MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: EchoStream – A Local AI Agent That Lives on Your iPhone
by shuhongwu | 2025-06-19 13:47:17+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a project called EchoStream, and I’d love to share it with you.

As an AI startup founder, the first thing I do every morning is open Hacker News. I look for what other founders are building, check out new GitHub projects, and explore new products. But I started noticing that it was taking me the whole morning just to get through it all.

I began to wonder: could an AI help me read Hacker News more efficiently? Could it summarize everything so I can quickly scan through, and then dive deeper into what interests me? And more than that—could it store what I’ve seen so I can recall it later when it's relevant?

That’s the idea behind EchoStream.

EchoStream is a local AI agent that runs entirely on your iPhone. It includes a built-in thinking model to help you do more with less effort—privately and efficiently, without sending your data anywhere.

Some of its key features:

- Read and understand web pages using AI

- OCR for recognizing and processing text in images

- Automatically record, transcribe, and summarize audio

- An AI-powered news feed with fresh, relevant updates

- Memory search that connects new info with what you’ve seen before

It’s still early, but I’d really appreciate your feedback or thoughts. I built this for myself, and now I want to share it with all of you.

You can have a try here:https://apps.apple.com/us/app/echostream-mind-copilot/id6476... or to the homesite: https://www.echostream-ai.com/

Note: It works well on any iDevice with at least 4GB of RAM.
by bayindirh | 2025-06-19 13:47:33+00:00
I really hate modern technology sometimes. I have nothing against being more energy efficient, running cooler, lasting longer, but we're losing some great things along the road.

I have to pay 3x the price for a CRI>90 LED w.r.t. a CRI>80 one. At least the price difference brings better light quality regardless of CRI (soft start, dimmability, even less flicker, better light distribution). On the other hand, I'm happy that I can get halogen bulbs if I really want to.

The problem comes from losing past frames of reference. We say "we're at 99% of benefit parity with the previous generation", but this 1% losses compensate every generation, and now we live in a more efficient, but arguably less comfortable life.

A couple of Technology Connections (this guy is nuts when it comes to LEDs, in a good way) videos on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSFNufruSKw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbvVnOxb1AI
by loufe | 2025-06-19 13:47:48+00:00
I really like this idea as I find Claude's transparency frustrating. Claude code's killer features revolve around better tools to manage context and limits vs the desktop app (compact and the % remaining until auto compact), but it's not enough.

If I can offer any advice, it's that the high use of emojis in a project readme (at least for me) looks so unprofessional and makes me worry that a project was vibe -coded in the sense that the AI was possibly not babysat to the extent I think they should. That's just me, though
by RHSeeger | 2025-06-19 13:48:01+00:00
That's not really comparing apples to apples though.

> A human co-worker can submit one version of code and usually have it accepted with a single review, no other "versions" to verify.

But that human co-worker spent a lot of time generating what is being reviewed. You're trading "time saved coding" for "more time reviewing". You can't complain about the added time reviewing and then ignore all the time saved coding. THat's not to say it's necessarily a win, but it _is_ a tradeoff.

Plus that co-worker may very well have spent some time discussing various approaches to the problem (with you), with is somewhat parallel to the idea of reviewing 4 different PRs.
by doodpants | 2025-06-19 13:50:35+00:00
Wow, the original DropZap was one of my favorite iOS games ever! I was able to keep playing it for years after the final release, because I didn't upgrade my phone for a long time. By the time I stopped playing I was #1 or #2 on most of the leaderboards. I definitely have to check this new one out...

[Announcer: Thirty minutes later]

...subscription pricing only? Automatic delete. :-( If there were a one-time purchase option of, say, $10, I'd be willing to pay it.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-06-19 13:50:46+00:00
> I don’t really buy this at all

For what it’s worth, you seem to be agreeing with the person you replied to. Their main point is that this break down happens primarily because people identify as Rationalists (or whatever else). Taken from that angle, Rationalism as an identity does not appear to be useful.
by sensanaty | 2025-06-19 13:50:49+00:00
Listen, I won't pretend to be The God Emperor Of Writing Code or anything of the sort, I'm realistically quite mediocre/dead average in the grand scheme of things.

But literally yesterday, with Claude Code running 4 opus (aka: The latest and greatest, to intercept the "dId YoU tRy X" comment) which has full access to my entire Vue codebase at work, that has dedicated rules files I pass to it, that can see the fucking `.vue` file extension on every file in the codebase, after prompting it to "generate this vue component that does X, Y and Z" spat out React code at me.

You don't have to be Bjarne Stroustrup to get annoyed at this kinda stuff, and it happens constantly for a billion tiny things on the daily. The biggest pushers of AI have finally started admitting that it's not literally perfect, but am I really supposed to pretend that this workflow of having AIs generate dozens of PRs where a single one is somewhat acceptable is somehow efficient or good?

It's great for random one-offs, sure, but is that really deserving of this much insane, blind hype?
by jmaestrooper | 2025-06-19 13:51:17+00:00
Aside from the fact that both were the largest rockets in their time there's literally NOTHING in common between these 2 programs.

Government-run vs private-run (partially govt-bankrolled). Single use vs fully reusable. Moon vs Mars. Traditional development vs iterative ("hardware heavy") development. There's just no parallels whatsoever.

Will the result be the same? We'll see. But the history says don't bet against Elon.

Btw N1 was a failure arguably due to Korolev's death, not his ineptness.
by Straw | 2025-06-19 13:51:46+00:00
AZ uses a known transition model. I wouldn't call this model-based, because when people say model-based they usually mean learning a world model.

MuZero doesn't actually learn a state transition function- it only models reward. It's a model that predicts reward given an action sequence. I suppose we could consider this a hybrid that's slightly model based because it does have an incentive to learn what's going on. But there's no feedback where we predict future world states and feed that back in.
by failrate | 2025-06-19 13:51:50+00:00
The main caveat is that you have to enable developer mode on the Android device to load the apps, but that is typical if you are running your own apps.

Godot uses a Python-like language instead of Lua, which is good for me. Lots of people groove with Lua, but it gives me the ick.

I did not get very far trying to make 3D or physics-based games with Godot 3. I did not like the 3D interface, and the physics engine was too brittle for e.g. a pinball simulation. Too much tunneling and other inconsistent behavior.

But for 2D applications that are a mixture of text and images, i find it fits the bill quite well.

(For 3D apps and physics, I currently use Unreal Engine 4. Some tunneling, but I know tricks to mitigate that, and I much prefer its 3D interface.)
by criddell | 2025-06-19 13:52:09+00:00
We understand that if you are willing to compromise on the fan and power efficiency, you can get a great machine like your Dell. People with your preferences are well served! The frustration is that there's nothing similar to even an old M1 laptop from other manufacturers. Why not? Apple has shown there's a big market for small, efficient, silent laptops with good displays in the $2500+ range.

Other people in this thread have mentioned a Lenovo Aura as coming pretty close and it does, except for the fan! Is it really that hard to eliminate the fan and get performance / watt numbers like Apple was getting 5 years ago?
by geophile | 2025-06-19 13:53:20+00:00
> There is no value for logging "function entry/exit, with param values" when all collaborations succeed and the system operates as intended.

Well, I agree completely, but those conditions are a tall order. The whole point of debugging (by whatever means you prefer) is for those situations in which things don't succeed or operate as intended. If I have a failure, and suspect a major subsystem, I sure do want to see all calls and param values leading up to a failure.

In addition to this point, you have constructed a strawman in which logging is on all the time. Have you ever looked at syslog? On my desktop Linux system, output there counts as voluminous. It isn't so much space, or so CPU-intensive that I would consider disabling syslog output (even if I could).

The large distributed system I worked on would produce a few GB per day, and the logs were rotated. A complete non-issue. And for the rare times that something did fail, we could turn up logging with precision and get useful information.
by paulette449 | 2025-06-19 13:53:52+00:00
I read Ulysses last year and enjoyed it but this "companion" book was indispensable:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/ulysses-annotated-revised-and-e...

But also the free (online) Joyce Project with hyperlinked annotations:

http://m.joyceproject.com/chapters/telem.html

I wish I'd bought this version when It came out. It's pretty expensive now.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-cambridge-ulysses-the-1922-...

And I cannot recommend Frank Delaney's Re: Joyce podcast enough, sadly he passed away before completing the project

https://blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce/
by runako | 2025-06-19 13:54:01+00:00
> they bought the subscribers, funnel and team that built the business, not the code

This is strikingly similar to just about every tech acquisition in history. Buyers purchase the assets, potentially including part of the team, needed to produce a reproducible business outcome, however one defines those terms.

What is striking is how quickly the team was able to assemble a reproducible business outcome worth so much.
by eitally | 2025-06-19 13:54:09+00:00
It's going to be very interesting to see how things evolve in enterprise IT, especially but not exclusively in regulated industries. As more SaaS services are at least partly vibe coded, how are CIOs going to understand and mitigate risk? As more internal developers are using LLM-powered coding interfaces and become less clear on exactly how their resulting code works, how will that codebase be maintained and incrementally updated with new features, especially in solo dev teams (which is common)?

I easily see a huge future for agentic assistance in the enterprise, but I struggle mightily to see how many IT leaders would accept the output code of something like a menugen app as production-viable.

Additionally, if you're licensing code from external vendors who've built their own products at least partly through LLM-driven superpowers, how do you have faith that they know how things work and won't inadvertently break something they don't know how to fix? This goes for niche tools (like Clerk, or Polar.sh or similar) as much as for big heavy things (like a CRM or ERP).

I was on the CEO track about ten years ago and left it for a new career in big tech, and I don't envy the folks currently trying to figure out the future of safe, secure IT in the enterprise.
by ben_w | 2025-06-19 13:54:29+00:00
> No doubt the pendulum will swing too hard and too far, and ordinary decent people will pay the price.

It has swung, and they are *already paying* the price. That's the question.

> I can't blame the other side for sending in the goon squad to crack heads.

Even when it's your own head? Given the complexity of the system, it's implausible that any immigrant, including you (or I in Germany) have done everything perfectly. But it's worse than that, as people in the USA are currently facing removal for writing things on the internet which are theoretically constitutionally protected free speech.

And that's without any discussion about why nobody in power did anything about what Biden's admin said was about 11 million undocumented migrants:

The reason being the US economy, and of main importance the food supply, actually depends on their labour — depending on how fast they get removed, the USA would be looking a 50% supply cut in perishable hand-picked crops and dairy (if done instantly) to a mere 20% price inflation (if done over a few years). Similar for construction industry, but that's less critical than, you know, eating.
by bawana | 2025-06-19 13:54:52+00:00
I suspect that economies of scale are different for software and hardware. With hardware, iteration results in optimization of the supply chain, volume discount as the marginal cost is so much less than the fixed cost, and lower prices in time. The purpose of the device remains fixed. With software, the software becomes ever more complex with technical debt - featuritis, patches, bugs, vulnerabilities, and evolution of purpose to try and capture more disparate functions under one environment in an attempt to capture and lock in users. Price tends to increase in time. (This trajectory incidentally is the opposite of the unix philosophy - having multiple small fast independent tools than can be concatenated to achieve a purpose.) This results in ever increasing profits for software and decreasing profits for hardware at equilibrium. In the development of AI we are already seeing this-first we had gpt, then chatbots, then agents, now integration with existing software architectures.Not only is each model ever larger and more complex (RNN->transformer->multihead-> add fine tuning/LoRA-> add MCP), but the bean counters will find ways to make you pay for each added feature. And bugs will multiply. Already prompt injection attacks are a concern so now another layer is needed to mitigate those.

For the general public, these increasing costs will besubsidized by advertising. I cant wait for ads to start appearring in chatGPT- it will be very insidious as the advertising will be comingled with the output so there will be no way to avoid it.
by jt2190 | 2025-06-19 13:55:44+00:00
I was wondering where the money comes from. This article [1] says it's government money provided through the CHIPS act:

> In December, the [prior] administration finalized a $1.61 billion government subsidy for Texas Instruments to support construction of three new facilities after the company announced plans to invest at least $18 billion under the $52.7 billion CHIPS and Science bill.

[1] "Texas Instruments plans $60 billion US investment under Trump push" https://www.reuters.com/business/texas-instruments-plans-inv...

Edit: Did the HN link change? I thought the link was to a TI press release with few details.
by fidotron | 2025-06-19 13:56:07+00:00
Prior to the AI boom Wix had developed a niche in very small businesses with events and sales, where it has a lot of the tedious stuff around that in a state where you can no code it into place very fast.

The problems begin when you try to do things slightly different, and this is almost entirely down to the staggering levels of inconsistency in their core APIs. (Genuinely impressively so). Their business model relies on the useful pieces being opaque enough and irregular enough that you cannot move off without overcoming a big migration effort.

Consequently their interest will be in two areas: can they use LLMs to get people to use those existing modules and get locked in faster? Can they own the funnel of people using LLMs to attempt to create this sort of functionality for their existing market? This acquisition helps on both levels, so it makes perfect sense for them.
by super_ar | 2025-06-19 13:56:10+00:00
Hi HN, A few weeks ago, we shared GlassFlow: Open Source streaming ETL to dedup and join streams from Kafka for ClickHouse (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43953722).

One of the top questions we received was: “How well does it perform at high throughput?”

We ran a load test and would like to share some results with you.

Summary of the test:

- Tested on 20m records

- Kafka produced 55,000 records/sec

- Processing rate of GlassFlow (deduplication): 9,000+ records/sec

- Measured on a MacBook Pro (M3 Max)

- End-to-end latency: <0.12 ms per request

Here is the blog post with full test results and tried with different parameters (rps, # of publishers, etc.): https://www.glassflow.dev/blog/load-test-glass-flow-for-clic...

It was important to us to set up the testing in a way that everybody could reproduce. Here are the docs: https://docs.glassflow.dev/load-test/setup

We would love to get feedback, especially from folks consuming high-throughput in ClickHouse.

Thanks for reading!

Ashish and Armend (founders)
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-06-19 13:56:44+00:00
No, there are 3rd party providers that run open-weights models and they are (most likely) not bleeding money. Their prices are kind of similar, and make sense in a napkin-math kind of way (we looked into this when ordering hardware).

You are correct that some providers might reduce prices for market capture, but the alternatives are still cheap, and some are close to being competitive in quality to the API providers.
by simonw | 2025-06-19 13:57:07+00:00
I don't know of any 100% reliable fixes for this, and I've been looking for them for nearly three years: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/

Most promising approach right now is this one: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/11/camel/

This paper is useful too: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/13/prompt-injection-desig...
by rybosome | 2025-06-19 13:57:24+00:00
AI code generation tools work like this.

Let me reword your phrasing slightly to make an illustrative point:

> so for an employee, instead of specifying explicit if conditions, you specify outcomes and you leave the human to figure out what if conditions apply and how to deal with them?

> Are there any serious applications built this way?

We have managed to build robust, reliable systems on top of fallible, mistake-riddled, hallucinating, fabricating, egotistical, hormonal humans. Surely we can handle a little non-determinism in our computer programs? :)

In all seriousness, having spent the last few years employed in this world, I feel that LLM non-determinism is an engineering problem just like the non-determinism of making an HTTP request. It’s not one we have prior art on dealing with in this field admittedly, but that’s what is so exciting about it.
by geophile | 2025-06-19 13:58:07+00:00
You are very attached to this "voluminous" point. What do you mean by it?

As I said, responding to another comment of yours, a distributed system I worked on produced a few GB a day. The logs were rotated daily. They were never transmitted anywhere, during normal operation. When things go wrong, sure, we look at them, and generate even more logging. But that was rare. I cannot stress enough how much of a non-issue log volume was in practice.

So I ask you to quantify: What counts (to you) as voluminous, as in daily log file sizes, and how many times they are sent over the network?
AI Dev Tools
by shaunross | 2025-06-19 13:58:10+00:00
We have been working with several tools like bolt.new and lovable.dev. All of these tools stop working after a certain level of coding complexity. - circular coding reintroduces similar bugs - new functionality gets harder to add only through prompts

Is there a reason why and a cut-off where you have to start using AI-IDEs for further development?
by _fat_santa | 2025-06-19 13:58:11+00:00
That has been my experience as well. My top comment talks about building an AI app, but that app is not being vibe coded. I know the article talk about how Base44 was entirely vibe coded but TBH i find that very hard to believe.

The other day I tried to legit vibe code for about an hour and Claude could barely build a weather app that used NWS data for me. Even with this toy weather app it collapsed a few features in, simply put the context windows of these AI tools is just not large enough. I think vibe coding _might_ be viable once context windows start growing into the 5-10M token range but even then I'm skeptical.
Show HN: Unlimited Search API for AI agents – $100/mo (seeking 10 beta devs)
by yihlamur | 2025-06-19 13:58:14+00:00
We've been frustrated about search vendors making their pricing unfriendly...

SerpAPI - 5K searches a month for $75 a month Tavily - 15K searches a month for $100 a month

So expensive for just 5k-15K searches a month...

This causes startups not to experiment as freely as possible -- we all need to count pennies because of that at Vela Partners (https://www.vela.partners/).

We built an infrastructure to run unlimited search at a fraction of their cost to solve our own pain point.

Happy to onboard up to 10 developers who will pay $100 a month for unlimited requests, and see how that goes.

Reach out at yigit@vela.partners
Show HN: I built an agent that creates videos for just $0.10 each
by yorkyarn | 2025-06-19 13:58:30+00:00
Hey HN,

I built an AI agent that turns images or text into 480p videos in ~10–30 seconds. It auto-selects the best video model for quality, speed, and cost — no config needed.

You can try it out here: https://www.vidduo.com/

Would love feedback!
by floatrock | 2025-06-19 13:59:14+00:00
kinda, but you're also not buying a mini space heater.

Average lifespan of an incandescent bulb is about 1,000 hours. For a typical 60 watt bulb, that means it burns 60 kWh in electricity over the course of it's life. At $0.20/kWh, that means an incandescent is going to cost you $12 in electricity over its lifetime.

A Philips Ulta-Definition 4-pack of 60W-equivalent is $11.53 on amazon today, or $2.88 / bulb. That $3 bulb is actually 8W. So over those same 1,000 hours, that's 8 kWh, or $1.6 in electricity costs. So the $3 bulb saves you $10 in lifetime electricity costs vs. one incandescent.

But those bulbs are rated for 15,000 hours. Lets assume they all lie and deflate that by 1/3 (maybe a power surge will hit a few years in). That single $3 bulb still saves you 10 x $10 = $100 in electricity costs vs incandescents over its useful life. A bit more if you pay California electricity rates, a bit less if you live near some hydro co-op. But the difference is large enough that the effect is true no matter where you are.

So yeah, top-range lamps give better results than the cheapo stuff, but top range isn't that much more expensive, and the lifetime savings of going to LED are hard to ignore -- op-ex vs. cap-ex if you will.
by beynar | 2025-06-19 13:59:48+00:00
Hey HN,

I built gen-pdf to solve a problem I kept running into: getting AI to generate professional-looking PDFs.

The problem: there is no AI native tool that generate PDF.

My solution: A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets any AI assistant generate TeX-quality PDFs from markdown. Using a rust Typst server under the hood, the MCP delivers PDF of an unmatch quality. It not the classic markdown to pdf that is using a puppeteer engine and deliver poor quality.

Just add this simple config to your mcp.json and your AI can instantly create professional reports, invoices, letters, and contracts.

{ "mcpServers": { "gen-pdf": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "mcp-remote", "https://gen-pdf.com/mcp"] } } }

Features: • LaTeX math expressions • Syntax highlighting • Complex tables • Images • Footnotes • Perfect layout (thanks to Typst) • Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, etc.

The free tier gives you 20 blocks per PDF to try it out. I'm using it daily for generating client reports and technical documentation.

Live at: https://gen-pdf.com Example PDF: https://gen-pdf.com/example.pdf

Would love your feedback!