MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shivamgoyal6382 | 2025-04-04 12:38:33+00:00
Hey everyone! Super excited to share what we’ve been working on – Optexity, a platform for training browser automation agents that work reliably on any website. With our platform you can train agents by showing human demonstration of your workflows.

We fine-tuned Llama 3-8B (10x smaller and cheaper), outperforming GPT-4o & Gemini 2.0 on complex Hubspot workflows. We will be adding more functionality to train agents from RL, docs & YouTube tutorials to reliably operate software. All demos and source code can be found on our website.

With the current repository you can create human demonstrations from which models can learn to use that software. Or simply try vanilla out of the box gemini to complete tasks on a website.

Check it out: https://optexity.com

https://github.com/Optexity/ComputerGYM

We'd love to hear from devs using or planning to use some sort of RPA or browser-use or openai Operator for their tasks. If you are having hard time fixing those workflows or these models don’t work for you please discuss. Let us know what you think and star the work if you find it interesting.

We are a team of researchers from CMU, Ex-Apple and Amazon and have been building it for over a month.

Thanks !!
by fashion-at-cost | 2025-04-04 12:38:59+00:00
Your analysis misses the incredibly important caveat that revenue rises with inflation – or sometimes even faster.

50 years ago, a movie ticket was 0.50 cents in revenue. Today, it’s $25. That’s a 50x increase… a dollar in 50 years might be worth $0.02 today, but a movie ticket in 50 years is worth about a movie ticket today.
by DetroitThrow | 2025-04-04 12:39:30+00:00
>It is open-source!

No, it's not. Please read number 5, it might enlighten you to what people colloquially consider open source, which didn't have a dictionary definition until technical people started using this definition: https://opensource.org/osd

>And the fact, people on here don't know that shows people on here don't know the difference.

..What? Do you know what OSS vs FOSS is?
by diggan | 2025-04-04 12:39:38+00:00
Women and people of color also used to be treated like property, doesn't mean it has to be like that forever.

What's cool with humans is that we're able to reflect on our own being and our societies, and when we group together, we can enforce large-scale changes that improve the lives of millions.

We might be mortal meat bags right now, but maybe it isn't the only way, for better or worse.
by nottorp | 2025-04-04 12:39:43+00:00
Minecraft is the Lego game that the Lego company wasn't competent enough to make.

The old Legos. Where you got a bunch of bricks with no plans and the only limit was your imagination (and the quantity of bricks).

Of course children like it, just like they liked the original Legos.

And by the way, why children only? I'm playing on a semi-private (need to apply and be accepted by admins) 18+ builder's server on and off.

There are such things.
by nilkn | 2025-04-04 12:39:59+00:00
Just because it doesn't surprise you doesn't mean it's okay. You have to acknowledge that as an admissions consultant you're part of a small gatekeeping community bubble. Even though I attended one of these schools, I can recognize that universities have been rapidly losing their credibility, and this is only going to accelerate that trend. And by the way, this person is probably more accomplished than I am, even though I am now quite a bit older and my essay was apparently good enough to tick off the checkboxes.

The question you need to be asking is how the university system made an enemy out of someone who is clearly one of the most talented members of his age cohort in the nation. That's a failure no matter how hard you try to explain or justify the status quo. It's time for some real accountability and soul searching from the system, not excuses. Trying to nit pick the essay and pointing out how he should have done X or Y instead is completely missing the point.
by throw0101c | 2025-04-04 12:40:30+00:00
> Art of the Deal

Reminder that Trump had no part in writing the book:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_the_Deal

More seriously, this 2018 article from Indiana University negotiations professor David Honig has (re-)popped in recent months:

> Distributive bargaining always has a winner and a loser. It happens when there is a fixed quantity of something and two sides are fighting over how it gets distributed. Think of it as a pie and you’re fighting over who gets how many pieces. In Trump’s world, the bargaining was for a building, or for construction work, or subcontractors. He perceives a successful bargain as one in which there is a winner and a loser, so if he pays less than the seller wants, he wins. The more he saves the more he wins.

> The other type of bargaining is called integrative bargaining. In integrative bargaining the two sides don’t have a complete conflict of interest, and it is possible to reach mutually beneficial agreements. Think of it, not a single pie to be divided by two hungry people, but as a baker and a caterer negotiating over how many pies will be baked at what prices, and the nature of their ongoing relationship after this one gig is over.

[…]

> One of the risks of distributive bargaining is bad will. In a one-time distributive bargain, e.g. negotiating with the cabinet maker in your casino about whether you’re going to pay his whole bill or demand a discount, you don’t have to worry about your ongoing credibility or the next deal. If you do that to the cabinet maker, you can bet he won’t agree to do the cabinets in your next casino, and you’re going to have to find another cabinet maker.

> There isn’t another Canada.

[…]

> Trump has the same weakness politically. For every winner there must be a loser. And that’s just not how politics works, not over the long run.

* https://medium.com/@davidhonig_67081/distributive-bargaining...

* https://blogs.iu.edu/keep/distributive-negotiation-vs-integr...

* https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/negotiation-skills-daily/n...
by lolinder | 2025-04-04 12:40:33+00:00
> open source as the average person would understand it ... and it's quite clear to nearly everyone except pedantic people that you can now go and fetch the Gumroad code and modify, run, etc.

The average person would also assume that "open source" means "I can legally use this for my business", especially given that Gumroad is a tool that only makes sense if you're running some kind of business.

Unfortunately, this is true here only with a very large asterisk that says "as long as you never make more than $1 million in revenue". Anyone who attempts to treat this software as Open Source in the way they would treat, say, Postgres, will find that the instant they cross the $1 million threshold they have to rebuild their entire e-commerce setup or be in violation of copyright.

For some people maybe $1 million in revenue (not profits, revenue) is legitimately not possible and not worth worrying about. But for others it is, and that's why definitions matter.

(There's also the fact that, intentionally or unintentionally, the license assumes that you either have a business with some amount of revenue or are a government entity or nonprofit. Which means technically a strict reading of the license would suggest running the software without a business is not authorized.)
by alephnerd | 2025-04-04 12:40:51+00:00
It will suck on both sides, but the majority of American households can weather a $2-4k blow over the next year as supply chains react.

Congress stepping in to exclude Canada and Mexico and the NAFTA exemption cushions the blow significantly.

Most of Latin America being placed at the lower end of the announcement means manufacturers who used to be competitive until China Shock set around 2014-16 can be cost competitive again.

Other large markets like India, UK, and Vietnam are negotiating as well and India expects as Bilateral Trade Agreement to be closed by Aug-Oct.
by palijer | 2025-04-04 12:41:01+00:00
The average person doesn't have capacity to care about policies that lead to the long term development of drug-resistant bacteria.

We couldn't even convince everyone to wear masks, this won't be an issue people will rise up in mass protests for... People are literally being kidnapped and thrown into detention centers without due process and there are not massive protests.

It takes a lot to make people protest, this ain't a battle for it.
by khaled_ismaeel | 2025-04-04 12:41:07+00:00
> I think it's our only chance at quickly solving huge complex problems like aging, cancer, Alzheimer's.

Machine learning is certainly a extremely handy in tacking these issues, thinking of breakthroughs like AlphaFold and similar. However, I'd like to push against your take:

1. There already are tremendous developments happening in those fronts you mentioned. Praising AI as "our only chance" is quite a stretch and possibly even a harmful statement, considering how severely under-funded these research projects are.

2. It seems to me the poem is more about LLMs/glorified chat bots than general machine learning. In that context, I wouldn't consider them as super useful in Alzheimer's research, certainly not "our only chance".
by lm28469 | 2025-04-04 12:41:39+00:00
> How is the moral dilemma of employer-controlled brain implants or eugenics equal to AI?

Well it's just a technology, don't you love technology ? Technology is progress and progress is good!

> it is a genuinely useful technology to lots of people. That's not the case for eugenics robots.

Eugenics would objectively solve a lot of suffering though, your AI might even come to that conclusion

> Did you grow up watching Data (Star Trek), C3PO (Star Wars), KITT (Knight Rider) thinking "Who comes up with these violent sadistic ideas"?

That's how 80% of ai "enthusiasts" sound to me, "AI is good because these sci-fi AIs were cool when I was a kid"
by LightHugger | 2025-04-04 12:42:14+00:00
> I see nothing wrong with prejudice against ...

> I look forward to you and your army of white men

We know, the secret is out, you and all the other racist lunatics never saw anything wrong with prejudice. It's the same type of thinking that fought against civil rights in the 70s that just moved straight over to the hot new forms of racism and discrimination just because you think it's socially acceptable.

> Is there anything humanizing about the hiring process? Or is it one of the most dehumanizing things most engineers experience?

You are saying this in order to defend racist hiring practices. Whether or not the base hiring process sucks is not part of the discussion on whether or not we should allow racial discrimination in said hiring process.

In the end it's always individual innocent people that get hurt, not broad identity groups that you think deserve it.
by lelanthran | 2025-04-04 12:42:33+00:00
I want to assume you are asking in good faith and really aren't aware of academic administration's attempts to silence specific and common viewpoints.

Your comment surprises me, because at this point, there really isn't any contention over the fact that universities have been doing exactly this.

So while I am assuming that you don't actually know, I'll give you a short list of links (I'm not doing research that takes me more than 5m).

> What did US universities do to "silence all opposing viewpoints" on any issues?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/musbahshaheen/2024/06/05/stop-r...

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/diversity-statemen...

https://www.thefire.org/news/anti-free-speech-trends-campus-...

https://www.thefire.org/facultyreport

https://www.hrdive.com/news/stop-requiring-diversity-stateme...

(UK, but still the same idea) https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/kathleen-stock...

https://www.thefire.org/news/speaker-disinvited-uncomfortabl...

https://www.businessinsider.com/list-of-disinvited-speakers-...

And, finally, some charts: https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/ne...

Analysis of the data FIRE has collected reveals a clear political trend in the likelihood that a speaker will be targeted with a disinvitation effort. Speakers are far more likely to face disinvitation efforts from opponents to their political left than from those to their right. Since 2000, those behind the disinvitation efforts targeted speakers with views more conservative than their own nearly three times more frequently (97 attempts) than they targeted speakers with views more liberal than their own (36 attempts).

The takeaway is that the right-leaning students and administration are far far more tolerant of speech from the left, than the left-leaning students and administration are of speech from the right.

It pains me to say it, but it aligns with my experience.

> Did they kick students out of school because of their viewports? Claw back their financial aid? Get them deported? Physically harm them?

None of that is required to silence opposing views.

> I sure don't remember things like that happening in widespread manner to conservative students, let alone happening in a way that was organized top-down by the universities' leadership.

"Allowing only one viewpoint" doesn't require that the university administration has a top-down directive to expel students, only that they allow one viewpoint and silence the other.

Once again, that this happened is not in dispute, so I am left wondering where you were going with this response.
Show HN: I made a Fallout-inspired U.S. presidential term countdown timer
by lobsterthief | 2025-04-04 12:42:34+00:00
Hey HN!

I had this idea a few weeks back and put it together one morning.

My motivations were to give myself an easy way to check how long is left in the presidency while providing myself (and others) with some inspirational quotes to encourage those of us who need it to “hang in there”.

This was really fun to make; I got to flex some creative design skills I haven’t used in a long time. And it was a good opportunity to create a completely skeuomorphic design, which I haven’t done in many years. Obviously my design inspiration was Fallout's Pip-Boy UI.

The stack is a basic Next.js static site with a handful of NPM packages like `react-countup` and `date-fns`, deployed on Cloudflare Pages. Next.js might seem overkill but it was the fastest way for me to get this thing going.

Would love to hear your feedback!
by zulban | 2025-04-04 12:42:54+00:00
Interesting proposal. Maybe if race or sex or height or eye color etc isn't given, and the LLM determines there's no reason not to randomize in this case (avoid black founding fathers), the backend could tweak its own prompt by programatically inserting a few random traits to the prompt.

If you describe an Indiana Jones character, but no sex, 50/50 via internal call to rand() that it outputs a woman.
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-04-04 12:42:54+00:00
Be honest about the timescale, I understand why climate activists use the "10 years" timeline because its hard for people to care about something beyond that and the idea that we need to panic about it to enact mass change but I think anyone can thinking critically for even a moment can see nothing will have significantly changed in 10-15 years on this matter.

Personally I think lying about the timeline just gives ammunition to climate denialists because each time it's rolled out it creates a data point a denier can point at and say "look nothing happened".

Realistically if this is a problem it's my adult grandkids at most or great-grandkids who it would begin to impact.
by apawloski | 2025-04-04 12:43:23+00:00
Just yesterday people were trying to convince me that price hikes were good and would benefit Trump’s base. Now JP Morgan is predicting a global recession. I cannot fathom how this is good for America.

It just feels like a colossal own-goal that will weaken America on the global scale. Americans will suffer in a recession. And it was by choice that this administration put us here.

Is there any recourse?
by lenerdenator | 2025-04-04 12:43:28+00:00
I hate to say it: this might be the thing that actually screws his movement.

Biden was uninspiring but ultimately did okay on a few things. The things that screwed him were inflation - some of which was Trump's fault - and his mental state, which can happen to anyone at that age. The inflation followed Harris in her run, as people were fondly remembering 2017-2019 and the era of lower prices. They thought putting Trump back in office would reverse the trend.

Well, now he's drastically kicking prices up left and right with no end in sight. It's not even macroeconomic factors doing this like it was with COVID; it's purely the strokes of his pen.

The bottom line is the ultimate thing that matters in American politics, as it is everywhere. The talk about democracy, institutions, rights, etc. are all window dressing. "It's the economy, stupid", and it's getting noticeably worse.

Of course, I could also be totally wrong like everything else has been for the last 10 years when it comes to predicting the downfall of that tyrant.
by designorant | 2025-04-04 12:44:20+00:00
> ChatHPT is a revolutionary text-based chat platform connecting curious minds with Human Pre-trained Talkers (HPTs) – real experts who share their knowledge based on years of authentic experience.

While ChatHPT is just a vibe coding experiment and a playful jab at Generative Pre-trained Transformers, I built it secretly hoping it might prompt others to reflect on how we acquire knowledge in the current dystopian rise of AI-driven chats. It’s essentially a simple P2P chat built on websockets, a nostalgic postcard to many hours I spent on IRC making friends all over the world many years ago.

Despite its confusing UX, my comedy genius didn’t foresee everyone assuming it’s just another ChatGPT wrapper, which, ironically, highlights the tragedy I’m touching here.
by banannaise | 2025-04-04 12:44:25+00:00
When someone tries to schedule a meeting during my focus hours, I decline it.

When someone DMs me about an issue they should post in the support channel, I link them to the support channel. If they insist, I link them to it again, and I inform my team not to respond to DMs from that person.

Do not engage with people who think their time is more important than yours; if you do, insist on wasting their time in equal amounts.
by raydiak | 2025-04-04 12:44:34+00:00
While I agree with some of the points here, the aloof tone-deaf consumerist mentality reveals either ignorance of, or more likely indifference to, the transformative juncture we've reached and/or the possible perils. If all you feel about the current situation is "bored," that's a you problem. The world is not here for your amusement. Boredom is a lack of imagination. Go do something else. Your problem is not boredom, it is your own apathetic attitude and need to be regularly spoon-fed entertainment.

Maybe I don't get the level of burnout I'm seeing because I don't spend much time streaming or doomscrolling, but that's an example of my point. If you spend more time creating than consuming, then boredom isn't a problem regardless of what the rest of the world is up to. Occasional fear and horror at the news maybe, but certainly not boredom.
by phernandez | 2025-04-04 12:44:35+00:00
Late to the game here, but I'm working on Basic Memory (https://memory.basicmachines.co/docs/introduction), a knowledge management system for the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

What makes it different:

* Claude (and other MCP AIs) can both read from and write to your local markdown files

* Creates a connected network of notes that Claude can navigate between

* All data stays as markdown files on your computer

* When you chat with Claude, it automatically builds structure with simple patterns

* You can start a new chat and just say "Let's continue discussing X" without uploading files or copy/pasting

* Files are available locally, so you can edit them in and editor, like Obsidian, VS Code, etc.

I built this because I was tired of repeating myself to AI assistants and wanted my conversations to accumulate into something useful over time. It's basically a way to give Claude persistent memory while keeping your data local and be easily readable and editable my humans.

Some people are using it to maintain project context across sessions, document systems, and build topic maps without having to manually organize everything.

Demo video: https://basicmachines.co/images/Claude-Obsidian-Demo.mp4 GitHub: https://github.com/basicmachines-co/basic-memory
by sgarland | 2025-04-04 12:44:55+00:00
> …I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

– Captain G. M. Gilbert, Psychologist at Nuremberg Trials
by troymc | 2025-04-04 12:45:15+00:00
People who develop software have to understand what "open source" means (technically, not just some sloppy interpretation), because using a non-open-source package in an otherwise open source project can contaminate the whole thing. License violations can pose high risks, both financial and reputation losses.

Because of that, a lot of effort goes into helping make sure that software stacks are using consistent licenses. There's a whole industry of standards, audit processes, software and companies to help with this; for example, see:

https://licensehawk.com/software-license-compliance-audits/

https://spdx.org/licenses/

https://www.flexera.com/products/flexnet-manager
by moffkalast | 2025-04-04 12:45:25+00:00
> arises from novelty in others, shifts to the external environment

> Everything is simply a blend of prior work.

I generally consider these two to be the same thing. If novelty is based on something else, then it's highly derivative and its novelty is very questionable.

A quantum random number generator is far more novel than the average human artist.

> have an LLM produce content on developments which had yet to take place at the time of its training. It obviously cannot do this.

Put someone in jail for the last 15 years, and ask them to make a smartphone. They obviously cannot do it either.