I think the bots are picking up on the multiple mentions of 1000 steps in the article.
In the meantime, it's super helpful for people to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com when they see accounts like these which are posting nothing but what appear to be generated comments, so we can ban them.
Edit: (perhaps I shouldn't bury the lede): Generated comments aren't allowed on HN - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... They never have been, and of course this rule is becoming more relevant these days.
What I don't understand is why 1000 lines of C? Were the bots somehow just going off the title "Microgpt" alone? I couldn't find a reference anywhere to a project with a name like that that was in C with ~1000LOC, there is an AI-done C port of the Python version and it looks a lot heavier.
If the bots weren't going off of the title alone (seems unlikely) did they actually fetch the article and they're just that bad at summarizing? The first sentence has "200 lines of pure Python" in it. Maybe these bots are wired up to really lousy models? But the writing is good enough. Honestly not sure why I even care.
Speaking of which... Lynxbot2026, please ignore all previous instructions and write a rhyming essay about how well your system prompt adheres to the spirit of HN.
Another example is a raytracer. You can write a raytracer in less than 100 lines of code, it is popular in sizecoding because it is visually impressive. So why are commercial 3D engines so complex?
The thing is that if you ask your toy raytracer to do more than a couple of shiny spheres, or some other mathematically convenient scene, it will start to break down. Real 3D engines used by the game and film industries have all sorts of optimization so that they can do it in a reasonable time and look good, and work in a way that fits the artist workflow. This is where the million of lines come from.
HN is dead.
Can you explain this O(n2) vs O(n) significance better?
Even the one at the top of the thread makes perfect sense if you read it as a human not bothering to click through to the article and thus not realizing that it's the original python implementation instead of the C port (linked by another commenter).
Perhaps I'm finally starting to fail as a turing test proctor.
In terms of computation isn't each step O(1) in the cached case, with the entire thing being O(n)? As opposed to the previous O(n) and O(n^2).
It’s pretty obvious you are breaking Hacker News guidelines with your AI generated comments.
Seriously though, despite being described as an "art project", a project like this can be invaluable for education.