MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by techpineapple | 2025-05-03 17:49:30+00:00
My biggest concern with LLM’s though is that it’s actually the opposite of the library of Babel, it’s a remarkably closed system, tuned by humans and using a (relative to the library of babel) small search space.

There’s meaning in what LLM’s say because actually the way it remixes its source material is much less sophisticated than we think, and thus its meaning is a direct representation of the human meaning it’s trained on.

Would you argue against the notion that there is rich meaning captured by the libraries of the world the LLM’s are trained on?
by moojacob | 2025-05-03 17:49:48+00:00
When a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.

The article talks about Google, but this is very prevalent in customer service too. You've had to deal with an annoying, useless chatbot.

The companies selling these chat bots advertise a resolution rate near 60%. That's a 60% reduction in work customer service has to do! But look deeper. It's not a 60% reduction in work because they're just tracking how many chats get escalated to a human. Would customers send an email to bother a human for that 60%? Probably not.

In the end customer service managers get to put "introduced AI to cut tickets by 60%" on their resume, customer experience platforms grow, and you get annoyed.
by perihelions | 2025-05-03 17:49:52+00:00
Late update: if you look at the fancy full version of the IPCC graphs[0], there's a funny (ehh...) observation: the human destruction of stratospheric ozone was one of the largest climate radiative forcing factors—and it was on the "cooling" side!

[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/technical-summary/figts-0...

It's the negative-side, green (O₃) bar in the third row, "halocarbons". There's multiple human contributions to ozone I don't fully understand, but, *that* one's the stratospheric ozone destruction due to CFC's. (That's not to to say CFC's were good for the climate: as that same row illustrates, CFC's themselves are also ultrapotent greenhouse gases. If you trust the fancy graph, the CFC's direct heating effect slightly outweighed their cooling effect via destroying ozone).
Show HN: Product-market fit in 30 min. or less
by bluelikejazz | 2025-05-03 17:50:00+00:00
A lot of posts here ask for product feedback. Most research tools either take forever or give generic data.

I’m testing something different: get instant feedback from a super consumer group (moms, the ones who make most household purchase decisions) within 30 minutes.

$50 gets you 5 unfiltered responses to a specific question about your product (pricing, UX, value prop, etc). No meetings. No surveys. Just short, honest feedback.

Useful idea or solving a non-problem?

Would love blunt thoughts, especially if you’ve ever tried to validate an idea quickly.
by chme | 2025-05-03 17:50:14+00:00
This is also not surprising for BGS as was demonstrated with the multiple Skyrim re-releases, which didn't fix all issues patched by the unofficial patches, and even introduced more.

See the change log here: https://www.afkmods.com/Unofficial%20Skyrim%20Special%20Edit...

Only a very small amount of the issues fixed there where integrated into the official patch releases.
Text to Form AI
by pushkar_aditya | 2025-05-03 17:50:16+00:00
Built a Text to form platform. (AI form generato)

Question is why ?

I have launched a lot of side projects, and for every side project, I had to build a bug report form and a feature request form. At the time, I was using Google Forms, but I hated it. Then I saw Notion AI and tried that, but found it hard to publish ai generated forms (probably the skill issue). After that, I decided to build my own tool: formshot[dot]com, which is currently in the MVP stage

Product is still in very early stage, so every sigle feedback will be very helpful. thanks
by rdiddly | 2025-05-03 17:50:53+00:00
Ah yes the "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention" crowd. As if being pissed-off and scared is the highest acme of civic participation. Outrage and fear are, at best, merely the initial reaction before getting off your ass and actually doing something to change things. Sitting around in perpetual outrage is actually a maladaptive reaction and the mark of someone who has chosen to be completely impotent and powerless. Usually because they don't want the burden of taking responsibility. And hey, if that's the decision you've made, fine, you have your reasons, but then that means presumably you make peace with that decision and stop complaining. And certainly you don't shame others for what you clearly see as your own failings. It's kind of a shit or get off the pot situation.
by calebhwin | 2025-05-03 17:51:18+00:00
Do you build agents that interface with web browsers? BLAST is sort of like vllm for browser+LLM. The motivation for this is that browser+LLM is slow and we can do a lot of optimization with an engine that manages browser+LLM together - e.g. prefix caching, auto-parallelism, data parallelism, request hedging, scheduling policy, and more coming soon.

Now the API is what may be throwing folks off. Right now it's an OpenAI-compatible API. We will implement MCP. But really the core thing is abstracting away optimizations required to efficiently run browser+LLM.
by citizenpaul | 2025-05-03 17:51:46+00:00
>none of the options are helpful

Yeah. I got locked out of my capital one account for a "fraud alert" last week. When I tried to login a message said "Call Number XXX" When I called that number I had to go through an endless phone tree and not single option was about fraud alerts or being locked out of accounts. I had to keep going through a forced chute of errors before after about 30 min I finally was able to speak to someone.

Even when I finally got a human they seemed confused about what happened and I had to be transferred several times.

Why would you put a phone number that does not even as a sub option address the issue?
by joshstrange | 2025-05-03 17:51:59+00:00
You buy credits on OpenRouter, or rather you load money onto your account and then as you make API calls your account balance is deducted by the cost displayed on OpenRouter's website (market rates).

So once money is loaded on your account you pay the same as if you used the LLM provider directly but you pay a premium to load money onto your account, it's effectively adding a 5% fee to the base LLM API prices (and $0.35/per reload, depending on reload amount this might be negligible but on a $10 reload it means you are effectively paying a 9% fee).
by nvk255 | 2025-05-03 17:52:04+00:00
Yeah, that finding about verification tasks eating the time savings makes total sense. Since AI output is probabilstic, you always need a independent human check, right ? .. that also feels like a shifting bottleneck.. maybe you speed up the coding part but then get bogged down in testing or integration, or the scope just expands to fill the saved time. Plus, how much AI actually helps seems super task dependent, and can vary quite a bit depending on what you are doing
by bgnn | 2025-05-03 17:52:08+00:00
This reminded me of my favorite David Greaber book: The utopia of rules (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules).

Greaber, if I remember right, argues that modern bureaucracy started with efficient means of communication. He squares the Deutsche Post as the milestone, as they made the whole population available to be controlled. Now the state could send them letters, count them, enlist them in the military etc.. It's a brilliant observation: communication technology is the main tool of the bureaucracy. The tangent he takes fron there is even more brilliant: we have been heavily focusing and improving the communication tech (telephone, fax, tv, radio, internet, social media) but not necessarily the tech to reduce thr burden of work for the masses (robots!). If you would ask someone 100 years ago how the future would look like, people would almost invariably say they would need to work less in the future, abd at some point they invariably expected to have robots do all the work. Yet, all we got is smartphones that watch every movement of us, makes us available to the employer anywhere and anytime, hence more means to control us by state or, exceedingly, private bureaucracies. There's a reason why AI boom is happening, as this is the next tech on the bureaucracy tree.

This being said, none of these tech are bad by themselves. It is the shape they took and the way they are used in contemporary society. To tie with the OP: we have communication tools available to us that is billions of times more efficient and effective yet the customer service, or any interaction with any big corporation (as a customer or employee) or state got so much worse and impersonal. Impersonal as in, individual cases do not exist anymore, only policies. One could have expected to escalate a claim back in late 19th century by just writing letters and eventually get to someone, or even just show up at the offices of a company and get their problem resolved (this is still the case in developing countries). Can we expect this now?
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-05-03 17:52:15+00:00
>nobody pays me not to work. If you’re in the US, then in theory you’re getting overtime for going over 40hrs a week. That’s time and a half for doing nothing, correct? I’d expect your principles put you firmly against overtime pay.

>But you do have that option, right? Work 20 hours a week instead of 40. You just aren't paid for the hours that you don't work. In a world where workers are exchanging their labor for wages, that's how it's supposed to work.

Look the core of your opinion is the belief that market dynamics naturally lead to desirable outcomes always. I simply don’t believe that, and I think interference to push for desirable outcomes which violate principles of a free market is often good. We probably won’t be able to agree on this.
by locallost | 2025-05-03 17:52:18+00:00
The obvious take away is that the left needs an actual Fox News. A friend of mine actually pitched this idea a few years ago, but I was of the opinion that the left is above that and nobody would read/watch/follow it. Now I'm not so sure anymore, I think people are ready for it just for the kicks and it would actually have a big effect on balancing things out.
by prmph | 2025-05-03 17:52:58+00:00
I hope you are being sarcastic.

> A man was carrying an animal to the vet. He said g'day on his way past. Then I had a nice chat with the lady at the post office about her kid's birthday this weekend.

And these shallow almost-no-effort-required conversations are what convince you that everything is good? For some, people making these polite conversations to hide the awfulness of life itself is maddening.

Not that such interaction is bad, but try to build on them to create any sort of meaningful relationship and see what happens.

> Nobody took advantage. Nothing bad happened. No woes or tribulations.

For you. I bet you many people were taken advantage of, killed, died from lack of food, were verbally abused, neglected emotionally, etc... that day
by ktaray | 2025-05-03 17:53:39+00:00
qomplement.com ships today. It’s a native OS agent that learns complete GUI workflows from demonstration data, so you can ask for something open-ended—“Plan a weekend trip to SF, grab the cheapest round-trip and some cool tours”—and it handles vision, long-horizon reasoning, memory and UI control in one shot. There’s no prompt-tuning grind and no brittle script chain; each execution refines the model, so it keeps working even when the interface changes.

Instead of relying on predefined rules or manual orchestration, qomplement is trained end-to-end on full interaction traces that pair what the user sees with what the agent does, letting it generalise across apps. That removes the maintenance overhead and fragility that plague classic RPA stacks and most current “agent frameworks.” One model books flights, edits slides, reconciles spreadsheets, then gets smarter after every run.

We are very excited and believe this can open up a whole new world of applications.

We’re also live on Product Hunt today: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/qomplement?utm_source=othe...

- Kerim Taray
by neckardt | 2025-05-03 17:54:48+00:00
The problem with mountains is twofold: Many mountains can be climbed without being elite while exposing yourself to major risk, and for some mountains there is objective hazard that can’t be mitigated.

One example of an “easy” but high risk climb is Mt. Rainier in Washington. All you need to go up is a set of crampons and a backpack, no technical mountaineering needed. However the mountain is full of glaciers that can collapse from under you, which has killed many people. Additionally, many have slipped and then slid to their death. In my case, when I attempted Rainier I took a wrong turn at one point and almost walked off a cliff.

Second: Objective Hazard. Objective hazard is risks that cannot be reasonably mitigated. Things like rockfall where a rock breaks off and falls on your head at random, or unpredictable avalanches. Mt Rainier as well has an area called the bowling alley known for its rockfall. The humans are the pins. Rainier also has an area called the icebox where cornices break off and fall into the climbing route. In 1981 the icebox killed 11 people in one day. Those climbers did everything right, but were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Mountaineering is not the same as other sports. It is sometimes deceptively easy, yet there are risks that simply cannot be mitigated. Any experienced mountaineer can give you a long list of friends they know that have died. That’s the case in few other sports.
by seadan83 | 2025-05-03 17:56:07+00:00
It's almost the argument of programming vs computer science coming out here.

This is math:

{x | x.id = 1}

OTOH, a SQL query is a SQL query.

This thread is hilarious though. It's like

- Cashier: here is your change.

- Customer: you did math!

- Cashier, no, I gave you change.

- Customer: that IS math!

- Cashier: You mean, I used math to give you change?

- Customer: No, giving change doesn't use math, it IS math!!!!" [2]

= D

Moving along.. FWIW, indeed SQL was created to model set theory (relational algebra and tuple calculus), the close relationship is no accident of course [0][1])

> No one is moving goalposts

I feel too they are.

First goal post:

> Coding IS math. >> No, not always. Quite a lot of high-level code doesn't require any math at all. It doesn't take math to perform CRUD operations

Second goal post:

> CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE are fundamentally mathematical in nature

CRUD is closely related to SQL, and SQL is closely related to various mathematics. Are they identical and therefore equivalent? No - because your database is not going to like it when you write "{x | x.id = 1}", and the Oracle DB might not like something that you can write for your Postgres DB.

[0] https://simpleprogrammer.com/mastering-sql/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL

[2] To quote: """Not "coding uses math", I mean it is math""" @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43872771
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-05-03 17:57:14+00:00
I've heard variations on this sentiment repeated a lot. The exact message varies, but it's usually some variation of: early investors always lose, small investors always lose, and/or non-preferred shareholders always lose. I've seen and lived a small number of personal anecdotes that seem to back this up, and I'd like to better understand what underlying pathology causes this.

I understand that early investors are taking the most risk, and clearly there's a lot of downside. But what prevents them from being able to realize or capture the upside?

I've heard a theory, a few different times now, that bigger, later investors effectively collude (descriptive term, not value judgment) with founders to squeeze out early founders and employees (common shareholders) via unfair terms, such as excessive dilution (accepting too low a valuation for larger investment), excessive liquidation preferences (2x or more), etc., and then topping the founders up via side deals. I've heard that, by virtue of squeezing out passive participants, they're able to offer more to the founders, and that incentivizes the founders to take their deal over other alternatives. Does anyone know more specifics about how this happens? In particular, how is this not a breach of fiduciary duty to passive participants?

It's definitely possible to write anti-dilution clauses, etc. But, I've heard that more or less no one writes them, and more importantly no one accepts them. If this is a pretty well-known game, why haven't countermeasures become popular?

For my personal anecdote, I was once an early engineer - the first hire after their Series A - at a small startup that never found product-market fit. The economy was bad, and they were running out of money, and they took - as I understood it - a dubious Series B led by a dubious investor. The founders were very vague about the terms of the round. In particular, the founders revealed that the investors took liquidation preference, that it was greater than 1x, but absolutely refused to say how much. That always left a bad taste in my mouth. When I left, I didn't exercise my options. In the end, the company floundered, and is a zombie to this day. In that regard, I suppose that the particulars of that round don't really matter - none of us were seeing anything regardless.

I'd really appreciate if anyone closer to the money part of this industry could weigh in.
by b8 | 2025-05-03 17:57:41+00:00
I grew up in Louisiana and have been to NOLA a lot (also studied at Tulane). While there's NOLACon etc. there isn't much tech here and not a lot of jobs. Lots of us live in poverty. Laissez faire and corrupt politics have been in Louisiana for a long time. Lots of public schools are closing to be replaced by private schools. NOLA floods pretty good every 5ish years, so it's not a good place to live imo + the insurance and crime rates are very high.

However, I've lived in Chicago, Austin, KY and Omaha. I moved back and honestly I like it here. I hated it when I grew up, but the cost of living is cheap and the food is good. I got my real ID here back in 2016 when I got my learners permit which surprised people in Chicago. Also we got phone app IDs pretty early. It's getting a little better.
by bayarearefugee | 2025-05-03 17:59:00+00:00
> Just since 2023, I have had:

> One company that raised over $100M, with my shares at one point valued at over $1M on paper, acquired in a fire sale that returned zero to early investors

> Two others that were also “acquired” with some fanfare in the media, but returned nothing to early investors

> Four companies shut down after being unable to get to profitability or fundraise

> Four others that raised money but with painful recapitalizations that effectively wiped out early shareholders

TL;DR - Angel investing became too much like being an early employee at a startup always was, except it was actual money being lost instead of sweat equity.
by kirubakaran | 2025-05-03 18:00:30+00:00
While that can always be arranged if all the parties agree, it would be a bad idea for the founders to give the angels the option to cash out like that, as the fact that they're choosing to cash out will tank all further investments. VCs will wonder "What do they know that I don't?"

Always consider signaling risk.

This can be avoided by always cashing out, I guess. But it's bad for angels to always cash out, as letting it ride on the unicorns is the only way to make meaningful returns, if any.

Always consider power law.
by ivape | 2025-05-03 18:01:05+00:00
Really? This stuff is mandatory for those who are dependent on it. Many people still just look at the code in a separate browser tab and make a meaningful decision of if they want to pull something in or not. Why even use an IDE is the better question. What exactly is an IDE for if the AI will search and determine where to add/remove code? I don't think Jetbrains needs to lose focus on their product to compete with products that are masquerading as an IDE but have no intention of fulfilling the role of an IDE. They want to re-invent it, so it's better they simply stay in their own lane as they will be cannibalized by their own genre as there are no rules in that wild-west. For example, why does my automatic code writing genie look like a fucking IDE? Is there a reason? Cursor and the like will have their own competition and they'll struggle to keep up with a blank screen that just magically outputs software with no visibility into the code. Then they'll be stuck trying to sell people why it's better to let magic be written inside of an IDE, both competing with new magic and old hard tools (like Jetbrains). Cursor is not the future, it's dead on arrival.

Jetbrains and existing IDEs are much more focused for exactly what it is, manual code writing/inspection. How they integrate AI should be done meaningfully to improve the IDE experience. If they want to be in the business of reinventing code-writing, then you have to scrap the IDE altogether.
by hakfoo | 2025-05-03 18:01:23+00:00
I always wanted to see a "pop up video" take on a cop show, where they have expository information and trivia from actual legal experts.

"Officer Jones just blew the entire chain of custody around the bloody knife"

"Flabbodell vs Borkweather says they have to give you access to counsel within X hours and they just ran out the clock"

"This type of traffic stop is explicitly forbidden in 17 states, including the one this show is nominally set in"
by victorbjorklund | 2025-05-03 18:01:31+00:00
I'm a developer but use N8N. One reason is not having to build and maintain integrations with lots of API:s for workflows that are just run once in a while. Like building an integration with Slack that will get data from 5 API:s and save it in google sheets and send you an email.

That would require writing lots of code while here it is much easier with N8N. Anything complicated or needing lots of useage I would go for programming
by Pamar | 2025-05-03 18:02:22+00:00
This was a fabricated example, actually: I work in tourism not in logistic (but I have friends in that field).

My point was that to the layman this does not make any sense while if you are managing a shipping company you soon realize that some destination are more profitable because your truck that was maybe taking specialized replacements parts from A to B can easily pick up some other stuff to send back to A, while travelling in the opposite direction your truck has a high chance to travel empty on retutning to base... but you still have to pay the drivers, the fuel, the maintenance and possibly tolls.
by moojacob | 2025-05-03 18:02:49+00:00
Congrats on the launch! I love how you released a Linux version.

Curious about the "get smarter after every run part." Does it just feed all the past instructions into context? Or is there some RAG going on behind the scenes?

Also, I'm not an expert in marketing, but "the first desktop AI agent" doesn't resonate with me. I don't care. What does it do for me? What ever pain it solves (Something like never manually extract data from a website again) should be the header.
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-05-03 18:03:12+00:00
The way I've heard it is that later investors collude (descriptive, academic term, not value judgment) with founders via liquidation preferences, dilution, etc., and effectively wipe out all common shareholders (particularly employees) and all earlier rounds, and then give the founders some additional terms to compensate them specifically. How exactly that works, what they're giving the founders, and how this isn't hugely illegal are all details that I don't understand. I put a top-level comment asking exactly that.