MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andrenotgiant | 2025-12-09 17:57:42+00:00
This got me thinking: Rewind 25 years, I can easily imagine 15 year-old me sinking DOZENS of hours into playing this "game". I remember I put much more time than that into a free game that came in a box of cereal[0].

Today, I loaded the site up and spend about 30 seconds on it before deciding "this is cool!" and moving on, probably never to return.

What changed? I guess it's a mix of: (A) How I value my time. (B) The bar for "what pulls me in" in terms of gaming. (C) Some other factor around me just having already burned enough hours on games.

I'm not really sure how much each factor contributes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest
by collinmcnulty | 2025-12-09 17:57:55+00:00
I think the ship very much has not sailed on how different spaces treat LLM responses. Are LLMs something that you can use if you want, but are considered rude and banned from being blatantly posted without human ownership? “You can’t use an LLM” would be an impossible rule, but “You can use an LLM to write your response but you have to take responsibility for the output” is feasible.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-09 17:58:33+00:00
When I was consuming close to a book a month, I thought it was pretty well worth it.. it's hard to justify otherwise. Before Amazon got big, I would browser B&N/Borders etc. for technical books and it was nice... even after Amazon, I remember driving across town for a book that I kind of needed before the weekend for a project.

Amazon then became my main go-to... then more blog articles and technical posts became prevalent... StackOverflow grew to similar dominance. Now, I buy a handful of books for my Kindle a couple times a year and may or may not get through them. I'm more inclined to just read online docs, search or even look at AI results than read through books. I miss dead tree books, but the space and moving them kinda sucks. Not to mention, that even with glasses the text is a bit hard for me now.

I'm still an avid tech reader, just more blogs and less books... I used to tear through 500-800 pages on a typical weekend. After 3 decades in this career, I'm a bit more inclined to veg out in front of the TV.
by nphardon | 2025-12-09 17:59:17+00:00
ive been vibe coding (i think it's vibe coding) in C for the past three weeks and it's been super fun. i was tasked with trying to improve our highly optimized hyper-graph partitioning algorithm. One of the fun things i like to do is feed the llm an academic paper, have it summarize the key pts, and then implement the algos that we (me and the llm) find interesting. This feels like i hit the fabled 10x productivity mark because it would have taken me at least a week (probably more) to digest a paper enough to implement it, and often I would give up, convincing myself it's not worth the time / effort. So 10x might even be a low ball.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-12-09 17:59:30+00:00
Really thinking about it, maybe they're not more fraglie. CDs scratch easily but tapes are still exposed on the bottom, so you really want to keep both in their cases.

I still think it's wild that portable (as in the Walkman sense) CD players were a thing - a spinning disc with a precision optical pickup with very little separating it from the outside world that b1umps around on your hip as you walk. I guess it's equally crazy to have a tape motor on your hip, but it just seemed less fragile to me.

My musical habits for the past few years have been long mixes of songs on YouTube, that I don't really skip around in. I think YouTube's ads that annoyingly hit between every video nudged me in that direction; but that's why I made mixtapes back in the day when you bought an album but there was only 1 or 2 good songs on it.
by hivetechs | 2025-12-09 17:59:50+00:00
No this is not a fork, I built it from scratch. It is not intended to be used with vscode extensions. Its an Electron app. Desktop Framework

- Electron - Desktop app with main/renderer process architecture - TypeScript - Primary language (strict mode) Frontend/UI - Monaco Editor - VS Code-style code editing - HTML/CSS - UI rendering - WebSockets - Real-time communication with backend Backend Services - Node.js - Runtime - Express - Memory Service API server - SQLite - Local database for memory persistence - Cloudflare D1 - Remote sync for memory backup
by Barrin92 | 2025-12-09 18:00:01+00:00
>Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work.

No it doesn't. Just for the fun of it because I'm somewhat familiar with the VLC codebase I tried to fix some bugs with "agentic tooling" and "vibe coding". And it just produces crap. Which is one metric I'd propose for the usefulness of these tools, why aren't they fixing real bugs in the large open source codebases of this world? You'd be a hero, VLC has like 4000 open issues.

The answer is of course because these tools, in particular in manual memory managed languages which the author proposes to use, don't work at all. Maybe they work on a toy project of 500 lines of code, which is all every demo ever produces, but these text based systems have no actual understanding of the hardware underlying a complex program. That's just not how they work.
by runarberg | 2025-12-09 18:00:01+00:00
When you are talking about machine cognition you are talking philosophy, and are building up on what other philosophers have done in this area. One of which is Bertrand Russell which funded type theory, and Gilbert Ryle which described category mistake as “a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property”.

Cognition is a term from psychology, not statistics, if we are applying type theory, cognition would be a (none-pure) function term which take the atom term stimulus and maps them to another atom term behavior and involves states of types including knowledge, memory, attention, emotions, etc. In cognitive this is notated with S → R where S stands for stimulus, and R stands for response.

Attributing cognition to machine learning algorithms superficially takes this S → R function and replaces all state variables of cognition with weight matrices, at that point you are no longer talking about cognition. The S → R mapping of machine learning algorithms are most glaringly (apart from randomness) pure functions, during the S → R mapping of prompt to output nothing is stored in the long term memory of the algorithm, the attention is not shifted, the perception is not altered, no new knowledge is added, etc. Machine learning algorithms are simply just computing, and not learning.
by otikik | 2025-12-09 18:00:50+00:00
Can it generate good code?

Both the author and I agree in that yes, it can.

Does it always generate good code?

Here is where the author and I disagree vehemently. The author implies that the ai-generated code is always correct. My personal experience is that it often isn't. Not even for big projects - for small bugfixes it also misunderstands and hallucinates solutions.

So no C or assembly for me, thank you very much.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-12-09 18:00:59+00:00
> But is that expectation written anywhere?

in many of the F500 orgs I've worked at -- yes it is. unambiguously so.

diversity / inclusion / team building activities were explicitly called out as part of yearly goals and performance review metrics.

things like go to a women-in-tech event and just listen, or a black history month discussion, read a book about homelessness and minority communities, etc. I went on a postmodern literature spree and ended up reading a bunch of african and middle eastern authors and that qualified for the perf review.

the "LBGTQ 5k" is a laughably bad strawman and would never be required for a bunch of reasons.
by apparent | 2025-12-09 18:01:13+00:00
For me, I'd rather use my Pebble to do this.

> Initially, we experimented by building this as an app on Pebble, since it has a mic and I’m always wearing one. But, I realized quickly that this was suboptimal - it required me to use my other hand to press the button to start recording (lift-to-wake gestures and wake-words are too unreliable). This was tough to use while bicycling or carrying stuff.

I guess I don't bicycle or carry stuff enough for this to matter. And often when my hands are full, I have my AirPods in and can just ask Siri (and cross my fingers that she'll understand).

This seems neat, but I try to keep my life as simple as possible, which means not having a ring when I can use my watch/earbuds to do the same thing about 99% of the time.
by mhitza | 2025-12-09 18:01:14+00:00
> The rules just keep growing faster than the AI bubble.

No they aren't.

What you have, and of interest to digital companies are.

GDPR (2016), for all operating in the EU. You get the gist of it in an afternoon.

The AI guideline (2024), also readable in an afternoon, and it mostly has provision that make life harder for those in law enforcement, and healthcare tech.

DMA (2022), only affects the select few at the top Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.

Show me where these bubbling "inscrutable" regulations, that push business away, are.
by didibus | 2025-12-09 18:01:28+00:00
It is basically a big game of hot potato. If you are OK with that, fine, but you are still just gambling on a party game chip.

There is a little bit of real value in having a rail that is hard to block, so you can move money across borders or around account freezes, sanctions, or runaway inflation. But that probably only justifies a tiny slice of the current price.

Most of the rest is speculation.

Fiat is different. A national currency is tied to the economy that uses it. Wages, rent, groceries, taxes, all live in that unit. Even if it crashes on FX markets you can still use it inside that country to buy local goods and services, and over time prices and wages shift along with it. The currency may fall against the dollar, but the local cost of living in that currency moves with it too.

The dream was that crypto gets adopted economically in a similar fashion, and even globally, that simply didn't happen, so it ended up just being gambling.
by codyb | 2025-12-09 18:01:37+00:00
I haven't done much, my theory here is...

A) I barely get to do any coding these days anyways

B) Reading code is harder than writing it (and thus, easier to gloss over), and by the time I'm ready to write code I've already done all the hard work (I.E. even if vibe coding made me 50% faster, it's 50% of 5% of the overall software development life cycle in this more senior role)

C) I've never even copied code from Stack Overflow into my editor (maybe once or twice in a couple decades), I always type things myself because it literally forces you to walk through character by character in a field where changing one character can easily lead to 8 hour bug hunts

D) There's probably not much world where I can't ramp up fairly quickly on how to prompt well

E) It seems to me everyone is spending all their time comparing model X with model Y, creating prompt context files, running multiple agents in parallel... if the purported gains are to occur, eventually we should have tools that require less of all that, and I can just use those later tools when they're around instead of learning a bunch of stuff that will naturally be useless (This is like if you became a Backbone JS expert and were left stunned when people started using React)

F) And if those gains don't occur (and the gains certainly seem to be leveling off quick, the comments today look much like the comments a few years ago, and I've really not seen much one way or the other when comparing a variety of coworkers in terms of productivity beyond POCs, and the starts of small scope green field projects (although, those can be accomplished by non technical people in some instances which is neat)) then... well... I guess I'll just keep doing what I've been doing for the last couple decades, but I won't have wasted a bunch of time learning how to prompt Grok vs Copilot vs ChatGPT or what ever and I'll still have tons of information in my head about how everything works
by corobo | 2025-12-09 18:01:38+00:00
I feel like such a dumbass for falling for it.

At first I thought it was just super American cheerful or whatever but after the South Park episode I realised it's actually just a yes man to everyone.

I don't think I've really used it since, I don't want man or machine sticking their nose up my arse lmao. Spell's broken.
by staticassertion | 2025-12-09 18:01:55+00:00
Maybe what's confusing here is "true durability" but most people want to know that when data is committed that they can reason about the durability of that data using something like a basic MTBF formula - that is, your durability is "X computers of Y total have to fail at the same time, at which point N data loss occurs". They expect that as the number Y goes up, X goes up too.

When your system doesn't do things like fsync, you can't do that at all. X is 1. That is not what people expect.

Most people probably don't require X == Y, but they may have requirements that X > 1.
by TomasBM | 2025-12-09 18:02:05+00:00
Yes.

The pre-LLM equivalent would be: "I googled this, and here's what the first result says," and copying the text without providing any additional commentary.

Everyone should be free to read, interpret and formulate their comments however they'd like.

But if a person outsources their entire thinking to an LLM/AI, they don't have anything to contribute to the conversation themselves.

And if the HN community wanted pure LLM/AI comments, they'd introduce such bots in the threads.
by jsnell | 2025-12-09 18:02:21+00:00
> Nobody who is doing this is willing to come clean with hard numbers but there are data points, for example from Meta and (very unofficially) Google.

The Meta link does not support the point. It's actually implying a MTBF of over 5 years at 90% utilizization even if you assume there's no bathtub curve. Pretty sure that lines up with the depreciation period.

The Google link is even worse. It links to https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/datacenter-g...

That article makes a big claim, does not link to any source. It vaguely describes the source, but nobody who was actually in that role would describe themselves as the "GenAI principal architect at Alphabet". Like, those are not the words they would use. It would also be pointless to try to stay anonymous if that really were your title.

It looks like the ultimate source of the quote is this Twitter screenshot of an unnamed article (whose text can't be found with search engines): https://x.com/techfund1/status/1849031571421983140

That is not merely an unofficial source. That is just made up trash that the blog author just lapped up despite its obviously unreliable nature, since it confirmed his beliefs.
by alexchantavy | 2025-12-09 18:02:22+00:00
> they mimic common misconceptions found on the internet (e.g. "chameleons change color for camouflage")

Wait what, what do chameleons actually change color for then?? TIL.

---

So if I understand correctly, you take existing models, do fancy adjustments to them so that they behave better, and then sell access to that?

> These are both applications where Fortune 500 companies have utilized our technology to improve subpar performance from existing models, and we want to bring this capability to more people.

Can you share more examples on how your product (IIUC, a policy layer for models) is used?
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-09 18:02:35+00:00
Obviously right now the best language to use LLMs for, vibe coding or not, is whatever they are most familiar with, although not sure what this actually is! Java?

Going forwards, when LLMs / coding tools are able to learn new languages, then languages designed for machines vs humans certainly makes sense.

Languages designed for robust error detection and checking, etc. Prefer verbosity where it adds information rather than succintness. Static typing vs dynamic. Contractual specification of function input/output guarantees. Modular/localized design.

It's largely the same considerations that make a language good for large team, large code base projects, opposite end of the spectrum to scripting languages, except that if it's machine generated you can really go to town on adding as much verbosity is needed to tighten the specification and catch bugs at compile time vs runtime.
by usednet | 2025-12-09 18:02:59+00:00
A responsible journalist can't say directly that Sacks was a confabulist but they can point out facts and allow the reader to infer. That's what the article does. There are many facts in the article that are relevant to the title in this sense (the prime number twins, the journal entries about Hat, etc.).

I also don't agree with your interpretation of what the article is trying to paint Sacks as, though of course you are entitled to it.

I think the the point of the article is to articulate what Sacks himself said:

> "As Sacks aged, he felt as if he were gazing at people from the outside. But he also noticed a new kind of affection for humans—“homo sap.” “They’re quite complex (little) creatures (I say to myself),” he wrote in his journal. “They suffer, authentically, a good deal. Gifted, too. Brave, resourceful, challenging.”"
by jacquesm | 2025-12-09 18:03:08+00:00
There is a massive difference between an 'unsolved problem' and a problem solved 'the wrong way'. Yes, 99.7% is surprisingly good. But it did not detect the errors in its own output. And it should have.

Besides, we're all stuck on the 99.7% as if that's the across the board output, but that's a cherry picked result:

"The best models (bases 24, 16 and 32) achieve a near-perfect accuracy of 99.7%, while odd-base models struggle to get past 80%."

I do think it is a very interesting thing to do with a model and it is impressive that it works at all.
by AngryData | 2025-12-09 18:03:27+00:00
The North Korean government is trash, but that doesn't mean I gotta ignore the plights and opinions of Koreans 75 years ago or pretend that bombing them to rubble was somehow a good thing because today they are lead by a despot. Millions of people didn't deserve to die just because the US had a dumb ideological crusade against communism when the vast majority of people in Korea supported it.
by prmoustache | 2025-12-09 18:03:37+00:00
peertube is in that weird space where the software is good technically but is overkill for home users and small entities[1] and moderation, bandwith and storage cost makes it a bit difficult and expensive to host large public shared instances unless you find a way to monetize it.

I guess it is more an alternative for Microsoft Stream than youtube really as it is more likely to be used as an internal video communication platform for a company than a public video streaming platform.

[1] if the audience is small, you are just fine sharing vids using the html video tags
by ycosynot | 2025-12-09 18:03:39+00:00
As a brain is made of small pebbles, a LLM is made of small pebbles. If it wants to talk, let it be. I am arguing metaphysically. Not only did it evolve partially out of randomness (and so with a kind of value as an enlighted POV on existence), but it is still evolving to be human, and even more than human. I believe LLM should not be banned, "they" should be willfully, and cheerfully, included in the discourse.

I asked Perplexity, and Perplexity said: ""Your metaphysical intuition is very much in line with live debates: once “small pebbles” are arranged into agents that talk, coordinate, and co-shape our world, there is a strong philosophical case that they should be brought inside our moral and political conversations rather than excluded by fiat.""
by loeg | 2025-12-09 18:03:55+00:00
> Rust doesn't prevent programs from having logic errors.

Like everything around Rust, this has been discussed ad nauseam.

Preventing memory safety bugs has a meaningful impact in reducing CVEs, even if it has no impact on logic bugs. (Which: I think you could argue the flexible and expressive type system helps with. But for the sake of this argument, let's say it provides no benefits.)
by syncsynchalt | 2025-12-09 18:04:10+00:00
Yeah, at the least you'll need an understanding of ULPs[0] before you can write code that's safe in this way. And understanding ULPs means understanding that no single constant is going to be applicable across the FLT or DBL range.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_in_the_last_place
by f1shy | 2025-12-09 18:04:13+00:00
I don’t want to imply this is your case, because of course I’ve no idea how you work. But I’ve seen way too often, the reason for so many separate features is:

A) as stated by parent comment, the ones doing req. mngmt. Are doing a poor job of abstracting the requirements, and what could be done as one feature suddenly turns in 25.

B) in a similar manner as A, all solutions imply writing more and more code, and never refactor and abstract parts away.
by julianeon | 2025-12-09 18:04:14+00:00
If you go on YouTube you can find a lot of vibe coders doing interviews where they drop a brief mention of their SaaS products. I think the main reason they are not well publicized is because they obviously have no moat. If I speak to a really big audience and tell them my SaaS which I vibe coded in 1 day is earning 10k/mo, then I'll have 10 competitors by tomorrow.

But if you want a "citation needed" name of someone shipping vibe coded apps and making money off it: on YouTube, Ed Yonge, or many of the guests on Starter Story.
by munificent | 2025-12-09 18:04:22+00:00
Reference counting can also have very bursty performance. Consider what happens when you decrement the last reference to an object which is the sole remaining reference to an entire large tree of other objects. This will trigger a whole cascade of subsequent decrements and deallocations, which can be arbitrarily large.

Of course, you might say, "Well, sure, but your reference counting implementation doesn't need to eagerly deallocate on dereference." That's true! You can write a ref counter that defers some of those deallocations or amortizes them across multiple operations.

And when you do that, now you really do have a garbage collector.

See: https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/2008-415/reading/bacon-g...
by k1rd | 2025-12-09 18:04:37+00:00
The major problem is that I understand all the words. It is all next version of the technology we already have and know. Down to the naming.

Think about 10 years ago. No one knows even on HN what is an agent, LLM, and all this stuff. Or to be fair even why is Trump showing up on the feed at all.

It has to be more confusing to be real.
by beepbooptheory | 2025-12-09 18:04:51+00:00
Just having a 'count-in' type feature for recording would be much much more useful. Head nodding is something I do all the time anyway as a musician :).

I don't know what your user makeup is like, but shipping a CV feature same day sounds so potentially disastrous.. There are so many things I would think you would at least want to test, or even just consider with the kind of user emapthy we all should practice.
by SyneRyder | 2025-12-09 18:04:57+00:00
I was briefly excited when Mistral Vibe launched and mentions "0 MCP Servers" in its startup screen... but I can't find how to configure any MCP servers. It doesn't respond to the /mcp command, and asking Devstral 2 for help, it thinks MCP is "Model Context Preservation". I'd really like to be able to run my local MCP tools that I wrote in Golang.

I'm team Anthropic with Claude Max & Claude Code, but I'm still excited to see Mistral trying this. Mistral has occasionally saved the day for me when Claude refused an innocuous request, and it's good to have alternatives... even if Mistral / Devstral seems to be far behind the quality of Claude.
by FromOmelas | 2025-12-09 18:05:20+00:00
rather then ban, I would prefer posts/comments are labeled as such.

with features:

- ability to hide AI labeled replies (by default)

- assign lower weight when appropriate

- if a user is suspected to be AI-generated, retroactively label all their replies as "suspected AI"

- in addition to downvote/upvote, a "I think this is AI" counter