MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by p1necone | 2025-12-08 20:48:51+00:00
I've used llms to help me write large sets of test cases, but it requires a lot of iteration and the mistakes it makes are both very common and insidious.

Stuff like reimplementing large amounts of the code inside the tests because testing the actual code is "too hard", spending inordinate amounts of time covering every single edge case on some tiny bit of input processing unrelated to the main business logic, mocking out the code under test, changing failing tests to match obviously incorrect behavior... basically all the mistakes you expect to see totally green devs who don't understand the purpose of tests making.

It saves a shitload of time setting up all the scaffolding and whatnot, but unless they very carefully reviewed and either manually edited or iterated a lot with the LLM I would be almost certain the tests were garbage given my experiences.

(This is with fairly current models too btw - mostly sonnet 4 and 4.5, also in fairness to the LLM a shocking proportion of tests written by real people that I've read are also unhelpful garbage, I can't imagine the training data is of great quality)
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-08 20:49:03+00:00
That is completely fair, I totally understand that, but then again, those contact mail boxes end up being very similar to the "fuck off contact page"

Like, I definitely feel exhausted and dont contact those contact pages because of it, I have shared the pain points in the previous thread but they assume me mostly to have my own company, have a position and have a website etc.

I do not mind contacting them via email if its simple. But in reality, it isn't

In my opinion, starting out, I think that companies should definitely have instant messengers as I have had lots of appreciation to those providers who kinda did but anyways, my point here is that those look like "fuck off contact pages" to me and I feel exhausted and tired and don't even contact them and would much rather work with someone who has a discord and I contacted them personally and dm'd them and they understand my customer support solution lets say.

What are your thoughts on the opinion, I definitely get where you are coming from, but I just don't know, maybe make the mail so easy and not make it feel like a void ykwim?
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-12-08 20:49:06+00:00
I'm not trying to convince you, because well, you can't reason person out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into - this is your ideological conviction, and you should own it and say it clearly rather than trying to slip it in sideways, but for other readers:

> European governments have so far adamantly refused again and again to reduce immigration

I do not recognise this as reality. This is not how these government have behaved, the ones that I have seen.

> indeed branded overt dissent as "racist"

If they keep calling your position racist, then well, it might be. I get that you're a "free thinker", freely falling into well-worn extremist tropes. Complaining about "the herd" where the problem surely lies for not letting you spread your "cultural and civilisational clash" belief.

But, it's just not convincing.
by ndriscoll | 2025-12-08 20:49:47+00:00
Assuming you can't just directly filter it, and even if it's hard to run a high quality LLM locally for the time being, it should be feasible to run a smaller model on the returned output of large commercial models to identify and remove any advertising. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if you could plug a model for filtering malicious content from all web pages right into the local translation framework Firefox already has.
by billti | 2025-12-08 20:50:09+00:00
It's a full featured and beautifully designed experience, and when it works it's amazing. However it regularly freezes of hangs for me, and I've lost count of the number of times I've had to 'force quit' Xcode or it's just outright crashed. Also, for anything non-trivial it often refuses to profile and I have to try to write a minimal repro to get it to capture anything.

I am writing compute shaders though, where one command buffer can run for seconds repeatedly processing over a 1GB buffer, and it seems the tools are heavily geared towards graphics work where the workload per frame is much lighter. (Will all the AI focus, hopefully they'll start addressing this use-case more).
by chironjit | 2025-12-08 20:50:39+00:00
>The master branch approach isn’t always ideal and people prefer having actual releases to base their work on.

I think this is me. My view is basically like this - if you use a tech you know works, you're only wrangling with your bugs. If you use a tech that is still being worked on, you are wrangling your bugs and the bugs of the tech you're using.

To be fair, I've tried this master branch thing with both Iced and PopOS's Iced fork. One year ago, PopOs's Iced fork was so slow I realised it basically wasn't going to be production ready for non Pop distros anytime soon.

IMO, both suffer from having very slow release cadence but at least dioxus has CSS
by on_the_train | 2025-12-08 20:51:17+00:00
> You are in a sea of people telling you that they are developing software much quicker which ticks the required boxes

But that's exactly not the case. Everyone is wondering what tf this is supposed to be for. People are vehemently against this tech, and yet it gets shoved down our throats although it's prohibitively expensive.

Coding should be among the easiest problems to tackle, yet none of the big models can write basic "real" code. They break when things get more complex than pong. And they can't even write a single proper function with modern c++ templating stuff for example.
by petersellers | 2025-12-08 20:51:31+00:00
> As I have gotten older I see now that this entertainment is junk food that replaces real satisfaction and accomplishment in life

A bit too condescending if you ask me. People are free to choose to spend time on things they find entertaining and that has no bearing on whether you find it "junk food" or whether the company producing the entertainment is trying to squeeze every penny they can out of it.
by joshvm | 2025-12-08 20:51:40+00:00
Also check if you're in education at any level. Most university libraries subscribe to what used to be Safari and you can SSO the full (enormous) catalogue. I didn't realize this for quite a long time as it's not widely advertised. There are ton of books that aren't the traditional animal-drawing tech titles, including Manning, as well as some lecture series.

But the app is pretty kludgey and it's way more locked down than other publishers who will give you chapter PDFs.

At least it's a good way to skim books to see if they're worth buying a physical copy.
Ask HN: Where Are Nvidia's GPUs?
by alecco | 2025-12-08 20:51:43+00:00
There's been a debate this weekend on fintwit about how the projection of Nvidia's shipped GPUs this year is way more than the power capacity and the speed of datacenter construction.

Most people think of 2 possible explanations: a) Nvidia is lying (mostly fintwit), or b) China bought a significant chunk of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, either black market or by some kind of proxy (mostly tech bros).

OG post with analysis: https://xcancel.com/kakashiii111/status/1997642056156463411

Even Michael Burry jumped into the discussion and requested pics of the warehouses holding the GPUs: "Calling for pics and proof of Nvidia GPUs being warehoused in mass quantities [...]" https://xcancel.com/michaeljburry/status/1997752436589818353

GNX earlier documental on the Chinese black market for Nvidia GPUs (but mostly consumer RTX) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI (August 2025)
by nottorp | 2025-12-08 20:51:51+00:00
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/study-finds-ai-tools-made...

They thought they were faster too.

Yes, I know, AGI is just around the corner, we just need to wait more because "agents" are improving every day.

In the mean time, LLMs are kinda useful instead of web searches, mostly because search is both full of spam and the search providers are toxic.
by nsomani | 2025-12-08 20:52:04+00:00
Hi HN,

I have been working on a small interpretability project I call Symbolic Circuit Distillation. The goal is to take a tiny neuron-level circuit (like the ones in OpenAI's "Sparse Circuits" work) and automatically recover a concise Python program that implements the same algorithm, along with a bounded formal proof that the two are equivalent on a finite token domain.

Roughly, the pipeline is:

1. Start from a pruned circuit graph for a specific behavior (e.g. quote closing or bracket depth) extracted from a transformer. 2. Treat the circuit as an executable function and train a tiny ReLU network ("surrogate") that exactly matches the circuit on all inputs in a bounded domain (typically sequences of length 5–10 over a small token alphabet). 3. Search over a constrained DSL of common transformer motifs (counters, toggles, threshold detectors, small state machines) to synthesize candidate Python programs. 4. Use SMT-based bounded equivalence checking to either: - Prove that a candidate program and the surrogate agree on all inputs in the domain, or - Produce a counterexample input that rules the program out.

If the solver finds a proof, you get a small, human-readable Python function plus a machine-checkable guarantee that it matches the original circuit on that bounded domain.

Why I built this

Mechanistic interpretability has gotten pretty good at extracting "small crisp circuits" from large models, but turning those graphs into clean, human-readable algorithms is still very manual. My goal here is to automate that last step: go from "here is a sparse circuit" to "here is a verified algorithm that explains what it does", without hand-holding.

What works today

- Tasks: quote closing and bracket-depth detection from the OpenAI circuit_sparsity repo. - Exact surrogate fitting on a finite token domain. - DSL templates for simple counters, toggles, and small state machines. - SMT-based bounded equivalence between: sparse circuit -> ReLU surrogate -> Python program in the DSL.

Limitations and open questions

- The guarantees are bounded: equivalence is only proven on a finite token domain (short sequences and a small vocabulary). - Currently focused on very small circuits. Scaling to larger circuits and longer contexts is open engineering and research work. - The DSL is hand-designed around a few motifs. I am not yet learning the DSL itself or doing anything very clever in the search.

What I would love feedback on

- Are the problem framing and guarantees interesting to people working on mechanistic interpretability or formal methods? - Suggestions for next benchmarks: which circuits or behaviors would you want to see distilled next? - Feedback on the DSL design, search strategy, and SMT setup.

Happy to answer questions about implementation details, the SMT encoding, integration with OpenAI's Sparse Circuits repo, or anything else.
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-08 20:52:07+00:00
It's like a buffered queue, if the producer (AI) is too fast for the consumer (dev's brain) then the producer needs to block/stop/slow down other wise data will be lost (in this analogy the data loss is the consumer no longer having a clear understanding of what the code is doing)

One day, when AI becomes reliable (which is still a while off because AI doesn't yet understand what it's doing) then the AI will replace the consumer (IMO).

FTR - AI is still at the "text matches another pattern of text" stage, and not the "understand what concepts are being conveyed" stage, as demonstrated by AI's failure to do basic arithmetic
My favorite talks from emacsconf 2025
by boletus | 2025-12-08 20:52:13+00:00
My two favorite talks so far from Emacsconf:

Emacs Reader, [talk](https://youtu.be/KQBXTSg_Occ?list=PLomc4HLgvuCVGgvM1ev1Oh2vSZbFPGl3U), [code](https://codeberg.org/divyaranjan/emacs-reader), [emacsconf page](https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks/reader/). This talk described a fast new document reader that leverages dynamic modules. This made it work faster than docview or pdftools.

LLM & Emacs talk, [talk])https://youtu.be/U3kbEabBJ_s?list=PLomc4HLgvuCVGgvM1ev1Oh2vSZbFPGl3U], [emacsconf page](https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks/llm/). This talk explores what is "editing" and how different classes of emacs LLM tools goes with, or against editing. A quick tour of many tools + an easy going philosophical discussion.
by futuraperdita | 2025-12-08 20:52:32+00:00
> It's like somebody set out to do what the 90s Geocities couldn't, using modern tech.

This style is basically a sort of nostalgiacore and that's exactly what it's trying to do. It's heavily influenced by Web 1.0 and the time-smear of 1990s-2000s early Web culture.
by SigmundA | 2025-12-08 20:52:38+00:00
How can you not realize that’s the point? Monopoly on violence is just that, the definition of the state.

Anarchy is not a stable system, you have no property rights or freedoms without a way to enforce them.

You provide no alternative, a government will form from a power vacuum made up of whoever has the most physical power around you.
by johnfn | 2025-12-08 20:52:41+00:00
The original post that failed to create the Space Jam had no comments on a lack of "proper zoom behavior" or "window resize". It said that the LLM failed to place the elements on the page. The LLM has now solved that problem.

You are repeatedly trying to change the criteria to be different than what it contextually was. "It's not a perfect solution because as a developer I would not get benefit from this." "It's not a perfect solution because it doesn't handle <thing which was never enumerated as a success criteria>". None of that was a topic in the original blog post.

You can make another blog post, if you like, about how Claude can't handle proper zoom when creating the Space Jam website. My guess is someone will one-shot that too.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-08 20:52:52+00:00
Right. Also the weird part of the Skydance Lasseter drama is not just that is happened once, there, but that it happened at nearly the same time but worse at Annapurna. Annapurna games division that had done so well last decade got purged by rehiring someone to oversee it who had been fired the first time for the "overly affectionate" types of problems just before Annapurna's "Golden Age" and was hired as much to better align the games division with making movie knockoffs rather than producing indie darlings (which was a "distraction" for a company trying so hard to be a movie company). (You can almost excuse "hired someone Disney fired for this reason", but how do you excuse "we already fired once for this reason"?)

The Ellison family's willingness to be tied to serial harassers, and in the case of Annapurna in direct expense of being a beloved media producer, makes you wonder what worse skeletons that family has in its closet if this is already just the open awful stuff they want us to know about their close associates.
by kaijia | 2025-12-08 20:53:18+00:00
I almost did it with the plain claude code on a $20 plan, without any skills, by leveraging my domain expertise with the following prompt:

Your goal is to create an HTML5 website that is pixel-accurate as the screenshot @Space-Jam.png . You can use the image files in the `img` folder. To achieve pixel-level reproduction, first write auxiliary programs to measure the pixel locations of the objects on this page. Then use your measurements to create the page. Consider using feature detection/matching with per-object (x, y) offsets and a global scale factor shared by all objects as the free parameters. Consider using RANSAC for robust estimation. After obtaining an initial estimation, crop the image of each object and use local sparse optical flow for refinement. Use JPG format for visual inspection of intermediate results. Your webpage should be able to scale with the window size.

Note: the footer text size/locations are off. We can probably fix that by explicitly asking cc to write scripts for text bounding box detection.

More details here: https://gist.github.com/jia-kai/802de63816711d67f0a090fa267a...
by manmal | 2025-12-08 20:53:20+00:00
In large projects you need to actually point it to the interesting files, because it has no way of knowing what it doesn’t know. Tell it to read this and that, creating summary documents, then clear the context and point it at those summaries. A few of those passes and you‘ll get useful results. A gap in its knowledge of relevant code will lead to broken functionality. Cursor and others have been trying to solve this with semantic search (embeddings) but IMO this just can’t work because relevance of a code piece for a task is not determinable by any of its traits.
by akomtu | 2025-12-08 20:53:27+00:00
The return of technocracy from 1930s?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement

"Technocracy advocates contended that price system-based forms of government and economy are structurally incapable of effective action, and promoted a society headed by technical experts, which they argued would be more rational and productive."
by lenerdenator | 2025-12-08 20:53:40+00:00
> I wasn't talking about 1950 and neither were you previously, so let's not shift focus.

I actually was. I said that hunger has decreased since the 1960s, and that was due to things like automation and chemistry - which means things like pesticides - so the 1950s would have been what things looked like before these changes were made, and when the UN official says

>“Using more pesticides is nothing to do with getting rid of hunger. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), we are able to feed 9 billion people today. Production is definitely increasing, but the problem is poverty, inequality and distribution.”

He's talking about using more pesticides than now.

> They do and will reduce it by 50%

Good. No reason to use chemicals that aren't necessary. The problem is, many people across the world have a fundamental lack of understanding on whether pesticides are necessary at all. There are people who think that you can do that, and if you don't show that to not be the case, they'll try it, and people will literally starve.

... which goes back to the point that I made earlier about the lack of the understanding on the bargain we make with these things.

> Not sure why you are so apologetic there.

I wasn't?
by pajko | 2025-12-08 20:53:59+00:00
The first generation was complete garbage. Itanium 2 came too late and it did not get widespread due to wrong business decisions and marketing. By the time it could have been successful, AMD64 was out. And even then Intel targeted only the same high-end enterprise market segment, when they have implemented 64-bit on Xeon: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/intel-expanding-64-b...
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-08 20:54:46+00:00
The reason search got so bad, even pretending google themselves are some beneficial actors, is because it is a directly adversarial process. It is profitable to be higher in search results than you "naturally" would be, so of course people attack it.

Google's entire theory of founding was that you could do better than Yahoo hand picking websites with an algorithm, and pagerank was the demonstration, but IMO that was only possible with a dataset that was non-adversarial because you couldn't "attack" yahoo and friend's processes from the data itself.

The moment that changed, the moment pagerank was used in production, the game was up. As long as you try to use content to judge search ranking, content will be changed, modified, abused, cheated to increase your search rank.

The very moment it becomes profitable to do the same for LLM "search", it will happen. LLMs are rather vulnerable to "attack", and will run into the exact same adversarial environment that nullified the effectiveness of pagerank.

This is orthogonal also to if you believe Google let search be shittier to improve their ad empire. LLM "search" will have exactly this same problem if you believe it exists.

If you build a credit card fraud model on a dataset that contains no attacks, you will build a rather bad fraud model. The same is true of pagerank and algorithmic search.
by duped | 2025-12-08 20:54:55+00:00
> absolutely everything about GHA fucking sucks

By adding one file to your git repo, you get cross-platform build & test of your software that can run on every PR. If your code is open source, it's free(ish) too.

It feels like a weekend project that a couple people threw together and then has been held together by hope and prayers with more focus on scaling it than making it well designed.
by jjmarr | 2025-12-08 20:55:03+00:00
I've been using it for a few years on Gentoo. There were challenges with Python 2 years ago, but over the past year it's stabilized and I can even do img2video which is the most difficult local inference task so far.

Performance-wise, the 7900 xtx is still the most cost effective way of getting 24 gigabytes that isn't a sketchy VRAM mod. And VRAM is the main performance barrier since any LLM is going to barely fit in memory.

Highly suggest checking out TheRock. There's been a big rearchitecting of ROCm to improve the UX/quality.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-08 20:55:05+00:00
Lowendtalks is absolutely nice and I am enjoying it a lot. I thought that cloud was centralized or cheap servers would be absolutely bad but to be honest I am enjoying the niche of low end servers too and they feel more personal to me :p

Very interesting that you mention twitter, my problem is that, I do not have twitter and do not intend on having one. Maybe mastodon?

Sorry for making this multi threaded simultaneous discussions lol but as we were talking about contact pages, I think that the best discussion that we can have in my opinion with my ideals and etc. too is if a company is active on mastodon. Like we were talking how IM's etc. can be ghosted etc. which is fair too (one of my issues on OVH discord was solved, the other wasnt and I was ghosted yes)

Having a frequent mastodon presence can be huge for such a company then. Maybe that can be a compromise I am willing to do if they mention in their website that they are active on mastodon or similar. I think it might be the best way then.

Like imagine a company's contact page said that "we are active on mastodon and you can (ping?) us on there regarding any issues/support inqueries"

Fediverse definitely needs an private dm features similar to twitter then I guess too but this might be outside of the scope of this discussion which might I say I enjoyed so have a nice day sir!
by csa | 2025-12-08 20:55:09+00:00
> You could just as logically say that if the user has spent money to remove advertising, then they now have less money and are less valuable to advertise for.

Thank you for the laugh.

While this may be true on an individual level, it’s wildly not true in aggregate.

The first dollar is hardest to get. Once someone has shown a propensity to spend on pretty much anything, they become much more valuable as an advertising target.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-12-08 20:55:10+00:00
Even before LLMs became big I started hording solid technical books, as there was so much misinformation on Google/SO that any non-trivial technical question could not be answer without a high probability that the answer was fundamentally wrong.

LLMs are super helpful for learning, but without the foundation of a true textbook at your side they will very easily go off the rails into a world of imagination.
by dzhiurgis | 2025-12-08 20:55:14+00:00
Sure if you got good tires, good weather, drive very cautiously, have long wheelbase vehicle - it will never be used.

Drive a bit faster on gravel road and FAFO. Puddle on a highway - hope you can brake quick enough to trigger ABS and save your ass. Taking a bend with a bit more speed than you should and there's some dirt - RIP. There's some snow and you drive Smart - you'll be spinning even with the best of tires.

Sure it can be avoided. It saved my ass about 5 times. 4 of which I was simply going too fast, but once it wasn't my fault.

I'd suggest getting car with one and try to spin it out of control either on gravel or snow. Pretty sobering.