moral principles) so this gives it a fair right to set the moral expectation or just the practical one.

Let's say someone does not get a job. Are they looking for one and being unsuccessful or are they just cashing their benefits?

Checks are needed in practice unless it can be shown they are not (what I suggested in my previous comments).
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-18 18:34:16+00:00
> Mo--ad operation most likely

This is America. A burglar, jealous relative or raging lunatic is most likely.

If we assume it is state action, which again, is like a teen assuming every zit is a malignant cancer, then putting Israel at the top of the list is pretty much only evidence of being in a filter bubble.

(EDIT: Never mind, looked at comment history, troll account.)
by runtimepanic | 2025-12-18 18:34:22+00:00
I don’t work on web apps at all. Most of my time goes into security tooling and analysis pipelines. A lot of it is closer to systems work than application development: parsing large datasets, automating analysis, dealing with flaky inputs, and building things that are mostly run headless. The feedback loop is slower than web work, but the problems tend to be deeper and longer-lived. You spend less time on UX and more time thinking about correctness, edge cases, and failure modes. I suspect there are many people here doing similar non-web work, it’s just less visible because there’s no UI to screenshot or product to demo.
by dang | 2025-12-18 18:34:22+00:00
> happy to run additional documents if people want to share examples

I've got one! The pdf of this out-of-print book is terrible: https://archive.org/details/oneononeconversa0000simo. The text is unreadably faint, and the underlying text layer is full of errors, so copy-paste is almost useless. Can your software extract usable text?

(I'll email you a copy of the pdf for convenience since the internet archive's copy is behind their notorious lending wall)
by DenisM | 2025-12-18 18:34:23+00:00
I hear you - model development might overcome the shortcomings one day.

However the "waiting out" strategy needs a timeout. It might happen that agentic crutches around LLMs will bear fruit much sooner than high-quality LLMs arrive. If you don't have a timeout or a decent exit criteria you may end up waiting indefinitely, or at least until reality of things becomes too painful to ignore.

The "ski rental problem" comes to mind here, but maybe there is another "wait it out" exit strategy?
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-18 18:34:52+00:00
Mullvad browser doesn't have an option to disable all AI features because it doesn't have any.

(The Mullvad guys took Tor browser for its resistance to fingerprinting and removed the connection the Tor network. You don't need Mullvad VPN to use the browser)

https://mullvad.net/en/browser
by genuser | 2025-12-18 18:35:14+00:00
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by LorenPechtel | 2025-12-18 18:35:51+00:00
You miss the point. I find your 95% figure reasonable--but that's the very nature of insurance! The problem is you don't know if you're in the 95% or the 5%. Under the old system, if you were in the 5% you probably died.

Suppose you extend Medicaid to those barred by pre-existing conditions--net result is a whole bunch of money moves from the ACA to Medicaid. The spending doesn't go away--if anything it probably increases. This has been an expensive year, nearly 9k in insurance premiums and I hit the stop-loss at nearly 9k. Thus 18k out of pocket that would have been Medicaid spending under your system.

And note that killing those 5% appears to be a Republican *goal*. Eugenics.
by whimsicalism | 2025-12-18 18:37:05+00:00
respectfully, there is no real evidence that Netanyahu (not Netenyahu) ever said this. if you're not familiar with the politics of the region prior to Oct 7th, a lot of this will be difficult to place in context.

i think Netanyahu is awful, but there are other reasons for support for Hamas -- i say this as someone who studied this extensively prior to 2023.
by spencerflem | 2025-12-18 18:37:13+00:00
If I want to move a password, I either already have it memorized or I find it in my manager and write it down.

If I want to move a passkey out of my Apple keychain, last I heard the answer is to just make a new passkey. The important part of the secret is 100% under their control. It makes me very squeamish
by koakuma-chan | 2025-12-18 18:37:17+00:00
I haven't used CC in a few months, what killer features have they added? I am using Cursor, it's clunky, but not that clunky so as to completely destroy model performance. I am pretty sure for my tasks (undocumented, buggy, legacy JavaScript project) GPT-5.2 is > all on any decent harness, because it doesn't give up or half-ass. It can run for 5 minutes or for 50 minutes, depending on your request.
by robinhood | 2025-12-18 18:37:45+00:00
Yet another thread of React vs the rest of the world. Each has its use case, and most of the time, React/Vue are largely overkill. Personally, I would never, ever, ever start another React project again. The nightmare of the horrible JS ecosystem, build steps and tooling is behind me. All my projects now use either HTMX or Alpine Ajax - and for web apps that are actually pretty large. It works perfectly fine. Add Turbo to the mix and you almost have the feeling of using a real SPA, without the headache and large bundled JS files. Feels refreshingly simple. Still have to figure out the no-build step so I can completely drop Bun/Yarn/Npm, and life will be a wonderful thing.
by venturecruelty | 2025-12-18 18:37:59+00:00
How do you square that with "use AI and get this feature done in three days or have your 'performance reviewed' with HR in the room"? Because I'm having trouble bridging that gap.

Edit: help, the new org said the same thing. :(

Edit 2: you guys, seriously, the HR lady keeps looking up at me and shaking her head. I don't think this is good. I tried to be a real, bigboy engineer, but they just mumbled something about KPIs and put me on a PIP.
by dang | 2025-12-18 18:38:35+00:00
There are quite a few comments below complaining about the headline - happy to change it, but I'm in a meeting trying to figure out more about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301921 for the next bit.

Can someone suggest a better title? Better here means "accurate and neutral, and preferably using representative language from the article".