MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Agent Arena – crowdsourced testbed for evaluating AI agents in the wild
by tejpalv8 | 2025-06-24 17:03:49+00:00
We just launched Agent Arena -- a crowdsourced testbed for evaluating AI agents in the wild.

Think Chatbot Arena, but for agents.

It’s completely free to run matches. We cover the inference.

I always find myself debating whether to use 4o or o3, but now I just try both on Agent Arena!

Try it out: https://obl.dev/
by drag0s | 2025-06-24 17:03:58+00:00
love this as someone who's been fixing the same billing bugs over and over and who sometimes finds stripe more complex than it should be. will make sure to try this on my next adventure.

btw, if you still want to go directly with stripe, here are some general recommendations/notes I generally agree with:

https://github.com/t3dotgg/stripe-recommendations
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-24 17:05:03+00:00
One of the things I really struggle to retain about the shell is the various expansions.

Unfortunately history shows the expanded form of what's happened, so I can't go reference that I used the third word of history item 773 as an argument, I only see the resolved argument.

Alas I haven't found any hooks in zsh that show promise here. I'd really love the pure history.

One technique I've used in the past is making a quick command in vim, that takes the selection or current line, and sends it to a given terminal. And perhaps starts a new line too. Basically using vim to author commands, to build the history log. Also I get to use vim, yay.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-06-24 17:05:25+00:00
If 3d printing was that good, stealing a car would be moot because production costs would come way down and only need to cover cost/procurement of materials and paying back the black box.

Regardless, I don't think the car is an apt metaphor here. Cars are an important utility and gatekeeping cars arguably holds society back., art is creative expression, and no one is going hungry because they didn't have $10 for the newest book.

We also have libraries already for this reason, so why not expand on that instead of relinquishing sharing of knowledge to a private corporation?
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-24 17:05:34+00:00
> I don’t think 2.5 GB is a lot nowadays. Xcode is over 12 GB, iMovie over 4 GB, MS Word 2 over GB

Word is ridiculous, agreed. Xcode isn't mandatory (although I'd LOVE to have it ship without tons of mandatory SDKs, emulators and god knows what else makes up the 12 GB) and I'm not sure if iMovie is.

> Is that ‘having to’? I thought those models only get downloaded after you give permission to do so.

I can't remember having ever given macOS the permission to install Siri and the likes.

> /Library/Printers is 12 MB on my system, for example and /Library/Audio 584 kB.

Indeed, tried on another machine, no printer drivers there. Probably the culprit is HP, their drivers suck balls. /Library/Audio however, that's just the same size on my M2 MBA as it is on my 2019 MBP.
by godelski | 2025-06-24 17:05:44+00:00
If the fingerprint reader is in the right place it feels like you aren't doing anything. Just like with FaceID where you looking at your phone becomes second nature so does your hand placement when pulling your phone out of your pocket.

If you haven't had a phone like this before it's hard to explain. But I can tell you from personal experience that it is less effort than FaceID, which is my current daily driver
by hilbert42 | 2025-06-24 17:06:00+00:00
You don't have to and shouldn't—not without further evidence. Nevertheless, that group has taken the effort and it seems considerable work went into preparing it—that the analysis is done yearly showing trends over time, etc.

The fact that the figures are on the table so to speak they can now be tested by other researchers.

I'd not seen this analysis before and found it fascinating (I spent an inordinate amount of time studying the figures).
by pron | 2025-06-24 17:06:00+00:00
The idea that memory safety is a binary choice between what Rust provides and anything less than that has absolutely no grounding in either empirical or theoretical results. For example, it is true that there are good empirical reports that some high percentage (~70%) of security issues in C programs are due to memory safety, but most of those are due to lack of spatial safety, and Zig offers the same level of spatial memory safety as Rust. But in short, you get a language that's far safer than C and far simpler than Rust, which appeals to some just as Rust appeals to some (and frankly, both appeal to far fewer people than what's necessary to achieve even a medium level of success).
by baruchel | 2025-06-24 17:06:51+00:00
Can't find the URL again for a funny (and probably universal) custom prompt: you had to do some

curl <url> | sh

then you could see on your terminal thousands of various tests related to your installation, then several megabytes being downloaded with progress bars, etc.

At the very end of the whole process, the whole stuff would vanish into writing PS1="$ " at the end of your ~/.bashrc

Of course, the very same prompt was used whatever your install could be. I think it was some joke making fun of all these crazy and heavy custom prompts all around.
by WalterBright | 2025-06-24 17:06:54+00:00
> It will cost you 35k a year

> If instead you rent it for 20k a year

Some good numbers, but what is missing is the result of investing $35k-$20k=$15k per year. Let's say you earn a %7 real return on $15k/year invested for 60-25=35 years.

Writing a little program:

import core.stdc.stdio; void main() { double d = 0; foreach (i; 0..35) d = (d+15000)*1.07; printf("d: $%f\n", d); }

Yields $2,218,701

I would think twice about buying real estate as an investment.

Personally, I own my home because I want to use it as I see fit, but I recognize that as an investment it's a lousy one.
by Yizahi | 2025-06-24 17:07:12+00:00
font-weight: 300;

I'm 99% sure that author had designed this website on an Apple Mac with so called "font smoothing" enabled, which makes all regular fonts artificially "semi-bold". So to make a normal looking font, Mac designers use this thinner font weight and then Apple helpfully makes it kinda "normal".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553486
by deng | 2025-06-24 17:07:13+00:00
Is Steam even dependent on 32bit distribution packages anymore? Doesn't it ship with its own whole set of 32bit libraries? If I look at my running Steam processes currently, it's all a huge stuff of wrappers, alongside the steamwebhelper binary, which however is 64bit. So I'm not sure at all if removing 32bit distribution packages would even be a problem nowadays. Even back then, you had to convince Steam to use system libraries by using things like STEAM_RUNTIME_PREFER_HOST_LIBRARIES=0 or similar.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-06-24 17:07:28+00:00
I personally don’t care about the performance:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44359183

I agree it would be better if it was in Python but pypa did not step up, for decades! On the other hand, it is not powershell or ruby, it is a single deployed executable that works. I find that acceptable if not perfect.
by dredmorbius | 2025-06-24 17:07:40+00:00
I know this is OT for the thread, but I'd be interested in hearing how you're using VOIP, provider(s) you've used, and any interesting hacks.

I'd recently twigged that I don't want a mobile phone that forwards to, say, an Asterisk server I control, but an Asterisk server (and VOIP number(s)) I can optionally forward to a mobile or other service (e.g., possibly Jitsi Meet or Signal).

That last I could then interact with on a subnotebook laptop or tablet device. The phone would principally exist as a tether or true-emergency comms.
by nexttk | 2025-06-24 17:08:01+00:00
About the axioms, not really. Axiom sets is mostly there just as a 'short hand' to quickly describe a context we're talking about, but ultimately you could just do away with them. E.g. if we let A be the set of axioms from some theory (e.g. set theory, number theory etc.) and you have a mathematical statement of the form X => Y within that theory, you could just as well consider the statement "A ^ X => Y" in the purely formal system without any axioms at all, then it is purely a logical question (essentially, if X => Y is a theorem within theory A) and more objectively true than "X => Y" which would be theory-independent.
by amluto | 2025-06-24 17:08:08+00:00
I’m willing to believe that machine vision would eventually become good enough to match or exceed human visual perception given the same inputs.

But humans in a car have a massive advantage over little cameras that no one seems to discuss much: we have two sensors (eyeballs) mounted on a servo (our head) that can move around and is looking through a truly monstrous aperture (the windshield), and that aperture is equipped with fancy cleaning devices (wipers and cleaning fluid spray), and the car’s operator is motivated to clean the windshield and maintain the windshield, wipers, and spray system to be able to see.

A Tesla car has little tiny camera lenses that are every bit as exposed as the windshield but don’t have all the compensating machinery.

Go stick a pair of nice cameras on a three-axis servo mount with a range of motion of a whole foot (or a camera array and no servo), stick that two feet behind the windshield, train it well (use that massive parallax!) and I’d believe the result would be competitive in performance but definitely not cost. Also the car would lose an entire seat.

Or use radar and lidar and achieve super-human performance.

Fir what it’s worth, the military was and is fully aware that lidar and similar tech can outperform human eyeballs in “battlefield conditions”, and I’m aware of old DARPA projects to do things like pulsed laser range-gated imaging to see through fog and such. (You still get attenuation and scattering, but you can mostly disambiguate the additive signal from fog from the stuff behind it.) Lidar can do something similar. Humans can move their head to acquire more data. Little cameras are at the mercy of the fog and can only use fancy image processing to try to compensate.
by klabb3 | 2025-06-24 17:08:27+00:00
I won’t speak to the technical merits of MCP but I will say this: it doesn’t matter for many use cases, in particular consumer tech.

The entire digital consumer economy is built around ownership of the screen real estate, due to a simple reason: ads. Whoever owns the sidebar sets the rules, period. Web2.0 was all about APIs (usually Rest/json) and in hindsight we see a clear distinction on where they’re used: in commercial B2B apps. Conversely, big B2C players shut down the little open they had - Facebook, Gmail removed their XMPP support, and these days Twitter etc even gatekeep content when you’re not signed in or using the app, and aggressively fortify against even basic scraping. When you’re using other clients, you are bypassing their sidebar, meaning their opportunity to deliver ads.

So no, your iOS apps and Twitter are not gonna ”open up” their APIs in any way, not through Rest and not through MCP, simply because it goes directly against their incentives. The exceptions are (1) temporary to ride a hype train, and (2) services you pay money for (but even that is wishful and hypothetical).
by garciasn | 2025-06-24 17:08:57+00:00
Are YOU being facetious? I haven't worked for a company since 2012 that forced Microsoft only OS and I wouldn't work for one that did unless I was absolutely and entirely desperate or the money was THAT good (like 2x my current salary good).

Sure; you should know how to use Office products, but to claim that using a Microsoft OS would somehow be a requirement to get a job is absolutely hilarious.
by KoolKat23 | 2025-06-24 17:09:18+00:00
Because two-century old injustice is handwavey pie-in-the-sky talk,it is also ridiculously selective. There are other injustices too and how do you determine what the amount is? Do you offset slave ancestors privilege for growing up in the 1st world against their ancestors losses, what is the actual tangible loss due to the past rather than those due to more modern injustices such as overt racism or mere growing up in a poorly run town? It's completely impractical and/or virtue signalling.

Reneging on debt is a very real decision taken today (not in the past). Practically speaking it signals to bondholders you can't be trusted to keep your word. Hardly honourable, not that they'd worry about this point of view, it's cold hard calculation, will you renege when you proceed on your next ideological crusade, this signals yes.
by pedrocr | 2025-06-24 17:09:20+00:00
Wouldn't that need a huge amount of extra hardware to do that filtering when the routers in each customer's home are mostly idle? Just setting egress filtering as the default and letting users override that if they need to for some reason should be a good outcome. The few that do change the default hopefully know what they are doing and won't end up part of a DDoS but they'll be few anyway so the impact will still be small.
by JohnFen | 2025-06-24 17:09:34+00:00
> did it used to be controversial that people should watch what they say?

When I was a kid, not only was this uncontroversial, it was desirable as a default in public discourse. Not so much "watch what you say" in terms of there are ideas you shouldn't express, but more in terms of being attentive of how you express them.

It's desirable because doing this is an important part of having a functioning society where there is a wide variety of different and often opposing viewpoints. I don't know if this particular change is the reason or not, but we (in the US) seem to have lost the ability to work with or have reasonable discussions with those who don't agree with us. Increasingly, we can't even seem to tolerate the existence of people who don't agree with us (whatever our opinions may be).

That bodes very ill for our future.
by ajross | 2025-06-24 17:09:42+00:00
The EFF has been yelling that Big Tech is a major threat for like three decades now. The dystopia seems not to have arrived. Until now, when it seems to be rolling out as offical administration policy.

In point of fact, nonsense like "Big Tech Bad" became part of the general antiestablishment mania that got us into this mess! Google and Meta kept our stuff mostly private, it's the nuts we voted for who were the real threat, and we voted for them because the EFF and other thought leaders told us not to trust the people who turned out to have been the good guys.

And I've mostly had it. The EFF turns out to have been a click farm milking sincere but mostly irrelevant outrage into an engine for social destruction. No thanks.
by munificent | 2025-06-24 17:09:51+00:00
An anecdote about how a toy project _really_ helped me out:

I work on Dart professionally. I've also been tinkering on a toy programming language that may never see the light of day. My toy language has gone through several incarnations but a while back I was working on adding algebraic datatypes, pattern matching, and exhaustiveness checking to it.

The canonical algorithm for exhaustiveness checking is this paper by Luc Maranget: http://moscova.inria.fr/~maranget/papers/warn/warn.pdf

When I first started dabbling in programming languages over a decade ago, I tried to understand that paper for weeks and just could not wrap my head around it. I don't have much of a formal CS background and that paper was impenetrable to me.

So here I am tinkering on my toy programming language and I run into again. I give it another try and laboriously implement it in my interpreter, basically doing a straight translation. I don't understand the code, but it seems to sort of work. So then I start refactoring it a tiny bit at a time into a style that fits the way I think about code. Eventually the algorithm sort of folds into itself and before I know it, I finally understand how it works. The end result was only a page or so of code, but my toy language had real exhaustiveness checking work.

Meanwhile, at work, I am working on adding pattern matching and exhaustiveness checking to Dart [1]. Exhaustiveness checking here is a much harder proposition because Dart has subtyping, unlike my toy language and the ML languages that Maranget's paper works on.

I'd been hacking away at an exhaustiveness algorithm for Dart based on a couple of papers about Scala's approach but they were sort of approximative and inelegant (in my opinion, maybe they are a great fit for Scala).

But once I understood Maranget's algorithm from implementing it in my toy project, it finally clicked for me how it could be adapted to work with subtyping in a sound, coherent way. I wrote it up as quickly as I could and (with a lot of additional help from a teammate to handle generics), that became the algorithm we shipped:

https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/main/accepted/3.0...

It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't coincidentally been working on a toy pattern matching implementation at home.

[1]: https://dart.dev/language/patterns
by lesuorac | 2025-06-24 17:09:54+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol_Foundation_for_the...

I wouldn't call it that. Goldsmith took a photograph of Prince which Warhol used as a reference to generate an illustration. Vanity Fair then chose to buy a license Warhol's print instead of Goldsmith's photograph.

So, despite the artwork being visual transformative (silkscreen vs photograph) the actual use was not transformed.
by johncole | 2025-06-24 17:09:54+00:00
This list is amazing, but at some point you have to prioritize what you’re paying attention to.

Your most dangerous plastic or microplastic is the PFAS. And the biggest source of PFAS is the water you drink. Does it run through plastic tubing? A pfas filter at any point? Sit in a plastic jug?

The most effective way to deal with this is to distill your water. Distilled water is nearly pfas free, and also removes bpas, lead, mercury, and any bacteria.[1]

https://learn.pfasfreelife.com/research/distillers-remove-pf...
by aldousd666 | 2025-06-24 17:10:46+00:00
I've done a lot of these kinds of projects. I got really sucked into a rabbit hole with the parser/interpreter/compiler that I was stuck (happily) in "I need to understand this so I will build one" mode. I eventually built a database server and query language for it. (for a business) This was in 2009, but I highly identify with his method of learning by doing for fun!
by bityard | 2025-06-24 17:11:01+00:00
I think we can generalize this into the overall computing environment. When I was younger, I was that kid building my whole OS from source via Gentoo, with all the CPU-specific flags and optimizations. I had a very detailed window manager configuration (fwvm2 maybe?), a .bashrc full of aliases and functions for every occasion. And yes, a custom prompt.

I think these kinds of over-optimization rabbit holes are a good learning experience, but I compare it to woodworking. A woodworker just starting out will spend most of his/her time building or refining the tools they need, learning techniques, coming up with ideas/designs and testing them, etc. But eventually the point comes where you have to get Real Work done and the tools and jigs have to wait until the weekend.

Linux is still my favorite desktop OS, but these days I just run Debian and KDE because "free time" is not a thing I have anymore and I care more about getting things done than having the most optimal computing experience.
by jekwoooooe | 2025-06-24 17:11:01+00:00
I agree. It’s fun to just write code to solve problems or even for fun. I love go (it’s the best all around language and it’s not even close) so for fun I wrote a game engine and a small game that I might try to turn into an actual game. It’s good to keep fresh. I’ve also tried to do llm free days
by attendant3446 | 2025-06-24 17:11:07+00:00
I mostly agree. But I have a couple of horror stories about staying in hotels too.

The main thing about hotels is that you rarely book them for a week or a month. So if it's bad, it's usually easy to leave. Also, it's a business, so sometimes they care about their reputation.

Airbnb used to be good, but it's been awful for a while now. I'm not saying it's all bad, but it's mostly bad. If property rating is plummeting, they can simply reset and relist the property - Airbnb doesn't punish such behaviour. Unfortunately, if you need to stay somewhere long term, there are no global alternatives to Airbnb.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-06-24 17:11:07+00:00
That's a part of the issue. I'm not sure if this has happened in visual arts, but there is in fact precedent against trying to hire a sound a like over the one you want to sound like. You can't be in talks with Scarlet Johannsen, reject her, and then hire a sound a like and say "talk like Scarlet". It's pretty clear at that point what you want but you didn't want to pay talent for it.

I see elements of that here. Buying copyrighted works not to be exposed and be inspired, nor to utilize the aithor's talents, but to fuel a commercialization of sound-a-likes.
by lapcat | 2025-06-24 17:11:16+00:00
> The South has terrible climate, suffocating heat and humidity much of the year.

I just have to laugh at this. Have you lived in the Midwest? We have suffocating heat and humidity too, in fact the past several days. In the winter, we have biting cold windchills. And guess what, we also rely on air conditioning!

Two other factors worth noting: exercise does not depend on the outdoors. There are gyms, etc. Moreover, obesity does not depend entirely on lack of exercise; diet is a major factor too. Indeed, many would argue that diet is the more important factor.
by dredmorbius | 2025-06-24 17:11:23+00:00
HN's policy is to deprecate HN-as-customer-support-of-last-resort:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34444459>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190090>

(I ... somewhat disagree, but can understand the viewpoint, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580124> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36444020> for example.)
by kanzure | 2025-06-24 17:11:38+00:00
Hi, your docs say that users don't need state syncing, but when using Stripe you do need state syncing or to ingest the Stripe events. I also don't see any information in the docs about handling e.g. chargebacks or other events and listening for (or otherwise syncing against the history of) those events. I'm a little confused - why would I want to not have that? I could be misunderstanding this project though!
by kloud | 2025-06-24 17:11:42+00:00
The reason for MCP is that you get better results with optimized prompts rather than using existing API docstrings. So everybody is going to end up adopting it in some shape or form.

It is a general concept, MCP itself is nothing special, it is that just that Anthropic formalized the observation first.

Tool call = API call + instructions for LLM

So vendors who provide APIs are going to write prompts, add a thin wrapper and out goes MCP. Or you create your own instructions and wrap in MCP to optimize your own workflows.
by andy99 | 2025-06-24 17:11:47+00:00
> inability to detect the number of r's in:strawberry: meme

Can someone (who know about LLMs) explain why the r's in strawberry thing is related to tokenization? I have no reason to believe an LLM would be better at counting letters if each was one token. It's not like they "see" any of it. Are they better at counting tokens than letters for some reason? Or is this just one of those things someone misinformed said to sound smart to even less informed people, that got picked up?
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-06-24 17:12:34+00:00
Thank you both.

Unrelated note to publishing platforms: Instead of using Archive to read your stuff, I'd rather pay for your content; but until a mechanism to send microtransactions to one-off view individual articles, I'm not going to ever sign up monthly (e.g. send 0.0001 XMR to address 1MADEup5649879846513216547, which then creates a machine-local cookie to allow viewing of content indefinitely/timed). Perhaps a GUI similar to the old .RSS feeds, with a central CC/crypto processor which pays per article?