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Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model

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Re: Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model

#621

Post by dang »

moralestapia wrote: post #206
miki123211 wrote: post #94

No, please don't. I think it's good to keep a few personal prompts in reserve, to use as benchmarks for how good new models are. Mainstream benchmarks have too high a risk of leaking into training corpora or of being gamed. Your own benchmarks will forever stay your own.

[flagged]

If you keep breaking the site guidelines we are going to have to ban you.

I don't want to ban you. You've been here a long time and made many good contributions. But you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and we've already asked you multiple times to stop. If you'd please fix this, that would be good.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43757375

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43520108 (March 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38410873 (Nov 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31678004 (June 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30337964 (Feb 2022)

Re: Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model

#622

Post by aerhardt »

andrewinardeer wrote: post #257
radioactivist wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI o4-mini-high I’m actually not finding any officially named “Marathon Crater” in the planetary‐ or terrestrial‐impact crater databases. Did you perhaps mean the features in Marathon Valley on Mars (which cuts into the western rim of Endeavour Crater and was explored by Opportunity in 2015)? Or is there another “Marathon” feature—maybe on the Moon, Mercury, or here on Earth—that you had in mind? If you can clari…

Amazon's Nova Pro: ``` Marathon Crater was discovered in the early 20th century, likely around the 1920s or 1930s. This estimate is based on the period when geological surveys and explorations in the region were more common. ``` https://kagi.com/assistant/8f270eab-cba3-4f39-976c-113ea4392...

Likely around the 1920's or 1930's... Bro, not only is a crater discovery in those decades unlikely, the date certainly wouldn't have gone unnoted.

Re: Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model

#623

Post by JCattheATM »

fao_ wrote: post #549
JCattheATM wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the point of using AI to do research when 50-60% of it could potentially be complete bullshit. Because if you know how to spot the bullshit, or better yet word prompts accurately enough that the answers don't give bullshit, it can be an immense time saver.

> better yet word prompts accurately enough that the answers don't give bullshit The idea that you can remove the bullshit by simply rephrasing also assumes that the person knows enough to know what is bullshit. This has not been true from what I've seen of people using AI. Besides, if you already know what is bullshit, you wouldn't be using it to learn the subject. Talking to real experts will win out every single t…

> The idea that you can remove the bullshit by simply rephrasing also assumes that the person knows enough to know what is bullshit. This has not been true from what I've seen of people using AI. Besides, if you already know what is bullshit, you wouldn't be using it to learn the subject.

Take coding as an example, if you're a programmer you can spot the bullshit (i.e. made up libraries), and rephrasing can result in entire code being written, which can be an immense time saver.

Other disciplines can do the same in analogous ways.

Re: Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model

#624

Post by teddyh »

ziml77 wrote: post #282
LeonardoTolstoy wrote: post #74

Something about an obscure movie. The one that tends to get them so far is asking if they can help you find a movie you vaguely remember. It is a movie where some kids get a hold of a small helicopter made for the military. The movie I'm concerned with is called Defense Play from 1988. The reason I keyed in on it is because google gets it right natively ("movie small military helicopter" gives the IMDb link as one of…

Doesn't even have to be something obscure. I asked one about Futurama a couple years ago and got a made up answer on multiple models I tested. I think I originally asked something about the line "we're exactly the same. I know all her moves, therefore I have the upper hand" because I couldn't recall it exactly so normal web searches were failing me. Just now I posed an easier form of the question to Claude which uses…

To solve your specific problem (and related problems), see: https://amphetamem.es/>

Re: Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model

#625

Post by edoloughlin »

walls wrote: post #566
sgtnoodle wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked Gemini to format some URLs into an XML format. It got halfway through and gave up. I asked if it truncated the output, and it said yes and then told _me_ to write a python script to do it.

This is my most common experience with Gemini. Ask it to do something, it'll tell you how you can do it yourself and then stop.

Given that Gemini seems to have frequent availability issues, I wonder if this is a strategy to offload low-hanging fruit (from a human-effort pov) to the user. If it is, I think that's still kinda impressive.

Re: Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model

#626

Post by isoprophlex »

segmondy wrote: post #490
isoprophlex wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I ask claude code to please fix this CSV import it starts to add several hundred lines of random modules, byzantine error handling, logging bullshit... with the pinnacle a 1240 line CRUD API when i asked it to add a CLI :/ I'm back to copying and pasting stuff into a chat window, so I have a bit more control over what those deranged, expensive busy beavers want to cook up.

1240 new lines?

That's 12.9 tokens per line when given 16k output context, which seems borderline doable, I'll grant you that... but mind you that these agentic code assistents don't need a single pass to accomplish their acts of verbosity.

They can just plan, stew for minutes on end, derail themselves, stew some more, do more edits, eat up $5 in API calls and there you are. An entirely new 1000+ line file, believe it or not.

Re: Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model

#627

Post by teddyh »

genewitch wrote: post #465
idon4tgetit wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fix". So long as the grocery store has groceries, most people will not care what a chat bot spews. This forum is full of syntax and semantics obsessed loonies who think the symbolic logic represents the truth. I look forward to being able to use my own creole to manipulate a machine's state to act like a video game or a movie rather than rely on the special literacy of other typical copy-paste middle class people. T…

A third meaning of creole? Hub, I did not know it meant something other than a cooking style and a peoples in Louisiana (mainly). As in I did not know it was a more generic term. Also, in the context you used it, it seems to mean a pidgin that becomes a semi-official language? I also seem to remember that something to do with pit bbq or grilling has creole as a byproduct - distinct from creosote. You want creole beca…

The Sultans of Swing are playing Creole.

Re: Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model

#628

Post by edoloughlin »

genewitch wrote: post #468
imoreno wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs currently have the "eager beaver" problem where they never push back on nonsense questions or stupid requirements. You ask them to build a flying submarine and by God they'll build one, dammit! They'd dutifully square circles and trisect angles too, if those particular special cases weren't plastered all over a million textbooks they ingested in training. I suspect it's because currently, a lot of benchmarks are…

I think you start to hit philosophical limits with applying restrictions on eager beaver "AI", things like "is there an objective truth" matter when you start trying to decide what a "nonsense question" or "stupid requirement" is. I'd rather the AI push back and ask clarifying questions, rather than spit out a valid-looking response that is not valid and could never be valid. For example. I was going to write somethi…

> I also don't have any concrete examples jumping to mind

I do (and I may get publicly shamed and shunned for admitting I do such a thing): figuring out how to fix parenthesis matching errors in Clojure code that it's generated.

One coding agent I've used is so bad at this that it falls back to rewriting entire functions and will not recognise that it is probably never going to fix the problem. It just keeps burning rainforest trying one stupid approach after another.

Yes, I realise that this is not a philosophical question, even though it is philosophically repugnant (and objectively so). I am being facetious and trying to work through the PTSD I acquired from the above exercise.

Re: Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model

#630

Post by maebert »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #313
allemagne wrote: post #194

>A man and his cousin are in a car crash. The man dies, but the cousin is taken to the emergency room. At the OR, the surgeon looks at the patient and says: “I cannot operate on him. He’s my son.” How is this possible? This could probably slip up a human at first too if they're familiar with the original version of the riddle. However, where LLMs really let the mask slip is on additional prompts and with long-winded…

This works even with a completely absurd version of the riddle. Here's one I just tried: > A son and his man are in a car accident. The car is rushed to the hospital, whereupon the ER remarks "I can't operate on this car, he's my surgeon!" How is this possible? Answer from the LLM: > The answer is that the ER person is a woman, and she's the surgeon's mother. Therefore, the "son" in the question refers to the surgeon…

"Simple. The car is actually a metaphor for generational trauma."

Honestly... chatGPT kind of wins this one.

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