MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigyabai | 2025-06-26 20:41:15+00:00
It depends on the company. In a certain sense, many SaaS products are more "software" than "service" and are therefore dead-on-arrival when competitors can undercut them or provide a local alternative. We've all seen the $10/mo AI inference apps that nobody uses, or the many transcription services that died with on-device NLP going mainstream.

So... AI accelerates the demise of stupid businesses and reinforces the value proposition of irreplaceable services. As a whole I would say that is a negative to a market that relies on "disruption" economics to stay afloat and continue raising capital.
by unsui | 2025-06-26 20:41:28+00:00
not entirely.

The risk raised in the article is that AI is being promoted beyond its scope (pattern recognition/creation) to legal/moral choice determination.

The techo-optimists will claim that legal/moral choices may be nothing more than the sum of various pattern-recognition mechanisms...

My take on the article is that this is missing a deep point: AI cannot have a human-centered morality/legality because it can never be human. It can only ever amplify the existing biases in its training environments.

By decoupling the gears of moral choice from human interaction, whether by choice or by inertia, humanity is being removed from the mechanisms that amplify moral and legal action (or, in some perverse cases, amplify the biases intentionally)
by Kreshnik | 2025-06-26 20:42:32+00:00
Hi HN,

Several people on our team experience panic attacks, so we built Abler - a simple app to track when they occur, symptoms, and potential triggers.

We know this is deeply personal and varies significantly between individuals.

Looking for honest feedback from anyone with lived experience: what features would make a tool like this genuinely useful? What do existing solutions get wrong?

We are not here to pitch or sell - just trying to build something that actually helps people.

Appreciate any insights.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-26 20:43:00+00:00
The idea that you can write one sentence and get a masterpiece of software that meets your needs is delusional and I’m shocked that it gets as much currency as it does here.

I asked Copilot to tell me how to clear out a a RabbitMQ queue and it gave me a great answer. I asked it to write me a Python script that solves Tower of Hanoi, same thing.

In both cases it is a well-defined task and I don’t care about how it is done.

Applications software is different. If you farm out a task to offshore developers you are either going to have to document every. little. detail. (India) or get a spike of work which might get between 0-40% of the way there and come back with detailed feedback through several cycles (China)

Maybe an A.I. coder could work with you intensively to get your needs met, but it’s not going to be “implement user authentication” and then it is done unless your definition of done is launching and getting a call the next night that somebody logged in without a password.

Even so, AI does make people more productive and it will shift buy vs build discussions towards build.
by philip1209 | 2025-06-26 20:43:02+00:00
I think the suburban angle does matter because the general life cycle of a suburb is that they start rich because they have 0 maintenance costs, but after 20-30 years require money to pay for road + sewer + water maintenance.

So they start with a massive budget surplus which creates well-funded schools that attract rich people. But after 30 years, they cannibalize education to fix potholes. And the socio-economic landscape changes to reflect this.

We're starting to hit a lot of suburbs in the USA around that 30 year mark, and they're attracting progressively lower income residents for whom transportation costs become an increasingly important factor in their home buying decisions.
by pixelpoet | 2025-06-26 20:43:35+00:00
It isn't a lot of things, but I would argue that its exceptionally (heh) good exception handling model / philosophy (making it good, required, and performant) is more important than memory safety, especially when a lot of performance-oriented / bit-banging Rust code just gets shoved into Unsafe blocks anyway. Even C/C++ can be made memory safe, cf. https://github.com/pizlonator/llvm-project-deluge

What I'm more interested to know is what the runtime performance tradeoff is like now; one really has to assume that it's slower than LLVM-generated code, otherwise that monumental achievement seems to have somehow been eclipsed in very short time, with much shorter compile times to boot.
Show HN: Built a Food Scanner for Longevity
by Fbue | 2025-06-26 20:43:52+00:00
I'm 17 and recently launched a private beta for Biohack - a tool that scans food products and gives a longevity score based on impact on aging factors such as inflammation, omega ratio, toxins and more.

Still early and a bit rough, but I'm looking for honest feedback from people who care about health span and deep nutrition.

Would love your thoughts.
by thisislife2 | 2025-06-26 20:43:55+00:00
Exactly. Many are missing the big picture - while Ukraine has managed to hurt the Russsians with drone warfare, how much has all that really helped Ukraine to drive back the Russians or re-take the territory held by the Russians? The simple answer is that it hasn't. Moreover, drones are not going to give an edge to Ukranian any more as the Russian too have mastered not just counter-drone warfare but also streamlined it into their conventional warfare tactics. (For example, Russians now outproduce the Ukrainians in drones and now use WW2 style motorbikes to evade drone defence - https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2025/06/25/russias-motorcycle-... ).
by VirusNewbie | 2025-06-26 20:44:38+00:00
Googler here ---^

I have incredibly mixed feelings on Sundar. Where I can give him credit is really investing in AI early on, even if they were late to productize it, they were not late to invest in the infra and tooling to capitalize on it.

I also think people are giving maybe a little too much credit to Demis and not enough to Jeff Dean for the massive amount of AI progress they've made.
by kshacker | 2025-06-26 20:44:48+00:00
I guess it is a battle between EU bureaucrats vs American Daddies :)

// I know it is tongue in cheek, but that is what this may end up being, especially if Apple is able to move non-trivial amounts of manufacturing to US.

What is non-trivial? IMO if China, India and USA become 3 tiers with each tier being half of the previous tier, that would somehow be justifiable as "hey we are almost there, we can do it any time, but let's have the hatchet ready but keep the cheap devices for now"
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-26 20:44:57+00:00
> I'd rather blow my brains out than continue to work as a software engineer in a world where the LLM-booster dream comes true.

I feel the same way

But please don't. I promise I won't either. There is still a place for people like you and me in this world, it's just gonna take a bit more work to find it

Deal? :)
by atiedebee | 2025-06-26 20:45:02+00:00
> A thread from former Hytale dev Sphax, who worked on the game "during its early-development days," seems to detail some of those promising features, including: blocks that could stream video in-game, real-time block painting, submerged blocks "way before Minecraft," and playable "mini-games on a single block."

Sounds like feature creep was there from the start? Streaming video in game is certainly the last thing I'd expect from an RPG-like Minecraft game.

For the Minecraft RPG experience I personally go to wynncraft, very well thought-out server.
by com2kid | 2025-06-26 20:45:57+00:00
Americans can order their own lab tests for pretty cheap as well. In regards to pricing, the overhead for billing is about 1/3rd of the price, though not relevant in the poster's situation. It is part of why some prices here are so inflated though.

If a patient goes to see their doctor at a major hospital, part of that bill goes to pay for uninsured patients in the ER. Hospitals in the US by law have to treat everyone who come to the emergency room, which results in a lot of losses for hospitals that they have to make up for by charging higher prices on other services.

> And you really don't need to hire a driver to get a box of samples to the lab at the end of the day.

Smaller doctor's offices do their labs offsite, in the US just a couple of companies do the majority of blood work, as part of the contract with the lab, a driver comes by and picks up samples. In the great name of outsourcing, I imagine this driver works for a separate company as well, so now there is 2x outsourcing overhead, once for the lab, and again for the transport company. For doctor's offices that cannot justify their own lab, this makes some sense.

FWIW in my city at least, the majority of doctors are affiliated with large hospitals. They either work in a large hospital, in a satellite campus, or have an affiliate relationship (which from what I can tell just means medical records are automatically transferred over).

I go to a "smaller" office, it is a 3 story campus that is the satellite office of a huge hospital nearby. They do some of their own lab work and outsource other stuff. The hospital network is publicly owned and accordingly much nicer to deal with than many of the horror stories I hear online and from friends. (also the prices are reasonable and they always give me a price sheet up front of what everything will cost, which isn't always the case for some doctors...)

> I just checked, the price for a standard blood panel at a local lab is 14€. It's really not a complicated procedure.

Is that a 100% unsubsidized price?

In the US, cash price for a Comprehensive metabolic panel (CMP) is just $50. The same labs that the hospitals outsource to actually offer direct to consumer tests at really reasonable rates.

I just checked my hospitals cash rates:

A yearly checkup for an existing patient is $48.

Lab work is $48 (a $2 discount!)

Urine tests are another $20.

So in summary, OP got ripped off by their doctor's office.
by dhosek | 2025-06-26 20:46:09+00:00
Because Russt and Swift are doing much more work than a C compiler would? The analysis necessary for the borrow checker is not free, likewise with a lot of other compile-time checks in both languages. C can be fast because it effectively does no compile-time checking of things beyond basic syntax so you can call foo(char) with foo(int) and other unholy things.
by bilbo0s | 2025-06-26 20:46:09+00:00
We don't even need to go back that far.

All these arguments could be made for, say, news media, or social media.

AI being singled out is a bit disingenuous.

If it is dehumanizing, it is because our collective labor, culture, and knowledge base have concerted to make it so.

I guess, people should really think of it this way: A database is garbage in, garbage out, but you shouldn't blame the database for the data.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-06-26 20:47:03+00:00
Whether we like it or not, AI sits at the intersection of both Moravec's and Jevon's paradox. Just as more efficient engines lead to increased gas usage, as AI gets increasingly better at problems difficult for humans, we see even greater proliferation within that domain.

The reductio on this is the hollowing out of the hard-for-humans problem domain, leaving us to fight for the scraps of the easy-for-humans domain. At first glance this sounds like a win. Who wouldn't want something else to solve the hard problems? The big issue with this is easy-for-human problems are often dull, devoid of meaning, and low-wage. Paradoxically, the hardest problems have always been the ones that make work meaningful.

We stand at the crossroads where one path leads to an existence where with a poverty of meaning and although humans create and play by their own rules, we feel powerless to change it. What the hell are we doing?
by eikenberry | 2025-06-26 20:47:24+00:00
> [..] if these projects all integrated LLMs into their chatbots for just a few bucks [..]

No matter your position on the AI helpfulness, asking volunteers to not only spend time helping support a free software project but to also pony up money is just doubling down on the burden free software maintainers face as was highlighted in the recent libxml2 discussion.
by Macha | 2025-06-26 20:47:35+00:00
Factorio and Minecraft (Java edition) are two of the few games that come to mind where the Linux port got comparable effort to the Windows port, and I don't think people are in a rush to play either of them in Proton.

Your latest AAA open world RPG on the other hand? Yeah, you're probably going to have better luck in Proton even if it gets a native Linux port.
by Gethsemane | 2025-06-26 20:48:41+00:00
Agreed, there’s been some interesting developments in this space recently (e.g. AgroNT). Very excited for it, particularly as genome sequencing gets cheaper and cheaper!

I’d pitch this paper as a very solid demonstration of the approach, and im sure it will lead to some pretty rapid developments (similar to what Rosettafold/alphafold did)
by perching_aix | 2025-06-26 20:48:55+00:00
I have participated in such channels for multiple years on the assisting side, and have been keeping in touch with some of the folks I knew from there still doing it. Also note that the projects I helped around with were more end-user focused.

Most interactions start with users being vague. This can already result in some helpers getting triggered, and starting to be vaguely snarky, but usually this is resolved by using prepared bot commands... which these users sometimes just won't read.

Then the misunderstandings start. Or the misplaced expectations. Or the lies. Or maybe the given helper has been having a bad day, but due to their long time presence in the project, they won't be moderated out properly. And so on. It's just not a good experience.

Ever since I left, I got screencaps of various kinds of conversations. In some cases, the user was being objectively insufferable - I don't think it's fair to expect a human to put up with that. Other times, the helper was being unnecessarily mean - they did not appreciate my feedback on that. Neither happens with LLMs. People don't grow resentful of the never ending horde of what feels like increasingly clueless users, and innocent folk don't get randomly chewed out for not living up to the optimality expectations of those who tend to 1000s of cases similar to theirs every week.
by pojzon | 2025-06-26 20:49:21+00:00
Due to how AI works its only a matter of time till its better at pretty much everything humans do beside “living”.

People tend to talk about any AI related topic comparing it to any industrial shift that happened in the past.

But its much Much MUCH bigger this time. Mostly because AI can make itself better, it will be better and it is better with every passing month.

Its a matter of years until it can completely replace humans in any form of intellectual work.

And those are not mine words but smartest ppl in the world, like AI grandfather.

We humans think we are special. That there wont be something better than us. But we are in the middle of the process of creating something better.

It will be better. Smarter. Not tired. Wont be sick. Wont ever complain.

And it IS ALREADY and WILL replace a lot of jobs and it will not create new ones purely due to efficiency gains and lack of brainpower in majority of ppl who will be laid off.

Not everyone is a noble prize winner. And soon we will need only such ppl to advance AI.
by energywut | 2025-06-26 20:49:28+00:00
Putting a datacenter in space is one of the worst ideas I've heard in a while.

Reliable energy? Possible, but difficult -- need plenty of batteries

Cooling? Very difficult. Where does the heat transfer to?

Latency? Highly variable.

Equipment upgrades and maintenance? Impossible.

Radiation shielding? Not free.

Decommissioning? Potentially dangerous!

Orbital maintenance? Gotta install engines on your datacenter and keep them fueled.

There's no upside, it's only downsides as far as I can tell.
by kenoath69 | 2025-06-26 20:49:57+00:00
Where is Cranelift mentioned

My 2c on this is nearly ditching rust for game development due to the compile times, in digging it turned out that LLVM is very slow regardless of opt level. Indeed it's what the Jai devs have been saying.

So Cranelift might be relevant for OP, I will shill it endlessly, took my game from 16 seconds to 4 seconds. Incredible work Cranelift team.
by hirvi74 | 2025-06-26 20:50:01+00:00
> start talking about so called "superpowers"

I cannot stand people like that.

I am not trying to be all 'woe is me', but ADHD has had non-stop negative impacts on my life from childhood through present time. I am in my 30s too (diagnosed in early 20s and treated since), and I've basically just given up on life.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-26 20:50:08+00:00
> makes me wonder why other languages like Rust and Swift can't just do something similar to achieve similar speeds.

One of the primary features of Rust is the extensive compile-time checking. Monomorphization is also a complex operation, which is not exclusive to Rust.

C compile times should be very fast because it's a relatively low-level language.

On the grand scale of programming languages and their compile-time complexity, C code is closer to assembly language than modern languages like Rust or Swift.
by Lerc | 2025-06-26 20:50:20+00:00
>This would be a good counter if this were all that this technology is being used for.

Do you hold the position that a thing is bad because it is possible to do harm, or that it is predominantly causing harm?

Most criticisms cite examples demonstrating the existence of harm because proving existence requires a single example. Calculating the sum of an effect is much harder.

Even if the current impact of a field is predominantly harmful, it does not stand that the problem is with the what is being attempted. Consider healthcare, a few hundred years ago much of healthcare did more harm than good, charlatans and frauds were commonplace. Was that because healthcare itself was a bad thing? Was it a mistake to even go down that path?
by microtonal | 2025-06-26 20:50:25+00:00
Yep, I have been a Mac user since 2007 and iPhone user since 2009. But all the malicious compliance and pettiness has me looking at alternatives (at least for iPhone, since it has good alternatives).

I don't recognize the fun, playful Apple of the 00s and early 10s anymore. Its soul has been replaced.
by cyral | 2025-06-26 20:50:31+00:00
This sounds kinda like what they did when they were forced to allow outside payments in the US. It could only be one link, with a big scary warning, and a 27% cut. They "comply" with the ruling by making another alternative deal that nobody would ever take. Fortunately this backfired in the US and they were actually forced to get rid of all the restrictions in May.
by 9rx | 2025-06-26 20:50:56+00:00
> They don't have to have the density of Manhattan or SF to be better for walkability than they are now.

Right, but it was said that the people don't want walkability at all. I mean, that's how we got here: Wondering why someone wants neither the walkability of the city nor the wide open spaces of the countryside, but instead the crampedness of the city and having to drive everywhere.

I mean, hey, If that's what is up someone's ally, cool. Whatever floats your boat. But the complaining about the the cost of transportation becomes at odds to that. At some point there needs to be a recognition of "you can't have it both ways", no?
by nick_ | 2025-06-26 20:51:09+00:00
If Rust is the language that finally overwhelms the resistance to memory safe languages, that's good.

I think it's also important not to centre Rust alone. In the larger picture, Rust has a combo of A) good timing, and B) the best evangelism. It stands on decades of memory safe language & runtime development, as well as the efforts of their many advocates.
by perching_aix | 2025-06-26 20:51:25+00:00
A lot of the projects that maintain Discord servers in my experience will receive plenty enough donations to make up for the $5 it'd take to serve the traffic that hits their Discord for help with AI. Yes I did run the numbers. It's so (intentionally) cheap, this is a non-issue.

But then one could also just argue that this is something the individual projects can decide for themselves. Not really for either of us to make this call. You can consider what I said as just an example you disagree with in that case.
by theturtletalks | 2025-06-26 20:52:18+00:00
You're misunderstanding what he's saying. He's saying Google has started enshittifing products and Sundar gets the blame for that. Sundar is also the CEO so he gets credit for Gemini. Google's playbook is enshittification though and if Gemini ever gets a big enough moat, it will be enshittified. Even Gemini 2.5 Pro has gotten worse for me with the small updates and it's not as good when it first launched. Google topped the benchmarks and then made it worse.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-06-26 20:52:21+00:00
Be that as it may, many C compilers are still an order of magnitude faster than LLVM. Probably the best example is tcc, although it is not the only one. C is a much simpler language than rust, so it is expected that compilation should take less time for C. That doesn’t mean llvm isn’t a significant contributor to compilation speed. I believe cranelift compilation of rust is also much faster than the llvm path
by WorldMaker | 2025-06-26 20:52:26+00:00
Currently <slot>s only have automatic behavior when attaching a <template> to the Shadow DOM to a node with existing "Light" DOM children, which mostly only happens with Web Components (and for now Web Components require JS).

So it is not yet a full, generic templating solution.

Also, this article goes on at length about how the templating needs to be "reactive" and not just "builds a DOM tree", and <slot> doesn't do that yet at all, even in the automatic behavior scenarios, it's a one time "merge".

Kicking the can along the road of the complexity of "reactive" components is a large part of how we've got the (quite basic) <template> and <slot> tags that we got, and I think why the article is still currently impractical. There needs to be more agreement on what "reactive" means. The article mentions the signals proposal, and that's one possibility that a lot of frameworks are pushing for right now, but it's still a process before browsers agree to support something like that, and something like that is a dependency before agreeing on what a "reactive" template language can be/how it would work out of the box.
by JohnFen | 2025-06-26 20:52:52+00:00
I once hired career-changer as a dev. His old career was as a music studio engineer. He had a baseline level of programming knowledge, but the reason I hired him was that he was wicked smart, his brain worked in the right way, and he worked well in a team. I wasn't worried that he would need some additional training and experience to come up to speed.

He turned out to be one of my best hires.
by steveklabnik | 2025-06-26 20:53:49+00:00
> "hey, there's some fast compiling going on here and it wasn't that hard to pull off. Can we at least take a look at why that is and maybe do the same thing?".

Do you really believe that nobody over the course of Rust's lifetime has ever taken a look at C compilers and thought about if techniques they use could apply to the Rust compiler?
by taylorallred | 2025-06-26 20:54:48+00:00
These languages do more at compile time, yes. However, I learned from Ryan's discord server that he did a unity build in a C++ codebase and got similar results (just a few seconds slower than the C code). Also, you could see in the article that most of the time was being spent in LLVM and linking. With a unity build, you nearly cut out link step entirely. Rust and Swift do some sophisticated things (hinley-milner, generics, etc.) but I have my doubts that those things cause the most slowdown.