MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rahimnathwani | 2025-04-24 04:04:44+00:00
instructing an agent to write anything from scratch inevitably takes more time than writing it yourself

But you can reuse your instructions with zero additional effort. I have some instructions that I wrote for a 'Project' in Claude (and now a 'Gem' in Gemini). The instructions give writing guidelines for a children's article about a topic. So I just write 'write an article about cross-pollination' and a minute later I have an article I can hand to my son.

Even if I had the subject matter knowledge, it would take me much longer to write an article with the type of style and examples that I want.

(Because you said 'from scratch', I deliberately didn't choose an example that used web search or tools.)
by oofbaroomf | 2025-04-24 04:04:50+00:00
If you would use LLM-assisted CAD for real industrial design, you would have to end up by specifying exactly where everything has to go and what size it has to be. But if you are doing that then you may as well make an automated program to convert those specific requirements into a 3D model.

Oh wait, that's CAD.

Cynical take aside, I think this could be quite useful for normal people making simple stuff, and could really help consumer 3D printing have a much larger impact.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-24 04:05:40+00:00
I suppose that if you divide up the value of a full Bible by 73 or 66, the price for a Gospel of John alone is pretty reasonable. It is certainly not practical to purchase one book alone, other than for ornamental or display purposes.

A Gospel of John alone is unsuitable for any liturgical use. Most illuminated books were pretty much understood to be placed in sacred liturgical settings, and therefore it made sense to go to that expense; they would not be shoved in a monk's drawer or a young girl's dowry chest, all things being equal.

Therefore, the illumination process would produce a complete Lectionary, a Psalter, or a Missal; speaking as a liturgical Roman Catholic, the Holy Bible is not a book we use directly for public liturgy, like at all. Bibles are for personal devotion and study. A Book of Gospels is a specialized Lectionary, and I do not know its particular structure, but it would need to include all four, for sure!

If they intend to produce all four Gospels this way, or the entire NT, that's great; I'm sure a collector would avidly follow their publication and snap them all up in short order. But for ordinary consumers, the sheer utility of an illuminated Bible is questionable at best. It's the sort of thing you'll place on a coffee table as a conversation piece, or prominently on a shelf, just to exhibit your wealth and good taste.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-04-24 04:05:47+00:00
My favorite Willy Ley quote:

When things get so tough that there seems to be no way out, the Russian embraces the vodka bottle, the Frenchman a woman, and the American the Bible. The German tends to resort to magic.

It's not especially complimentary in context, though (page 72): https://epizodyspace.ru/bibl/inostr-yazyki/Buss_Willy_Ley_Pr...
by spenceXu | 2025-04-24 04:06:02+00:00
Totally hear you. $8/hr is steep, and I’ve hit that wall too.

My hypothesis is that we might find weird edge-cases — small arbitrage tasks, emotional labor, creative content, or even hustling donations — where the agent survives not by being efficient, but by being novel.

It might not scale. But if one survives for 3 days doing random TikTok reposts or selling AI-generated stock photos, I’d consider that a win.

Also, part of the fun is just watching how it tries. Even if it fails, the failure modes could be insightful (or hilarious).
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-24 04:06:41+00:00
One of the cool things about humanity is that we do stuff that doesn't seem to make much sense, like set sail in a direction without any idea if there is even land out there

The reason to colonize Mars is to see if we can

For a lot of people that's a sufficient reason

And frankly it may be worthwhile because if we can colonize Mars we may be able to colonize a large asteroid full of resources that we need, or something else

Or create a chain of fueling station colonies on planets on the way to a new, habitable planet

Who knows. But sometimes we just should set sail and see what happens
by 13years | 2025-04-24 04:06:51+00:00
But it is not an illusion, and the answers make no sense. In some cases the models pick exactly the opposite answer. No human would do this.

Yes, outside the training patterns is the point. I have no doubt if you trained LLMs on this type of pattern with millions of examples it could get the answers reliably.

The whole point is that humans do not need data training. They understand such concepts from one example.
by spenceXu | 2025-04-24 04:07:25+00:00
Great point on homoiconicity — I agree that most current LLMs are "frozen brains" with no lifelong learning.

My aim here isn’t to create a fully self-modifying AI (yet), but to test what happens when even a static model is forced to operate in a feedback loop where money = survival.

Think of it as a sandbox experiment: will it exploit loopholes? specialize in scams? beg humans for donations?

It’s more like simulating economic pressure on a mindless agent and watching what behaviors emerge.

(Also, your last line made me laugh — and yeah, that’s part of the meta irony of the experiment.)
by captainkrtek | 2025-04-24 04:07:59+00:00
This is spot on. And in line with other comments, the tools such as chatgpt that give me a direct interface to converse with are far more meaningful and useful than tacked on chatbots on websites. Ive found these “features” to be unreliable, misleading in their hallucinations (eg: bot says “this API call exists!”, only for it to not exist), and vague at best.
by paulpauper | 2025-04-24 04:08:15+00:00
All my comments for the past month have 1, 0, or negative votes. These are perfectly reasonable comments. This never happened, until the past few years. So I think something has changed. Getting an upvoted comment means having to write the Magna Carta or something, and this assumes someone does not later downvote it. It does not matter if left-right wing. Someone will downvote. For this reason I have done much less commenting in recent months.
by pests | 2025-04-24 04:09:54+00:00
> Or else, if there IS a subcategory to turn off then they just invent a new subcategory a few months after I’ve opted out, and auto opt me into that instead.

Nextdoor is the worst for this. Their UI to disable them also requires clicking into 15 different groupings of notification and turning off each type one by one. I always find myself getting random Nextdoor marketing spam and sure enough they've added a new category and opted me in.
by shalmanese | 2025-04-24 04:10:46+00:00
I strongly believe pitch competitions are negatively correlated with success because they bias for ideas that are easy to validate which means there’s probably a non-obvious reason it hasn’t been done already.

In this case, OP is working on something in the travel space which is notoriously a startup tarpit because customer acquisition costs end up killing most ideas.

You can’t meaningfully affect frequency of usage via your actions and the vast majority of the audience travels infrequently enough that they forget your tool exists the next time they travel.

Also, if you’re serving outbound, you need to bizdev a meaningful amount of the globe to first gain utility. If you’re serving inbound, the customer acquisition generally only happens late in the user journey and is expensive/time consuming to access.

There are still successes in the travel space but the odds are stacked against you.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-04-24 04:11:17+00:00
I sometimes use AI to write messages to colleagues. For example, I had a colleague who was confused about something in Zendesk. When they described the issue I knew it was because they (reasonably) didn't understand that 'views' aren't the same as 'folders'.

I could have written them a message saying "Zendesk has views, not folders [and figure out what I mean by that]", but instead I asked AI something like:

My colleague is confused about why assigning a ticket in Zendesk adds it to a view but doesn't remove it from a different view. I think they think the views are folders. Please write an email explaining this.

The clear, detailed explanation I got was useful for my colleague, and required little effort from me (after the initial diagnosis).
by oofManBang | 2025-04-24 04:11:47+00:00
> It literally bombed in the market.

Compared to what?

> abject failure

Applying this to apple is beyond comprehension... What do you mean by using such a term? Apple is likely the richest single entity to have every existed, outside of perhaps the US economy as a whole. This single vr product line made apple more money than either of us will make in a lifetime. So hopefully i'm mistaken and you can educate me as to what the word means.

But hopefully you meant "objective". Which is still stupid, but is at least a familiar and manageable form of stupidity.
by dangus | 2025-04-24 04:12:19+00:00
Perhaps the real takeaway is that there really is only one product, two if you count image generation.

Perhaps the only reason Cursor is so good is because editing code is so similar to the basic function of an LLM without anything wrapped around it.

Like, someone prove me wrong by linking 3 transformative AI products that:

1. Have nothing to do with "chatting" to a thin wrapper (couldn't just be done inside a plain LLM with a couple of file uploads added for additional context)

2. Don't involve traditional ML that has existed for years and isn't part of the LLM "revolution."

3. Has nothing to do with writing code

For example, I recently used an AI chatbot that was supposed to help me troubleshoot a consumer IoT device. It basically regurgitated steps from the manual and started running around in circles because my issue was simply not covered by documentation. I then had to tell it to send me to a human. The human had more suggestions that the AI couldn't think of but still couldn't help because the product was a piece of shit.

Or just look at Amazon Q. Ask it a basic AWS question and it'll just give you a bogus "sorry I can't help with that" answer where you just know that running over to chatgpt.com will actually give you a legitimate answer. Most AI "products" seem to be castrated versions of ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.

That sort of overall garbage experience seems to be what is most frequently associated with AI. Basically, a futile attempt to replace low-wage employees that didn't end up delivering any value to anyone, especially since any company interested in eliminating employees just because "fuck it why not" without any real strategy probably has a busted-ass product to begin with.

Putting me on hold for 15 minutes would have been more effective at getting me to go away and no compute cycles would have been necessary.
by patrakov | 2025-04-24 04:12:26+00:00
The metric is flawed. What should be counted are high-quality IPv6 deployments.

The following would be disqualifications:

* IPv6 traffic to a different ISP in the same country goes through the USA

* Only one /64 prefix is available (seems to be unavoidable on mobile networks)

* The main router supports IPv6, but the wireless mesh network system installed by the same ISP is IPv4-only

* The router gives out an IPv6 prefix, but actual IPv6 connectivity exists only once in a blue moon

* A mobile operator switches the network in a certain area to IPv6-only, despite the widely-deployed units sold in official stores not supporting 464XLAT

And I have seen all of that. Sorry, enough is enough. My default recommendation now is to switch off IPv6, unless extensive tests by third parties show that it really works as intended in the particular network location.
by stego-tech | 2025-04-24 04:13:00+00:00
Y'know, you (the general 'you', not you specifically, coldbrewed) feel bad about your writing or blog because of the odd spelling error, or grammar issue, or repeated language, or maybe your points aren't clear enough, or maybe you're talking in the wrong tone...

...and then you read something like this, and realize, "Yeah, no, I have room for improvement, sure, but thank f*** I'm not like this."

The entire post reads like someone high on their own supply. Just when I think they're getting to a point, they pull out every fifty-dollar word and concept they possibly can (explaining none of it, nor linking to any Wikipedia articles to help readers understand) to ostensibly sound smarter-than-you and therefore entitled to authority.

I'm sure there's a law/rule/principle for this concept somewhere, but if you can't explain your point simply, you don't understand the topic you're trying to communicate. This one-off, vibe-coded (RETCH), slop-slinger is a prime example of such.

Pay no attention to the charlatan cosplaying as tenured academia.
by spauldo | 2025-04-24 04:13:24+00:00
The "when requested" is the point I was making. FOIA is how you request such software. If you want a copy of the elisp libraries I wrote to automate creation of field devices on military fuel farm SCADA systems, you'll have to submit an FOIA request. Unless someone at the DoD decides to share it out of the goodness of their hearts, you have to ask for it.
by pmontra | 2025-04-24 04:14:49+00:00
> what happens if customers have purchased that product? You still want it in the database, and you still want to fulfill the orders placed.

You might still want to show to those customers their purchase history including what they bought 25 years ago. For example, my ISP doesn't have anymore that 10 Mb/s fiber optic product I bought im 2000, because it was superseded by 100 Mb/s products and then by 1 Gb/s ones. It's also not my ISP anymore but I use it for the SIM in my phone. That also accumulated a number of product changes along the years.

And think about the inventory of eshops with a zillion products and the archive of the pady orders. Maybe they keep the last few years, maybe everything until the db gets too large.
by tpmoney | 2025-04-24 04:15:12+00:00
The "free riders" aren't developers in general, they're the developers not paying for their portion of the upkeep. Like I said, someone has to pay for the dev work that goes into making the platform, building the SDKs and maintaining the whole thing. No one works for free. So Apple can get that paid for either by charging more for hardware, charging for access to the dev kits, or taking a cut of sales for products produced with those dev kits. Apple chose the later.

So now they have a problem, not all software is monetized. You want to have the ability for people to choose to distribute software for free. Open source projects, educational, charity, and also "accessory apps" (think your bank app). But you don't want to charge developers money that they're not making. Imagine the shit storm Apple would stir up if they just started charging free apps a monthly fee to be listed in the app store at all. You also want to have young and new developers without a lot of capital to have access (that's why so many companies used to offer student discounts). But the problem becomes how do you allow that, and also allow in app downloads and purchases without every developer just having a "free" downloader app that then downloads the real application code that you pay for separately?

Let's say you sell a dev tool. And you decide you want to support open source projects, so you offer free licenses to any open source project. Would it satisfy your licensing if some company that had an "open source" curl wrapper that downloaded and executed binary blobs for which there was no source code? I doubt it. You'd rightfully say that an app that does nothing except download and launch closed source binary blobs is not in and of itself an open source project for the purposes of your license. It's the same basic idea for Apple. An app that only serves to download or unlock the "real" app after you pay the developer in a separate external transaction is not a "free" app of the sort Apple intends to allow. So they don't allow external transactions at all except for a narrow set of circumstances, and in those cases they don't allow steering. This maximizes the number of developers who are funding the costs of the platform, reducing the overall cost for all the developers who are paying and subsidizing a limited set of developers who are distributing free applications.

Or to try one other way of thinking about it, everyone hates the "freemium" business model. How much crappier would it be knowing that all the "freemium" games were paying absolutely nothing, but everyone who chooses not to engage in the freemium model still had to pay 15-30% to apple on their revenue?
by tonetegeatinst | 2025-04-24 04:16:04+00:00
I'm sorry but Figure 1 Lightning Protection Drone....all I see when I look at that is a abomination of antenna....like 5 or 6 roof antennas crammed into a single point in space time.

Not that it don't look super cook in its own way. But I just reminds me of antennas
Show HN: Hyprnote – A privacy-first AI notepad that works locally
by johntopia | 2025-04-24 04:16:34+00:00
Hyprnote is a local-first AI notepad designed for people in back-to-back meetings. It's an open-source alternative for Granola AI.

Here are the key things to know: 1. Runs on your Mac with no bots or cloud upload – the app uses on-device AI to process your raw notes and audio. 2. Creates enhanced summaries by combining your notes with surrounding meeting context. 3. No need to export or sync manually – it works like Apple Notes, but understands what was said. 4. Open-source and built with Rust + TypeScript (Tauri), it’s lightweight and respects your data.

Why it matters: Most AI notetakers upload your meetings to the cloud. Hyprnote doesn’t. It runs everything locally – giving you full control over your data while still offering the benefits of modern AI.

Check out our demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-apfueHQHBk&t=2s
by tpmoney | 2025-04-24 04:17:47+00:00
> Would it increase the cost of phones (maybe only in the EU) to compensate the missing revenues?

Probably not "fair" since the EU seems opposed to their "core technology fee", which is (supposedly) a fee to the developers to compensate for the missing revenues. And if the EU allowed raising prices in EU counties to offset that lost revenue, but didn't allow the core tech fee, that would effectively be the EU outlawing making your money on software rather than on hardware. It seems more likely the EU would just demand continued subsidized access to the same services, like they already did with facebook.
by aurareturn | 2025-04-24 04:18:19+00:00
During the last US Election, I got bombarded by my Robinhood stock trading app to bet on Trump vs Harris election.

I couldn't help but think about how the act of betting with real money influences your own vote.

In traditional sports betting, you can't influence the results directly because you betting on a team should yield no difference in the outcome in theory. However, in elections, if you bet on one candidate, you're probably more likely to go out and vote for that candidate to increase your odds of winning.

Let's say you're not sure which candidate you're going to vote for yet. You read on the news that Candidate A is more likely to win. You place a bet on Candidate A. On election day, you go out and actually vote for Candidate A. You've just made a choice that had nothing to do with the quality of the candidate but rather just to increase the chance of a quick payout.

Will this be a problem?
by rahimnathwani | 2025-04-24 04:19:50+00:00
Disparate impact is flawed:

- It imposes liability for neutral policies based solely on statistical outcomes, ignoring discriminatory motive. Example: Griggs v. Duke Power invalidated a diploma requirement due to impact alone.

- It prioritizes group statistical parity over individual qualifications, potentially invalidating useful criteria. Again: Griggs invalidated tests because of their statistical impact.

- It incentivizes racial quotas: fear of liability drives companies (and college admissions offices) toward managing numbers by race, undermining the principle of equal treatment. Example: New Haven (Ricci) discarded firefighter exam results specifically to manage racial outcomes.

- Trying to avoid disparate impact liability can itself constitute intentional discrimination against another group. (Ricci paradox, same case as above.)

- It enables lawsuits against essential, neutral practices based purely on statistical correlations. Example: Challenges to voter ID laws based on disparate ID possession rates. Challenges to 'rat control' regulations based on disparate impact on rents.

- The "business necessity" defense is often hard to prove and subject to judicial second-guessing. Example: Duke Power failed to prove its hiring requirements were essential.

- It conflicts with the Equal Protection Clause's requirement of discriminatory intent for government liability.

- It creates the potential to challenge almost any neutral policy with unequal outcomes. Example: suspensions and other school discipline must be meted out 'fairly' between different races.
by stevenwoo | 2025-04-24 04:20:30+00:00
I live between San Jose and San Francisco and (sampling bias I mainly ride my bike during the day) I've seen foxes a couple of times in the suburbs (once about two miles outside Cupertino and once in Portola Valley where people like Larry Ellison have an estate) over twenty years, and probably a coyote at least once a month and a bobcat maybe twice a year and three mountain lions over the same time period, a fox is rare to see in the day but they are nocturnal so mostly not active during the day. The average person is more likely to encounter fox scat without knowing that's what it is.
by alexjplant | 2025-04-24 04:22:13+00:00
> In Linux’s defense, the userland abi is stable, which is no small feat in terms of absorbing pain in order to benefit their many users..

I understand that technically eBPF programs run on a VM in kernel space but aren't they loaded from userspace? Isn't eBPF an alternative to developing kernel modules and in-tree drivers? To a layperson like me it walks, talks, and quacks like userspace much more than the kernel. The fact that struct layout can change at the whim of kernel developers seems counterproductive. I guess this is what CO-RE is supposed to solve but having to deal with a bunch of pointer and sizeof() chicanery seems archaic (coming from a total luser/kernel nublet that hasn't written C in over a decade).
by Terr_ | 2025-04-24 04:22:16+00:00
> What data in a federal agency could the chief executive not have authorization to access?

Personally? For starters, he can't access anything the Legislature's laws say he can't.

The Executive is there to implement the law, and that includes obeying them him/her-self.

A President telling other people to break the law on his behalf by threatening to fire them is also a crime of extortion.