MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bruce511 | 2025-05-18 06:33:40+00:00
I think you are asking the right question here. Before building something determine if there is a market, and if that market will pay.

Personally my gut says no. I personally don't use any tools in that range, but I also think that at first glance the numbers don't add up.

Firstly, people pay for value. You seem to feel your ideas are low value (hence the low price) which means you don't really expect users to use it a lot. And "very occasional use" doesn't motivate me to go to the effort of paying.

Since the absolute number is low, you're either expecting really tiny numbers or you're hoping for really high numbers. The tiny numbers result in tiny revenues and tiny profits, so what's the point?

High numbers of people are likely to consume all that revenue. If you got high numbers you'd like ho the ads based route, with maybe a premium "no ads" subscription. But then you can charge more (getting rid of ads is $20 value.)

But again people dont pay for occasional use. If the use is frequent then it's likely more valuable than 5$.

To answer your root question - people don't "subscribe" to single-use tools (if by single-use you mean one-time-use.)

Perhaps you need to charge more? (People pay $10 for a coffee and that's single use). Or charge per use?
by lmm | 2025-05-18 06:36:11+00:00
> read Spycatcher

I'm not going to read a whole book to respond to an internet comment, especially when it sounds like it's from someone with vested interests very much on one side.

> in the post-war/cold war era, Britain, particularly the upper classes, was fucking riddled with soviet agents, mostly British-born communist sympathisers who were activated by the USSR, and many of them could have been stopped from doing huge damage if simple vetting had been in place

What "huge damage" was done? Britain was if anything doing better for itself in that era, and the USSR's success record speaks for itself.

> do you think it's a coincidence the vetting stopped when the soviet union collapsed?

No, of course not, that removed the funding and the excuse, as well as laying bare the complete failure of the intelligence establishment to accomplish anything useful (given that they'd been unable to see it coming).
by doug_durham | 2025-05-18 06:36:31+00:00
In an area where motorists are used to bikes being on the roads this is an effective approach. I nearly got killed in Portland trying this. Apparently they aren't used to share the road with bike. Which was surprising to me given the city's reputation. I'm much more comfortable doing this in the Bay Area where there a hundreds of bikers on the roads at pretty much all times.
by polskibus | 2025-05-18 06:37:31+00:00
What would be the copyright status for clips generated with such service? Would the copyright protect it?

Current stance:

https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html

“It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements”.

If it isn’t covered (after all it’s the AI that drew all the pictures) then anyone using such service to produce a movie would be screwed - anyone could copy it or its characters).

I’m leaving out the problem of whether the service was trained on copyright material or not.
by Too | 2025-05-18 06:39:02+00:00
That will only work for the most simple of functions. How would you even make such a prompt? "Plz explain this code for me?" It's going to come back with the same essential complexity except in English instead of Javascript, you still need to understand the surroundings. Often you need to approach the understanding from different angles. Are you going to ask it "What will happen given preconditions A, B and C". How many of those questions do you need?

Not to mention how slow this is, instead of just reading a piece of code or instantly query my already existing internal mental model of it, I have to type a prompt, wait for the response, read the response, hope it understood my intent, hope it understood the code, map it to my own understanding.
by flowerthoughts | 2025-05-18 06:39:30+00:00
> This change is prompted by changes to Google Chrome’s root program requirements, which impose a June 2026 deadline to split TLS Client and Server Authentication into separate PKIs. Many uses of client authentication are better served by a private certificate authority, and so Let’s Encrypt is discontinuing support for TLS Client Authentication ahead of this deadline.

Makes sense, even if inconvenient. Client auth is something LE can't provide as much validation of, compared to server certs.

Based on this: https://googlechrome.github.io/chromerootprogram/#322-pki-hi...

> To align all PKI hierarchies included in the Chrome Root Store on the principle of serving only TLS server authentication use cases, the Chrome Root Program will "phase-out" multi-purpose roots from the Chrome Root Store.

Rationale lacking.
by iforgotpassword | 2025-05-18 06:40:22+00:00
Huh, I've been using HA for over a year. The only issue I had was the very first version I was on sometimes stopped firing timers. It was fixed in the next release. Since then, I occasionally add or change an automation as I see fit, other than that it's working the way it's supposed to. Doesn't mean I have a wishlist, but everything else I looked at seemed more complicated and technical.
by cjk | 2025-05-18 06:40:45+00:00
Anecdotally, I have seen some engineers totally give in and start using LLMs to do 90%+ of their work, and the atrophy in their critical thinking skills is readily apparent. It's both shocking and entirely predictable.

I'm extremely worried about how this phenomenon is going to affect junior engineers and folks getting into programming from here on out. It's not hard to imagine an entire generation of “engineers” that can't program their way out of a paper bag without assistance from an LLM.
by condwanaland | 2025-05-18 06:41:32+00:00
Possibly. I think R is actually easier to learn for people who have never studied or done programming before.

1. It's easier to get up and running as RStudio is much more 'batteries included' than other popular IDEs, it's harder to get into the case of multiple different python versions, and you install packages through the R interpreter rather than via pip at the command line

2. I would say R data analysis packages are easier to learn than the python equivalents. Because the dataframe is a native structure in R there has been a lot more packages that have tried alternative syntax approaches to try and find the 'optimal' one. Python has really only had pandas, polars, and pyspark (all of which have implemented their own data structures and therefore have focused more on performance than syntax)

3. This doesn't hold if you're studying a language to be a general purpose programmer. Then python is much better. Anything to avoid the hell of the R standard lib. But if you need to do a bit of coding to analyse data and you've never done any before, my vote would be for R.

However, these are thoughts from my own personal anecdotes rather than any pedagogical theory
by transpute | 2025-05-18 06:41:33+00:00
It's doing VNC-alike "graphics remoting", but with less isolation/security in the name of efficiency/performance:

> We thought this is too inefficient. So we decided to combine both into a single application, to eliminate most of the interprocess communication, and avoid having the Linux server run in the background, and thus suffering from power optimizations. We still have a framebuffer, but we do the scrapping and updating directly. We have reduced all the hassle to mere memcpy and texture update operations. This turned out to be huge! In the future, we hope to reduce this overhead even further by rendering directly to the texture, and this saving the need to scrape and copy memory.

When the next release of Android Linux Terminal ships vGPU with virtio, it will provide better graphics performance than VNC, while retaining strong security isolation between Debian guest VM and host Android.
by lmm | 2025-05-18 06:43:16+00:00
SQS is great if you're already on AWS - it works and gets out of your way.

Kafka is a great tool with lots of very useful properties (not just queues, it can be your primary datastore), but it's not operationally simple. If you're going to use it you should fully commit to building your whole system on it and accept that you will need to invest in ops at least a little. It's not a good fit for a "side" feature on the edge of your system.
by jbotz | 2025-05-18 06:43:36+00:00
You can't build sky-scrapers without rebar (i.e. with un-reinforced concrete), but you can build some pretty large structures if you use curves, arches, widening bases, buttresses, etc. The Pantheon is pretty big, built from un-reinforced concrete, and nearly 2000 years old.

You have to adapt your building style to the material you're working with and tall, thin structures depend on the tensile strength of steel; concrete doesn't have much tensile strength, but does have tremendous compressive strength, so your structure will have to be wider at the bottom, although not necessarily wider than it's tall. It's all about directing the vectors of forces in a way that they stay inside the material of the structure, so no flying slabs, upper floors have to have arches or domes supporting them from below (or lots of pillars that widen into a small arch at the ends).

Here is an idea for a technique may be useful for building with un-reinforced concrete: instead of pouring whole walls into a mold, pour "lego"-style interlocking (large) blocks, layer by layer. Between layers you paint the surface with a thin layer of weak but flexible mortar or glue before pouring the next layer. This way you keep enough room for the structure to shift and settle without cracking and you can use the angle of contact between blocks to deflect the vectors of force back into the material. The article mentions that the Roman-style concrete hardens much faster, so that'll work well with this idea (you don't have to wait too long between pours).
by troupo | 2025-05-18 06:44:17+00:00
The choice of transport is just one, quite telling, aspect of this mess.

Could these commands be executed over websockets? Yes, they could. Will they? No, because the specification literally only defines two transports, and all of the clients only support those.

As with any hype, the authors drink their own coolaid, invent their own terminology, and ignore literally everything that came before them.

Even reading through explanations on the once again vibe-coded https://modelcontextprotocol.io/ you can't help to wonder why.

"tools" are nothing but RPC calls (that's why the base of this is JSON RPC)

"resources"? PHP could do an fopen on remote URLs in the 90s. It literally is just that: "Each resource is identified by a unique URI and can contain either text or binary data." You don't say.

"sampling"? It literally is just bi-directional communication. "servers request data from the client by sending commands". What a novel idea, must have a new name and marketing blurb about "powerful MCP feature, enabling sophisticated agentic behaviors while maintaining security and privacy."

As for auth, again, MCP doesn't have it, and expects you to just figure it out yourself. The entirety of the "spec" on it is just "MCP provides an Authorization framework for use with HTTP and your expected to conform to this spec". There's no spec. Edit: to be clear. At the point of writing all mentions of "MCP Auth Spec" on the internet link to https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26 which at the time of writing contains zero mentions of OAuth and says nothing about auth (and is not a spec to begin with) [1]

And so on.

It's hype-driven vibe-coded development at its finest.

[1] The auth spec is here: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26/bas... I don't think anything on the site links to this directly. I found the link from some github discussion. See issues with it here: https://blog.christianposta.com/the-updated-mcp-oauth-spec-i...
Show HN: MentionedBy AI is now live
by nikin_mat | 2025-05-18 06:44:51+00:00
A few weeks ago I shared an early version of MentionedBy.ai — a tool we built to monitor how your brand is mentioned inside AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and other LLMs.

We’re now officially live

This started from our own frustration. Our startup wasn’t being mentioned in ChatGPT responses, even for queries where we were clearly relevant. Meanwhile, legacy or SEO-heavy brands kept showing up. We realized: AI is becoming the new search engine — and no one knows how they rank in it.

So we built MentionedBy to answer questions like:

How often does your brand appear in AI-generated answers?

Is the mention accurate or hallucinated?

Are you being misrepresented, dropped, or out-ranked by competitors?

What’s your sentiment score across different LLMs?

How do your rankings change over time?

Under the hood:

We run scheduled and real-time prompts via OpenRouter and native APIs

Cluster and semantically match results using OpenAI + Cohere

Log all responses in a time-series DB for trend tracking

Run hallucination detection by comparing AI claims with verified sources

We’re calling this space Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — like SEO, but for LLMs.

The platform is live: https://mentionedby.ai

Would love your feedback — especially on how we can make LLM visibility more transparent and actionable. AMA about the stack, prompt orchestration, hallucination detection, or what we’ve learned comparing LLMs.

— Nikin Founder @ Synapse AI Labs Built in Sri Lanka, Global by default.
by iforgotpassword | 2025-05-18 06:45:37+00:00
Imo that's people trying to be too clever with the automation, inevitably resulting in situations where you'd want different behavior to your "smart" automation.

I did that too in the very beginning but soon realized that you need subtle, non-intrusive rules that make your day ever so slightly more comfortable but don't get in your way if you do something unexpected.

The problem is that HA gives you a million possibilities while Google and apple don't, and most techies just fall for it and start over engineering the shit out of it only to annoy the rest of their family to no end and then getting rid of everything again.
by 9dev | 2025-05-18 06:46:42+00:00
Actually with Netflix, I'd argue that they used to produce a few shows that were great, novel, and interesting to watch. But over time, as their revenue (and shareholder expectations) grew, they started to crunch out targeted content created for specific audiences at a budget (ever noticed how the set is practically empty save for the show's protagonists at all times?). These shows suck because they're not works of art, but metric-driven checklists of features that the target group enjoys.

I assume there's a small sliver of budget available for actually interesting productions, kind of similar to Google's moonshots, but the vast majority of Netflix' catalog is just algorithmic crap by now, so the recommendations are probably solid, there's just nothing good to recommend.
by xlii | 2025-05-18 06:47:00+00:00
I disagree, because in high specialty domains you even cannot reuse knowledge as it might be proprietary.

On the other hand patterns are universal. You sit in a meeting where someone raises problem of „database slow, we have 50M of log entries, we need to delete them” and all the familiarity bells already ring.

The open domain knowledge IMO is something that can be extracted from LLMs. Ask LLM for disk-based data cache and it will happily provide. But it won’t ask how many writers or readers you have. For me even imagining this scenario makes my spidey sense tingling.
by pmlnr | 2025-05-18 06:49:45+00:00
I had to do home automation for FIR panels as the official solution had problems - writeup at https://petermolnar.net/article/herschel-fir-heating/index.h... - and used Domoticz. Never regretted it. I gave HA 3 runs, backed off each time.

At first, in the YAML era, because it was insanely hard to create heating automation (not HVAC, just heating).

Second when HA decided that their supported Python version was greater, than Debian Stable's and FreeBSD stable's Python version.

Third when it became near impossible to install manually, especially on something not linux, FreeBSD.

HA might be a great system when set up once and left alone, but nobody seems to be doing that.
by atoav | 2025-05-18 06:52:15+00:00
This is the correct answer. One big problem is that your "safe bicycle path" can be made unsafe by a motorist that forgot to check for bicycles at any second. That can be parked cars, cars that turn right or or motorists that narrowly overtake with a high speed or whatever.

And the best solution for this is to create a separate space for bicycles that can't be accidentally violated without running into some sort of barrier. The next best thing is probably to include certain things in the the education for the drivers license that give people the empathy and perspective of what it feels like if you are on a bicycle and some asshole overtakes you with 70 km/h and half an arm of distance.

The Dutch cycling embassy website provides some basic principles on this: https://dutchcycling.nl/expertises/cycling-behaviour/ and on infrastructure https://dutchcycling.nl/expertises/cycling-infrastructure/
by anon7000 | 2025-05-18 06:52:59+00:00
This is exactly what HA has been for me. I had several smart bulbs on Apple HomeKit which were… unreliable to say the least. After switching everything to Home Assistant as the main brains, it’s been rock solid, and a LOT faster. I even have an Apple TV which should have helped HomeKit be better.

You can still use Apple’s automations to do stuff in HomeKit. I mean all the rooms & devices “just show up” in Apple HomeKit seamlessly. “Siri, bedroom off” works perfectly with no setup, for example.

Apple home is ok, but automations / iOS shortcuts are unfortunately extremely difficult to write unless they’re very simple. As a technical user, it’s nice to have the option to do something deeper if I want. But the biggest problem for me was the reliability, even for bulbs allegedly fully supported by HomeKit.

I originally only set HA up to bridge in non-homekit devices (like my Govee LEDs), which is also a good use case for HA.

I’ve been fiddling with my smart home less than ever now that HA is set up.
by kilroy123 | 2025-05-18 06:53:02+00:00
Yes, I agree. I think we're at the point where tastes are more important than ever and how to differentiate in this new AI slop world.

No fancy algorithm or AI tool will replace human curation with good tastes (or what you think is good taste)

I dig this for music curation: https://ghostly.com/

If anyone has other similar links I'd love to see them.
by sshine | 2025-05-18 06:53:27+00:00
It’s great that you have sympathy for illustrators, but I don’t see a big difference if the training data is a novel, a picture, a song, a piece of code, or even a piece of legal text.

As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower.

In the end, the work we do that is heavily robotic will be done by less expensive robots.
by lwouis | 2025-05-18 06:56:31+00:00
I've been developing a fairly popular macOS app for years. I consider myself in the community for that reason.

Apple has bundled everything together in a big mess.

- Only certain macOS versions can run certain XCode versions

- Only certain XCode versions contain certain SDK versions

- XCode embeds "Command line tools" which contains things like gcc, ruby, python, installed as a package, and conflicting with other versions on the machine

- Interface Builder is built into XCode and has its own compatibility story

It's a big messy blob and you can't pick-and-choose parts. You have to update your whole machine to move to the latest OS so they will let you run the latest XCode, so your app can compile on the latest platform for your users. It's not the best experience for sure. Many ecosystems have SDKs that you can download as you wish. I don't need to update my OS to download a version of the JDK for example.

That being all said, if you require users to download XCode, regardless of which part of it is necessary, i don't think you should mention "XCode free experience" or "XCode replacement".

I'm already developing a macOS app without launching the XCode GUI. I use the xcodebuild CLI that ships with XCode. My IDE is AppCode. I also use xcodebuild on CI to build the app headless. I would never call that a XCode free experience though, as i suffer from all the issues i mentionned above with version upgrades and XCode issues
by jbotz | 2025-05-18 06:58:14+00:00
As for rebar making concrete structures less durable; yes, that's certainly true for steel rebar. The reason being that it will rust, very slowly at first, but once it starts the expansion of the rusted part causes cracks in the concrete which allow more humidity and oxygen to reach the steel, thus rusting faster. This is often called "concrete cancer", and limits the useful lifetime of most modern reinforced concrete structures to between 50 and 250 years (depending on the environment they are in, the forces they are exposed to, and the quality of the concrete they were constructed with).

Concrete cancer can be reduced or even eliminated by using rebar material that rusts more slowly (stainless steel) or not at all (carbon fiber), but these are much more expensive of course. There is room for research on other reinforcing materials, but basically nothing with good tensile strength is going to be cheaper than steel and considering the quantities of rebar we use, cost is definitely a major issue.

The self-healing nature of Roman concrete might also help here, but the chemistry of concrete and rust formation on embedded steel is complex, and without extensive experimentation right now we don't know if steel embedded in Roman concrete rusts faster or more slowly than in modern concrete (before considering cracks).
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-05-18 06:58:55+00:00
I see value in a pay-per-execution model. I run a service which has a lot of proprietary data. Right now, if Anthropic/OpenAI wanted to use that data in their responses, they need to find me, setup an account, plug it into their chatbot, and return the data to an end user.

With some kind of MCP tip jar, they could extract the data they need and pay $0.02 for the service.

It would remove a lot of friction in the system, and could generate revenues for content & data creators.
by octo888 | 2025-05-18 06:59:30+00:00
re your last paragraph, I'm not sure (another commenter told me to be more positive so here we go!)

In my ~20 year career, a huge amount of tech has just been: servers, frontend, backend, databases, queues, caches, auth etc. The big shifts have been gradual and evolutionary (eg NoSQL, OAuth, React, SaaS, Cloud)

Big fads that were going to disrupt tech work as we know it have not entirely lived up to their hype (at least from my perspective): No Code, Blockchain, Serverless, GraphQL, Big Data.

Tech is a lot of big companies who move very slow. Particularly outside of SV/US where there is less VC hype.

But, it could be different this time. It's of course something to keep an eye on, particular if I feel I need to ride the hype train to get back into things
by jakelazaroff | 2025-05-18 06:59:55+00:00
Awaiting a non-promise doesn’t make it synchronous, though — it still executes any subsequent lines in a microtask.

Try running this code. It’ll print “bar” first and then “foo”, even though the function only awaits a string literal and the caller doesn’t await anything at all.

const foo = async () => console.log(await "foo"); foo(); console.log("bar");