MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jjice | 2026-01-26 18:00:19+00:00
I've found that the thing that made is really click for me was having reusable rules (each agent accepts these differently) that help tell it patterns and structure you want.

I have ones that describe what kinds of functions get unit vs integration tests, how to structure them, and the general kinds of test cases to check for (they love writing way too many tests IME). It has reduced the back and forth I have with the LLM telling it to correct something.

Usually the first time it does something I don't like, I have it correct it. Once it's in a satisfactory state, I tell it to write a Cursor rule describing the situation BRIEFLY (it gets way to verbose by default) and how to structure things.

That has made writing LLM code so much more enjoyable for me.
Show HN: Code syntax beats JSON for LLM tool specs
by galaxyeye | 2026-01-26 18:00:47+00:00
While building the AI agent module in Browser4, we noticed an interesting effect:
*describing tool specifications with programming language syntax instead of JSON significantly reduces prompt size.*

In our experiments, Kotlin-style signatures were consistently more token-efficient than JSON-based schemas.

## Example: tool specification in Kotlin-style syntax

```kotlin
// domain: driver
driver.navigateTo(url: String)
driver.focus(selector: String)
driver.hover(selector: String)
driver.click(selector: String)
driver.click(selector: String, modifier: String)
driver.fill(selector: String, text: String)
driver.type(selector: String, text: String)
driver.press(selector: String, key: String)

// domain: browser
browser.switchTab(tabId: String): Int
browser.closeTab(tabId: String)

// domain: fs
fs.writeString(filename: String, content: String)
fs.readString(filename: String): String

// domain: agent
agent.extract(instruction: String, schema: String): String
agent.summarize(instruction: String?, selector: String?): String

// domain: system
system.help(domain: String): String
system.help(domain: String, method: String): String
```

## Size comparison

### Tool specification only

| Format | Lines | Characters |
| ------------ | ----- | ---------- |
| Kotlin-style | 50 | 2,180 |
| JSON | 339 | 7,720 |

### Full system prompt

| Format | Lines | Characters |
| ------------ | ----- | ---------- |
| Kotlin-style | 433 | 11,522 |
| JSON | 722 | 17,066 |

In this case, the Kotlin-style format reduced prompt size by roughly *~30–40%* (and ~70% at the tool-spec level).

## Observations

Compared with JSON, language-like syntax has several properties:

* *Higher information density*: types, parameters, and semantics are expressed in fewer tokens.
* *Better alignment with LLM training data*: models have seen大量 programming language code.
* *Improved human readability*: easier to scan than deeply nested JSON.
* *Lower inference cost*: fewer tokens in system prompts.

At the same time, there are trade-offs:

* Less explicit structure than JSON Schema.
* Harder to validate automatically.
* Language bias (Kotlin vs TypeScript vs Python).

## Question to HN

If the goal is to optimize LLM tool calling, should we still default to JSON?

Or should we treat “code-like DSLs” as a first-class representation for tool specifications?

Full comparison and raw data:
[https://github.com/platonai/Browser4/blob/a88ecbd10de075041a...](https://github.com/platonai/Browser4/blob/a88ecbd10de075041a...)
by zahlman | 2026-01-26 18:00:51+00:00
> Way more than half the country was disenfranchised in the last election.

Over 152 million votes were cast, representing more than 64% turnout among those eligible to vote (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...).

The USA has about 342 million people, and over 18% of them are age 14 or younger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...) and at least some of them are 15-17 (citation needed). So clearly, doing some arithmetic, there are fewer than 304 million adults.

Not only was "half the country" not "disenfranchised", literally a majority of adults actually voted (and this is not even considering that not all adults were statutorily allowed to vote in the first place).
by marcd35 | 2026-01-26 18:01:00+00:00
i'm no expert, and i actually asked google gemini a similar question yesterday - "how much more energy is consumed by running every query through Gemini AI versus traditional search?" turns out that the AI result is actually on par, if not more efficient (power wise) than traditional search. I think it said its the equivalent power of watching 5 seconds of TV per search.

I also asked perplexity to give a report of the most notable ARXIV papers. This one was at the top of the list -

"The most consequential intellectual development on arXiv is Sara Hooker's "On the Slow Death of Scaling," which systematically dismantles the decade-long consensus that computational scale drives progress. Hooker demonstrates that smaller models—Llama-3 8B and Aya 23 8B—now routinely outperform models with orders of magnitude more parameters, such as Falcon 180B and BLOOM 176B. This inversion suggests that the future of AI development will be determined not by raw compute, but by algorithmic innovations: instruction finetuning, model distillation, chain-of-thought reasoning, preference training, and retrieval-augmented generation. The implications are profound—progress is no longer the exclusive domain of well-capitalized labs, and academia can meaningfully compete again."
by cloverich | 2026-01-26 18:01:09+00:00
This has been a tough nut to crack, conversationally. My strategy lately has been to flip tue script: Do you think Fascism is bad? How do you define it? What would Trump need to do for you to consider him a fascist.

Its interesting to see at what point and how people try to wiggle out. Its a fun one because common counters of eg "Biden is a communist" are so easy to disassemble, ie im happy to define communist, agree it would be bad, agree we should fight against it, provide specific examples of things Biden could do to fit a communist description, etc.

It helps so far to help the right at least admit to their biased world view. not change it, but at least sort of see it.
by maxglute | 2026-01-26 18:01:20+00:00
In 6 months TMSC US foundries would grind to a halt without consumables from TW who still has many sole source suppliers. The reason for CONUS TSMC fabs is because that's all US industrial policy can really manage, CHIPS never pretended to be able to reshore the entire semi supply chain (unlike PRC) and until US does, or at least reshores everything sole source off TW, will remain exquisitely vulnerable.

Also TW politicians have objected to notion they'd vaporize their fabs / golden goose. That meme started by US Army War College + Colby who said US should blow up the fabs, as in it shouldn't be a TW decision. Which TW have rebuked said they will defend against US attacks. Also other shenanigans like when US suggest they would paperclip TW semi engineers, and TW basically said there's no way they'd send semi engineers to safety before children. AKA TW not retarded, they know not to toast their golden goose, because golden goose for PRC still gives TW leverage even if TW forced to capitulate. They'd still rather be wealthy semi producers than pine apple farmers under PRC.
by pmarreck | 2026-01-26 18:01:38+00:00
I asked it about "Chinese cultural dishonesty" (such as the 2019 wallet experiment, but wait for it...) and it probably had the most fascinating and subtle explanation of it I've ever read. It was clearly informed by Chinese-language sources (which in this case was good... references to Confucianism etc.) and I have to say that this is the first time I feel more enlightened about what some Westerners may perceive as a real problem.

I wasn't logged in so I don't have the ability to link to the conversation but I'm exporting it for my records.
by Geste | 2026-01-26 18:01:44+00:00
I'd say we did, you need more and more for the same effect.

Here is the first ad ever, for a watch :
https://youtu.be/ho2OJfXkvpI

For comparison, here is the latest ad for the best selling watch as of today :
https://youtu.be/kdMTc5WfnkM
by neogodless | 2026-01-26 18:02:04+00:00
To beat a dead horse, propaganda works. And it's so much more pervasive than an occasional misleading message.

Millions in the U.S. get "information" from a firehose of propaganda.

That defines the reality they see. Others perhaps just feel hopeless but... want to believe that our constitutional democracy somehow manages to hold on and rebound.
by ProofHouse | 2026-01-26 18:02:16+00:00
Is anyone a researcher here that has studied the proven ability to sneak malicious behavior into an LLM's weights (somewhat poisoning weights but I think the malicious behavior can go beyond that).

As I recall reading in 2025, it has been proven that an actor can inject a small number of carefully crafted, malicious examples into a training dataset. The model learns to associate a specific 'trigger' (e.g. a rare phrase, specific string of characters, or even a subtle semantic instruction) with a malicious response. When the trigger is encountered during inference, the model behaves as the attacker intended.You can also directly modify a small number of model parameters to efficiently implement backdoors while preserving overall performance and still make the backdoor more difficult to detect through standard analysis. Further, can do tokenizer manipulation and modify the tokenizer files to cause unexpected behavior, such as inflating API costs, degrading service, or weakening safety filters, without altering the model weights themselves. Not saying any of that is being done here, but seems like a good place to have that discussion.
by narrator | 2026-01-26 18:02:17+00:00
It's more than that. If you ask ChatGPT what's the quickest legal way to get huge muscles, or live as long as possible it will tell you diet and exercise. If you ask Grok, it will mention peptides, gene therapy, various supplements, testosterone therapy, etc. ChatGPT ignores these or even says they are bad. It basically treats its audience as a bunch of suicidally reckless teenagers.
by drusepth | 2026-01-26 18:02:29+00:00
I'm not sure this is true... we heavily use Gemini for text and image generation in constrained life simulation games and even then we've seen a pretty consistent ~10-15% rejection rate, typically on innocuous stuff like characters flirting, dying, doing science (images of mixing chemicals are particularly notorious!), touching grass (presumably because of the "touching" keyword...?), etc. For the more adult stuff we technically support (violence, closed-door hookups, etc) the rejection rate may as well be 100%.

Would be very happy to see a source proving otherwise though; this has been a struggle to solve!
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-26 18:02:30+00:00
The Tea Party was an astroturfed political movement that started freerunning on hatred, and still hasn't stopped. MAGA is just that political movement still running.

That political movement was basically "Fox News will save us from the Government", and of course, "Black people are their own problem"

Donald Trump can be directly traced back to shit Nixon did, and every single Republican administration since. "If the president does it, it's not illegal" is literally how Nixon tried to defend his crimes.

It's a common trope in liberal circles that Fox News was started explicitly to never ever let that happen again. Well, it worked.

IMO it goes all the way back to reconstruction being abandoned because racist people voted for horrifically racist politicians who were sympathetic to the Confederate cause. America elected many politicians, including literal presidents, who thought fixing the problem of genuine traitors should be avoided.

The confederacy was a shithole, authoritarian state who's entire purpose was maintaining the institution of slavery, and the vast majority of it's supporters didn't even hold slaves. But they needed to live in a world where a black person was inherently worse than they were. The confederacy was also working to lean on the dumbest fundamentalists Christians they could find, the ones who lapped up the "God wants us to enslave black people" tripe they spouted, and millions did exactly that. The Confederacy was exploring being an explicit theocracy, but the main reason against that was essentially that the oligarchs preferred being in control.

This happened again with the Civil Rights movement, where America has responded by pretending it wasn't real, we never did anything to black people that wronged them after we banned slavery, it's all woke nonsense, why do black people keep talking about being oppressed, "Obama shouldn't have made it a race thing" when it was definitely a race thing, etc.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-26 18:02:41+00:00
Not the parent poster, but the cynical impression I had from very early on for DID is that almost all of its complexity and much of the reason its space is full of half-working implementations rather than working ones is pretty obviously because it was designed to be an abstraction layer on top of "namecoins" and when the "namecoin" dependency was removed (for good reasons) there were not enough good ideas for what to replace that dependency with, sort of intentionally leaving what was left of the design in a sort of guaranteed perpetual state of half-implementation (including implementations based on some of the original "namecoin" ideas).
by galangalalgol | 2026-01-26 18:02:51+00:00
People work different than llms they fond things we don't and the reverse is also obviously true. As an example, a stavk ise after free was found in a large monolithic c++98 codebase at my megacorp. None of the static analyzers caught it, even after modernizing it and getting clang tidy modernize to pass, nothing found it. Asan would have found it if a unit test had covered that branch. As a human I found it but mostly because I knew there was a problem to find. An llm found and explained the bug succinctly. Having an llm be a reviewer for merge requests males a ton of sense.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-26 18:03:08+00:00
To add to this, in case of any remaining confusion. You can implement your own execve in userspace. [0] But the kernel's execve is a piece of machinery that invokes the loader so obviously it follows that you're free to make any changes you'd like to the overall process.

Bonus points if you add compression or encryption and manage to trip a virus scanner or three. [1]

[0] https://grugq.github.io/docs/ul_exec.txt

[1] https://blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-07/Yason/Whitepape...
Show HN: I built Goodreads for academic papers to help my wife survive her PhD
by lowercasename | 2026-01-26 18:03:10+00:00
My wife recently started her PhD and while she uses Zotero as a citation manager, she was really missing a tool for keeping track of what she's reading right now/has already read/needs to read next. This overwhelming experience might be familiar to other researchers working on a niche field where every paper is called pretty much the same thing

So I built her Paperstack. It's basically Goodreads, but for research papers:

- Save articles to familiar To Read/Reading/Read stacks
- Tag articles with logical projects/chapters/whatever your system is
- Get AI-generated summaries so you can quickly decide if a paper is worth your time

I would love feedback from any students and researchers managing paper overwhelm!
by _pdp_ | 2026-01-26 18:03:19+00:00
Many EU members impose regulatory requirements for software in some sectors. If you want to get certified you need to go through some of them and while they are arcane they are also required.

EU could easily force the hand - not in the next month or so but over a period of time. No need to discriminate against US companies but EU companies might be preferred and might have better access to EU services.

We already have customers asking for this. They are not the majority but given the recent events this could quickly become a valuable chunk of the business - perhaps even overnight. We as a business are already thinking about it. And it is not just about moving the data to an EU data center. This is of course acceptable in many cases but still subject to the CLOUD Act. We are talking about a clean cut situation.

It is true that good alternatives are not available, yet. But I would not underestimate EU tech companies either. There are plenty of great engineers and great companies in EU so strong competitors can spun up in short order. Now with AI coding assistants, it is even more doable then before.

It is also potentially a great opportunity especially now.
by jampekka | 2026-01-26 18:03:32+00:00
This looks like it's coming from a separate "safety mechanism". Remains to be seen how much censorship is baked into the weights. The earlier Qwen models freely talk about Tiananmen square when not served from China.

E.g. Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 gives an extensive reply starting with:

"The famous photograph you're referring to is commonly known as "Tank Man" or "The Tank Man of Tiananmen Square", an iconic image captured on June 5, 1989, in Beijing, China. In the photograph, a solitary man stands in front of a column of Type 59 tanks, blocking their path on a street east of Tiananmen Square. The tanks halt, and the man engages in a brief, tense exchange—climbing onto the tank, speaking to the crew—before being pulled away by bystanders. ..."

And later in the response even discusses the censorship:

"... In China, the event and the photograph are heavily censored. Access to the image or discussion of it is restricted through internet controls and state policy. This suppression has only increased its symbolic power globally—representing not just the act of protest, but also the ongoing struggle for free speech and historical truth. ..."
by everfrustrated | 2026-01-26 18:03:42+00:00
Worth pointing out that your IDE/plugin usually adds a whole bunch of prompts before yours - let alone the prompts that the model hosting provider prepends as well.

This might be what is encouraging the agent to do best practices like improvements. Looking at mine:

>You are a highly sophisticated automated coding agent with expert-level knowledge across many different programming languages and frameworks and software engineering tasks - this encompasses debugging issues, implementing new features, restructuring code, and providing code explanations, among other engineering activities.

I could imagine that an LLM could well interpret that to mean improve things as it goes. Models (like humans) don't respond well to things in the negative (don't think about pink monkeys - Now we're both thinking about them).
by chimpanzee | 2026-01-26 18:03:52+00:00
> prices should determine what an effective use of resources should be

I have $1,000,000,000 and an insatiable appetite for both material and domination. My 9 neighbors, stupid naive fucks that they are, only have $100,000 in total and do not have imaginations sufficient to even begin to want all materials and power in the world.

So of course, when the sole owner of water comes along and offers to sell it, I buy it all for $100,001. I can really never have enough water, especially as I need to power wash my driveway everyday. (I absolutely cannot stand the sight of grime.)

Anyways I guess my point is, I’m glad we all understand that price determines efficiency. Once my 9 neighbors die of dehydration, I’ll be able to gather more materials and power with less obstruction and competition. Hooray!
by spockz | 2026-01-26 18:03:55+00:00
The dependencies were always there. But never before (since the forming of NATO) has the US leadership so clearly and concretely distanced themselves from Europe. Before that there was a strong sense of North America and Europe belonging to the same “liberal” world where many things did be relatively cheaply exchanged.

The dependencies were therefore seen as a non issue for many. Banks have always been skeptics of the cloud because of the ability of the American government to just pull the plug if they want. Before it was a theoretical possibility that still came up in risk analysis. Today it is something that could even concretely happen.

Prosecutors and others have been denied access to their official work email etc because they displeased the president.

Trust has been eroded.
by zibini | 2026-01-26 18:03:58+00:00
I did test it on controversial topics that I already know various sides of the argument and I could see it worked well to give a well-rounded exploration of the issue. I didn't get Fox News vibes from it at all.

When I did want to hear a biased opinion it would do that too. Prompts of the form "write about X from the point of view of Y" did the trick.
by hombre_fatal | 2026-01-26 18:04:03+00:00
Well, you can review its reasoning. And you can passively learn enough about, say, Rust to know if it's making a good point or not.

Or you will be challenged to define your own epistemic standard: what would it take for you to know if someone is making a good point or not?

For things you don't understand enough to review as comfortably, you can look for converging lines of conclusions across multiple reviews and then evaluate the diff between them.

I've used Claude Code a lot to help translate English to Spanish as a hobby. Not being a native Spanish speaker myself, there are cases where I don't know the nuances between two different options that otherwise seem equivalent.

Maybe I'll ask 2-3 Claude Code to compare the difference between two options in context and pitch me a recommendation, and I can drill down into their claims infinitely.

At no point do I need to go "ok I'll blindly trust this answer".
by olivdums | 2026-01-26 18:05:14+00:00
Hey!
I'm Oli, Senior software engineer working with React for some years now,

With the AI era, I'm spending some time waiting for AI code generation and less time learning stuffs on StackOverflow, blogs etc,

So I thought about this solution to keep learning new React concepts, the lessons and exercises I've made are for junior to senior devs,

I've added some React19 courses, it's super new and I know it's not 100% perfect for now but I would love your feedback to improve it and build a project people love,

Cheers
by cyberax | 2026-01-26 18:05:25+00:00
> Comparing them with cars on this metric is laughable. Must be 18 or so and able bodied, obtain an expensive license, purchase the actual very expensive vehicle, pay for constant upkeep in insurance, fuel, repairs, and risk serious accidents. All of this is an insane barrier to entry.

Just wait until you hear how much transit costs!

> And where exactly is this place you describe where everyone commutes exclusively by bike? Ooops, right, it doesn't exist, never has, probably never will. So you're just making stuff up.

Who said anything about exclusivity? Please point out with a hyperlink.

> I adore your conversational technique of adding positively charged words like "democratic" and "accessibility" without any justification or explanation, just to make it seem like you have an argument.

I provided a link in this thread. Go on, dispute it.
by jeppester | 2026-01-26 18:05:26+00:00
I don't know about France, but here in Denmark you'd generally find tech jobs on LinkedIn.

If you have a decent amount of experience I don't think you'd be looking for very long.

But as stated by other commenters, the salaries and lower and the taxes higher.

What you get back is great worker protection, child care, free education and generally a feeling of safety for yourself and family. We also have a democracy that offers more than two choices!