MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by predkambrij | 2025-12-18 22:29:39+00:00
Things about those approaches did and will change more when LLMs are getting better. I got some unbelievable good results back in March, then I was tasking LLMs too hard problems and got bunch of frustrations, then learned to prompt better (to give LLMs methods to test their own work). It's an art to do good balance of spending time writing prompts that will work. A prompt could be "fix all the issues on Github", but maybe it going to fail :)
by basch | 2025-12-18 22:30:00+00:00
The same applies to context vs a database. If a reasoning model makes a decision about something, it should be put off to the side and stored as a value/variable/entry somewhere. Instead of using pages and pages of context, it makes sense for some tasks to "press" decisions that become more permanent to the conversation. You can somewhat accomplish that with notebooklm, by turning results into notes into sources, but notebooklm is insular and doesnt have the research and imaging features of gemini.

And also, in writing, writing from top to bottom has its disadvantages. It makes sense to emulate human writing process and have passes, as you flesh out, and conversely summarize writing.

Current LLMs can brute force these things through emulation/observation/mimicry but they arent as good as doing it the right way. Not only would I like to see "skills" but also "processes" where you create a well defined order that tasks are accomplished in sequence. Repeatable templates. This would essentially include variables in the templates, set for replacement.
by ta1999 | 2025-12-18 22:31:31+00:00
Not shocked given the following statement from Mintlify to a recruiter a few months ago:

"I'd rather hire a junior dev who knows the latest version of NextJS than a senior dev who is experienced with an earlier version."

This would be a forgivable remark, except the recruiter was aware of the shortsightedness, and likely attempted to coach the hiring manager...
by smivan | 2025-12-18 22:31:33+00:00
I ended up prototyping self hosted https://woodpecker-ci.org/ on my k8s cluster. Ended up taking just a few hours of AI time (Claude Code). Woodpecker has a helm chart, can connect to Github and post status checks to commits.

Open to feedback or tips and tricks on this, but so far it's looking promising. Curious how other folks experience has been.
by troupo | 2025-12-18 22:31:49+00:00
See, you're again projecting things.

Yes, you can do good things with shitty tools. And you could stop and say: this is enough. But then we would probably never have any programming languages at all.

Haskell exists because idiots that made existing languages didn't make one as good as in Philip Wadler's brain.

Go literally exists because idiots cannot use programming languages created by geniuses.

Rust exists because idiots who made all the existing languages didn't make one as good as in Graydon Hoare's brain. After all, all browsers on the market were built in C/C++, who is he to think that he could create a better/different language? Shut up and get on with the program.

C# exists because idiots who created other languages didn't create a language Microsoft wanted to control, and also weren't as good as the one Anders Hejlsberg's brain. After all, Java was already there.

Except Java exists only because who created other languages didn't create a language as good as the one in James Gosling's (and Mike Sheridan's and Patrick Naughton's) brain. Again, C/C++ had already been there, they could've used that.

Is Blow abrasive and shits on a lot of things? Of course. If you can't see past that to what he's actually doing with the language he's implementing, it's your problem.

> Only JB is arrogant to think that only a new language is good enough for him to make a game with.

Lol. I think this is the textbook definition of projection. He literally never said nor implied this in any way, shape, or form.

If anything, creating a new language set him back several years.
by chasd00 | 2025-12-18 22:31:59+00:00
LLMs are great at spewing content and code is a form of "content". I think what we're seeing is software development turning into youtube. Content creators cranking out content, some is great, most is meh, a lot is really bad. I do find it all a bit funny and ironic. My wife was a journalist and bemoaned news blogs and social media for terrible terrible writing claiming it was journalism. She would tell me about how much work quality journalism is and all the mistakes these bloggers and social media make and how detrimental it was to society at large blah blah blah

Now the power to create tons and tons of code (ie content) is in the hands of everyone and here we are complaining about it just like my wife use to complain about journalism. I think the myth of the highly regarded Software Developer perched in front of the warming glow of a screen solving and automating critical problems is coming to an end. Deservedly really, there's nothing more special about typing words into an editor than, say, framing a house. The novelty is over.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-18 22:32:13+00:00
Yup. "Get dinged" was usually some kind of reprimand. It could go from being yelled at by the department manager, to being fired as a department.

And yes. It was a strong disincentive to making changes.

I didn't really like it, but our software did do what it said on the tin (which wasn't always ideal).
by pavel_lishin | 2025-12-18 22:32:13+00:00
Two answers:

1. Why should they be restricted to ludicrously low wages? If they're producing something of value, they should be compensated. Not only is it morally wrong to, you know, enslave people, on a more practical level it would be very helpful for people who are leaving prison after serving their sentence to actually have some money saved up, so they have better opportunities, to avoid recidivism.

2. The reason they can sit on their ass and consume what they produce is that they effectively become wards of the state. They're still human beings, and if we have decided to incarcerate them, we become responsible for them, and they still have rights as human beings.

A humble job is fine; I'm not saying they should be sitting in an aeron chair bullshitting on Slack for 8 hours a day. But slavery for pennies on the hour is wrong.
by reallynattu | 2025-12-18 22:32:55+00:00
I built this to scratch my own itch – in companies we use different data services that produce charts in different styles, and unifying them for reports or presentations is a pain. Sometimes you have a CSV export, sometimes just a screenshot from a dashboard, and manually recreating everything is tedious.

How it works: - Paste a screenshot, drop a CSV or JSON, or describe what you want in text - AI extracts the data and generates an editable chart - For clean CSVs, it parses locally without hitting the AI - Customize colors, themes, labels, and data directly in the browser

Export formats: SVG, PNG, animated GIF, MP4, WebM, and Lottie (for web/app animations).

Built with TanStack Start, Recharts, and Gemini API. Free to use.

Would love any feedback, especially on the UX and what export formats or chart types you'd find useful.
by jonahx | 2025-12-18 22:32:57+00:00
> because there aren't existing business processes those vulnerabilities drop seamlessly into; they're all situational and time-sensitive.

what's an example of an existing business process that would make them valuable, just in theory? why do they not exist for xss vulns? why, and in what sense, are they only situational and time-sensitive?

i know you're an expert in this field. i'm not doubting the assertions just trying to understand them better. if i understand you're argument correctly, you're not doubting that the vuln found here could be damaging, only doubting that it could make money for an adversary willing to exploit it?
by mcjiggerlog | 2025-12-18 22:33:12+00:00
> Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".

They basically already have this feature: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-link-previews-firef...
by sethops1 | 2025-12-18 22:33:40+00:00
I have a site with a complete and accurate sitemap.xml describing when its ~6k pages are last updated (on average, maybe weekly or monthly). What do the bots do? They scrape every page continuously 24/7, because of course they do. The amount of waste going into this AI craze is just obscene. It's not even good content.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-12-18 22:33:57+00:00
I'm not sure why people still believe this, especially developers. We're starting to literally just build AI into everything... you're not even going to know what's AI and what's not. The phase of labeling everything with cute little sparkles is starting to end and AI is going to be used similarly to external libraries.

If you don't like AI you need to seek legislation and pressure your local politicians. It's the only way to stop it.
by gruez | 2025-12-18 22:34:00+00:00
>We've already had TVs which only started serving ads after a few months of use. What's stopping them from selling TVs which stop working if it hasn't been able to connect to the mothership for a few weeks?

Same thing that prevents your phone manufacturer from adding a firmware level backdoor that uploads all your nudes to the mothership 1 day after the warranty expires. At some point you just have to assume they're not going to screw you over.
by rglullis | 2025-12-18 22:34:13+00:00
> I dont see any reason why an app approach cant support that.

Matrix clients have e2ee encryption like Signal or WhatsApp.

Every single one of my close contacts that I have on my server have ignored or misunderstood the instructions to download and store the recovery key when they first access the servers.

I have customers on my support channel who keep trying different clients (Element, ElementX, Fractal) and every time they fail to validate their sessions.

Then I have customers who got their phone stolen and then come asking me to either delete the data on their phone.

---

There is no magic about "putting it in a app to manage it". If any "app approach" you come up with creates a sandbox between user and device, then the user can not even see their private keys, then they effectively do not own it.

If you are doing "nostr, but with keys sandboxed on the device", then you are just recreating Signal - which is not decentralized - then what's the point?
by Yoric | 2025-12-18 22:34:24+00:00
In my experience, not really, no.

You need a very different mindset to write in JS (or TS), in Rust, in Rocq, in Esterel or on a Quantum Computer. You need a very different mindset when coding tools that will be deployed on embedded devices, on user's desktops, in the Linux kernel, on a web backend or in a compiler. You need a very different mindset when dealing with open-source enthusiasts, untrusted users, defense contractors.

You might be able to have "seen it all" in a tiny corner of tech, but if you stop there, I read it as meaning that you don't have enough curiosity to leave your comfort zone.

It's fine, you don't really have to if you don't want to.
by agentultra | 2025-12-18 22:34:35+00:00
Worse for Vizzini; the LLM doesn’t even care about the truth. It was trained on all of the sloppy code we could find. Even if he reads every line of code he could miss the non-obvious bugs and expire anyway when management gets wind that it was his LLM generated code that led to the PII breach which cost them 10% of their share value in a week.

At least a liar is trying to deceive you. Vizzini’s entire exercise is moot.
by bsimpson | 2025-12-18 22:35:00+00:00
I have my HN name @gmail.com.

I've never actually used that account, because there are too many anonymous Bart Simpsons (and old people who don't understand email addresses) who use that one.

The shitty thing is that I use Google Apps for Your Domain (a.k.a. Dasher/GSuite) to get around this. For years, things like Photos and Music were stuck to my useless Gmail account, because the PMs involved never bothered going through the approvals to get those things to work on custom domain accounts (which Google ret-conned to be for businesses only).

A lot of these are resolved now, but there are still frustrating places where it comes up:

- I pay twice for YouTube Music - once for myself, and once for my family. I can't share my account with them, because it's attached to my domain name.

- I similarly can't join their Google Home accounts to do things like have my voice recognized when I visit them.

- Gemini CLI thinks I'm a business and quotas me like one.
by roenxi | 2025-12-18 22:35:07+00:00
The NASDAQ line go up model is why the AI boom is happening and a major factor in why it is Western companies leading the charge. The more bigger issue is that the west refused to sell chips to China so they had to figure out how to make their own. And margin compression is what free markets do. That is one of the big motivators to putting free markets everywhere, the freer the market the more compressed the margins become. All the people working hard at crappy jobs start working hard at high paying jobs instead until the competition drives the money out of the sector.

There is a theme in the industries China does well in - western regulators ban cut-throat competition, China competes very hard and wins. The situation at scale is pretty straightforward. Usually it is environmental or labour policy, so this case of the root cause being sanctions is a bit unusual. But, once again, how Nvidia is meant to compete in China when their best products can't be sold there?
by dagmx | 2025-12-18 22:35:29+00:00
You made the statement that Blow doesn’t get political in an attempt to refute someone else’s comment.

Other people have proven he does.

So either you must concede that your initial rebuke was based on insufficient information, in which case why try and act like he has said nothing of concern.

Or his world views fit within your own view and are thus deemed neutral.

His comments are not a matter of opinion. And opinion that extends to affecting the lives of others , including supporting those who affect the lives of others, is very much politics.

So your favourite food is not politics but if you try and affect change that affects someone else’s favourite food, it is inherently political. If you support someone who starts affecting my favourite food, that too is political.
by ninkendo | 2025-12-18 22:35:53+00:00
I didn't say I live in a place just like Houten, I said I live in a place where you regularly see kids under 10 years old riding bikes together without adults (and like GP said, often with a fishing pole or soccer ball in tow.)

You don't need a place that's the literal "best place for cycling in the world" for this, you just need to (1) build a bike path that's not adjacent to the road (ours is typically 10-20ft away from the road) and (2) have it be along a main thoroughfare where everyone lives a short distance from it.
by wincy | 2025-12-18 22:36:39+00:00
Isn’t that mostly economics? I definitely prefer using Claude to GPT-OSS120B for a code assistant.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $500,000 laying around to buy myself a DGX B200 with a TB of HBM and 2TB of system ram, nor the 14.3kW of power to run the thing.
by hekkle | 2025-12-18 22:36:55+00:00
No, the permissions are very granular compared to Stock Android. I can't remember all of them from scratch, but by way of example Graphene allows for 'contact scopes', which sets permissions for which contacts you will share with each app, rather than a blanket "you can access all of my contacts" that Android has. I know when I tried it last (this was more than a year ago mind you so it might have changed), if you didn't give Amazon access to all contacts it somehow knew and refused to work.
by kyuksel | 2025-12-18 22:37:02+00:00
Google DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve made a key insight clear: hashtag#AgenticAI can act as a team of evolutionary scientists, proposing meaningful algorithm changes inside an evaluation loop. AlphaEvolve and similar methods also share a fundamental limitation. Each mutation overwrites the structure. Earlier variants become inert. Partial improvements cannot be recombined. Credit assignment is global and coarse. Over long horizons, evolution becomes fragile. I introduce EvoLattice, which removes this limitation by changing the unit of evolution itself. Instead of evolving a single program, EvoLattice evolves an internal population encoded inside one structure. A program (or agent) is represented as a DAG where each node contains multiple persistent alternatives. Every valid path through the graph is executable. Evolution becomes additive, non-destructive, and combinatorial — not overwrite-based. We evaluate EvoLattice on NAS-Bench-Suite-Zero, under identical compute and evaluation settings. EvoLattice outperforms AlphaEvolve, achieves higher rank correlation, exhibits lower variance and faster stabilization, and improves monotonically without regression. We further validate generality on training-free optimizer update rule discovery, where EvoLattice autonomously discovers a nonlinear sign–curvature optimizer that significantly outperforms SGD, SignSGD, Lion, and tuned hybrids — using the same primitives and no training.

Why this matters? Persistent internal diversity: AlphaEvolve preserves diversity across generations. EvoLattice preserves it inside the program. Strong components never disappear unless explicitly pruned. Fine-grained credit assignment: Each micro-operator is evaluated across all contexts in which it appears, producing statistics (mean, variance, best-case). AlphaEvolve only sees a single scalar score per program. Quality–Diversity (QD) without archives: EvoLattice naturally exhibits MAP-Elites-style dynamics: monotonic improvement of elites, widening gap between best and average, bounded variance — without external archives or novelty objectives. Structural robustness: AlphaEvolve relies on the hashtag#LLM to preserve graph correctness. EvoLattice applies deterministic self-repair after every mutation, removing structural fragility from the loop.

AlphaEvolve shows how hashtag#LLMs can mutate programs. EvoLattice shows what they should evolve: the internal computational fabric, not entire programs. This turns LLM-guided evolution from a fragile rewrite process into a stable, cumulative, QD-driven discovery system. The same framework applies to prompt and agentic workflow evolution. As agent systems grow deeper and more interconnected, overwrite-based evolution breaks down. EvoLattice’s internal population and self-repair make long-horizon agentic evolution feasible and interpretable.
by james_marks | 2025-12-18 22:37:09+00:00
If I were 16, I’d be thinking I just made an obscene amount of money ($4,000!) messing with computers for fun, and got to meet people at a famous company.

That’s a free car. Free computer. Uber eats for months.

And my status with my peers as a hacker would be cemented.

I get that bounty amounts are low vs SE salary, but that’s not at all how my 16yo self would see it.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-12-18 22:37:19+00:00
> The problem here is that it's cheaper to leave financed buildings empty, rather than fill them up at cheaper rents

Exactly! So we make it more expensive to leave their building empty. Land value tax makes it more expensive to hold the land vacant, thus encouraging the speculator to either use the property (improving the community), or continue lowering rental/sale prices until it rents or sells, or pay higher taxes to the community they're ruining.

> Empty lots aren't empty because their owners hate you, it's because the land value is too low for the mortgage and needs to drop, but can't, they're unwilling or unable to eat the loss.

They're empty because the speculators are asking so much above market price for rent or sale that nobody can afford it. The solution is to institute forces which coerce them to either use it or sell it (potentially at a loss, but not as high a loss as holding it vacant).

> Land value tax supposedly solves that ... by making everything more expensive?

No, land value tax only makes it more expensive to leave the property empty. It doesn't make anything else more expensive. Indeed, it makes it cheaper for a business to buy up an unused property, because the seller would rather sell at a loss than incur a sufficiently larger loss (land value tax) over time.
by frndsprotocol | 2025-12-18 22:37:29+00:00
This is exactly why the current ad model is broken.

Users are tracked without real consent, advertisers still waste budgets, and everyone loses except the platforms collecting the data.

What’s interesting is that you can actually build effective ads without spying at all — by targeting intent signals instead of identities, and rewarding users transparently for engagement.

The tech is already there, but the incentives are still backwards.
by Dr_Birdbrain | 2025-12-18 22:37:39+00:00
I’m unclear what has been gained here.

- Is the work easier to do? I feel like the work is harder.

- Is the work faster? It sounds like it’s not faster.

- Is the resulting code more reliable? This seems plausible given the extensive testing, but it’s unclear if that testing is actually making the code more reliable than human-written code, or simply ruling out bugs an LLM makes but a human would never make.

I feel like this does not look like a viable path forward. I’m not saying LLMs can’t be used for coding, but I suspect that either they will get better, to the point that this extensive harness is unnecessary, or they will not be commonly used in this way.
by sigmar | 2025-12-18 22:37:58+00:00
Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?

Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?

Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
by pfannkuchen | 2025-12-18 22:38:20+00:00
> who insist that no books containing LGBT characters appear in libraries

Is this a common stance? I thought it was more like, no books glorifying LGBT lifestyle or teaching it as if it’s not controversial and it’s just a fact of life (as proponents sincerely believe, of course, not saying no one is thinks it is a fact of life, that’s just the part that is controversial). I understand disagreeing with that, but it isn’t the same as opponents pushing for zero gay/etc characters period, right?

I haven’t been following this topic too closely though so I might be missing what people are screeching about on the right today.
by Avicebron | 2025-12-18 22:38:24+00:00
Or, to play Devil's advocate, people called in the rabid dog because they felt they had been sold down the river starting in the 1970s. The hollowed out industrial towns weren't good places to grow up, and when they did manage to go to college and play by the rules the ladders were already in a fast retreat up the walls..

Damned if you. Damned if you don't.
by hintymad | 2025-12-18 22:38:39+00:00
> Parsing a known HTML structure, transforming a table, running a financial simulation.

Transforming an arbitrary table is still hard, especially a table on a webpage or in a document. Sometimes I even struggle to find the right library. The effort does not seem worth it for one-off need of such transformation too. LLM can be a great tool for doing the tasks.