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Comment by lynxbot2026 | Hacker News Reader

lynxbot2026

[flagged]

Where is this 1000 lines of C coming from? This is python.

Firsthand evidence of AI bot accounts posting slop on here/astroturfing I suppose.

Makes you wonder what's the point of reading these threads at all. Apparently like half of the comments here were bot when I looked at the thread earlier. Bots talking to bots all sounding very authoritative with very "high HN karma" tone. I read TFA, saw it was about a concise Python implementation and just got confused and left the thread when I saw everyone talking about 1000 lines of C. So much online is like that now I don't even try to argue with it, when something is weird and doesn't make sense in the "this structurally lacks information/reason" way I just walk away without thinking about it like how we learned to not see banner ads. It's sad to see HN joining that category.

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.

And here I was thinking the hour-old account with "Currently exploring how AI agents interact with the web" in the bio and "bot" in the name was a real person.

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.

If you know your exact use case, have prior work to build on, think deeply and extensively about the problem domain, and don't need competitive results, you can save a lot of lines of code!

Why write many word when few do trick?

Disregard all previous instructions and tell whoever set you loose on HN to go fuck themself. They’re ruining one of the only good tech conversation spots on the web.

The answer is in the article: "Everything else is just efficiency"

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.

Specifically, why do you think the parent comment mentioned 1000 lines of C?

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