MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-07-30 14:09:46+00:00
This isn't measuring the same thing, and recent results are so extreme that they call into question whether the results would map to the real-world implementation Anthropic tried. Is it really the case that Grok 4 can manage a vending machine many times more profitably than a human, or is it exploiting some property of the simulated environment?
by zamalek | 2025-07-30 14:09:55+00:00
I recently went and killed off ~10 domains :). Current project: something like eww[1], only using lua and a UI idea that I think may actually be ergonomic in Rust (immediate/imgui style and actors). Maybe I'll finish it this time.

One the other hand, I have a great idea for CI and it's an itch I am currently suffering...

[1]: https://github.com/elkowar/eww
by cess11 | 2025-07-30 14:09:55+00:00
What do you mean by "literal invasion"? It seems to imply that Israel would have been attacked without provocation.

In 1948 the zionist paramilitaries had been at war with the indigenous population for quite some time, neighbouring states offering the palestinians military support once the british ended the mandate wasn't exactly out of the blue.

The 1956 Suez crisis was an attack by Israel and some of its allies.

The 1967 Six-Day-war was an attack by Israel.

The 1973 Yom Kippur war was an attempt to retake syrian and egyptian territory, and 'invading' occupied territory in an attempt to retake it is hardly a "literal invasion" of Israel, right?

In 1982 Israel attacked Lebanon and invaded its southern parts.

Quite consistently Israel has been the aggressor and very explicitly expansionist at the expense of its neighbours.
by maerF0x0 | 2025-07-30 14:10:11+00:00
I will admit I'm mostly ignorant on these subjects, but just using rational/logic

> If any task an organism must perform is better done during the day, then evolution has a very clear gradient towards only doing that thing during the day.

But wouldn't remaining conscious and aware be the optimal state? So you don't get eaten by predators or attacked by other humans etc? It seems to me your sentence points to an ultra low energy but conscious state, not one in which you're very vulnerable...

But maybe the vulnerability is just too little, maybe cooperative tribal/family type arrangements covered this sufficiently to not be selected?
by julius | 2025-07-30 14:10:13+00:00
Lots of people who have relatively stable currencies (EUR, USD..) do not want to use bitcoin. What if bitcoin price goes down? How many extra steps is it to convert my USD to bitcoin and then back to USD? Do I only convert the 19.99 USD for my current purchase into bitcoin or do I put in more?

Do you solve these issues for customers? Or are you only targeting people who already are happy bitcoin wallet users? Are stablecoins part of your strategy?

Given how Visa,Mastercard,Paypal are seen as bad actors. Do you think you can capitalize on that, possibly partnering with Valve or something of that sort?
by AlexanderAylen | 2025-07-30 14:10:45+00:00
If you have ever tried using CNN's Fear and Greed Index data you know it's not easily available, so I built a scraper for it.

The results of the back test might surprise some people. Turns out, at least for SPY, there is no advantage over DCA if you try to actively invest based on the Fear and Greed index.
by ArnoVW | 2025-07-30 14:10:53+00:00
One exception, for sales. I don't see how they could have done it differently.

We have a "one rate per level" rule. The rates are published, and so are the definitions of the levels, and everyone's level (i.e. indirectly you can know everyone's salary)

Worked great, untill we started to look for sales. Doesn't work. They only know incentive-based schemes.

So now they have an incentive-based scheme just for the sales, which is (essentially) budgetted from their stock-option package (that everyone gets). I.e. they benefit from growth a little bit earlier and directer.

If we hadn't done that, we wouldn't have a sales department.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-07-30 14:11:32+00:00
I mean crypto itself is only as anonymous as your most public link to your wallet too, which is one of the reasons I dislike it despite seeing the appeal of the idea. People like to compare it to cash, but the fact is every hundred dollar bill in circulation doesn't have a list of people's unique if anonymized handles who's touched it since it was printed. And that gets doubly problematic if you use... really any of the wallet managers out there, who now know every wallet address associated with not only your personal info, but likely bank info.
Show HN: Open-source alternative to ChatGPT Agents for browsing
by ElasticBottle | 2025-07-30 14:11:36+00:00
Hey HN,

We are Winston, Edward, and James, and we built Meka Agent, an open-source framework that lets vision-based LLMs execute tasks directly on a computer, just like a person would.

Backstory:

In the last few months, we've been building computer-use agents that have been used by various teams for QA testing, but realized that the underlying browsing frameworks aren't quite good enough yet.

As such, we've been working on a browsing agent.

We achieved 72.7% on WebArena compared to the previous state of the art set by OpenAI's new ChatGPT agent at 65.4%. You can read more about it here: https://github.com/trymeka/webarena_evals.

Today, we are open sourcing Meka, our state of the art agent, to allow anyone to build their own powerful, vision-based agents from scratch. We provide the groundwork for the hard parts, so you don't have to:

* True vision-based control: Meka doesn't just read HTML. It looks at the screen, identifies interactive elements, and decides where to click, type, and scroll.

* Full computer access: It's not sandboxed in a browser. Meka operates with OS-level controls, allowing it to handle system dialogues, file uploads, and other interactions that browser-only automation tools can't.

* Extensible by design: We've made it easy to plug in your own LLMs and computer providers.

* State-of-the-art performance: 72.7% on WebArena

Our goal is to enable developers to create repeatable, robust tasks on any computer just by prompting an agent, without worrying about the implementation details.

We’d love to get your feedback on how this tool could fit into your automation workflows. Try it out and let us know what you think.

You can find the repo on GitHub and get started quickly with our hosted platform, https://app.withmeka.com/.

Thanks, Winston, Edward, and James
by sim7c00 | 2025-07-30 14:12:10+00:00
definitely interesting points for C structs. regarding CPU it might be interesting to look a little further still regarding optimal sizes for structs regarding cachcing, figuring out hot and cold areas and either including padding or putting cold values behind pointer to a substruct.

like the examples though, very clear what the changes are and the specific impact. always a good reminder to review for these things after a session hacking in new things!
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-30 14:12:22+00:00
Why use this word, "un-live" multiple times? How does one confront or at all protest grotesque things if they can't so much as mention them without absurd, childish euphemisms? Kill, it's about killing, or maybe more accurately: exterminating, butchering, slaughtering, murdering. There, better to properly, crudely name things that are by nature crude and barbaric.
by gruez | 2025-07-30 14:12:24+00:00
>Sometimes I think the only real difference is it’s easier to sell stuff to upper management than it is to a congresscritter. Easier for one person to waste a lot of money than it is for a committee to do it.

How does this square with congressional pork like the SLS[1], or buying tanks that the army doesn't want[2]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Criticism

[2] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/12/18/congress-agai...
by kragen | 2025-07-30 14:12:24+00:00
I think there's an enormous amount that can still be discovered, including new paradigms. I don't agree with Ken Thompson's opinion that people studying informatics today are unlucky because the most interesting stuff is already done.

But I don't think it's especially controversial to claim that Galileo and Newton had more of an impact on physics than Maxwell and Einstein or than anyone since. You could maybe quibble about Gauss and Lagrange, but Kip Thorne and Ed Witten are much more similar to Galileo than Galileo was to Descartes or Aristotle.

You might be able to cause an Einstein-like revolution in informatics—LLMs in particular seem like they have a good chance of doing that. But the field those new paradigms revolutionize will probably be recognizably the field that was largely defined by papers published in CACM in the 60s and 70s.

Also, although this isn't relevant to my thesis that probably nobody will publish such an impactful paper again, the ACM is especially unlikely to. "Attention is All You Need" https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/3... got published in NIPS 2017 rather than CACM or even an ACM conference. You could imagine a timeline where CACM was the Cell or Lancet of informatics and published papers like AiAYN instead of "The Transformative Power of Inspiration". But that's not the one we're in.
by ralferoo | 2025-07-30 14:12:35+00:00
I did that years ago when I bought a Redmi Note 4 in Shenzhen and discovered that the Chinese ROM is very locked down. I created the Mi post, but I don't remember having to make a forum post (although it does ring a slight bell). AFAIK it was just sending a DM to support on the forum / app to explain why you needed to install the Global ROM rather than the Chinese ROM (and being a foreigner was accepted as a valid reason). About a day later they unlocked the phone bootloader remotely, and then I could install any version of the Global ROM I wanted.

I've bought all my subsequent ones (Note 5, Note 8, Note 11, Note 12Pro) in either HK or UK so they all came with the Global ROM, and I've not felt the need to unlock any of them, so not tried to process since. But it definitely used to be pretty easy.

I suspect the reason for the weird process is legal to ensure that phones in China don't get unlocked in order to circumvent content controls.
by dcminter | 2025-07-30 14:12:48+00:00
I think the downvoting on you is a little harsh. TFA does allude to it, but doesn't explicitly answer your question. I presume the implicit answer is here:

> With growing customer enthusiasm, we were increasingly getting questions about what it would look like to buy a large number of Oxide racks. Could we manufacture them? Could we support them? Could we make them easy to operate together?

i.e. they need the capital in order to be able to satisfy large orders on sane timeframes - but that's very expensive when you're a hardware business.
by ben7799 | 2025-07-30 14:12:51+00:00
I raced in the early 2000s. Power meters were expensive, but Pros had them.

The only thing back then is they sometimes didn't use them on race day for fear they were too heavy.

Bikes are actually much heavier today than they were back then. Almost all bikes were near the weight limit back then, I just read an article where they weighed riders bikes at the TdF this year and some bikes were over 18lbs.

Disc brakes + Aero + Electronic components have really made the bikes heavier and have made it much more expensive to get a bike at the same weight as 10-15 years ago. You're either spending about the same money and getting a bike that is 1.5kg heavier or you're spending 2-2.5x more money to get a bike as light as what you would have bought in 2010-2015.
by JohnFen | 2025-07-30 14:12:52+00:00
> People who aren't into tech thinks Instagram is listening to them 24*7 to show feed and ads

True, but that's a world different than thinking that your data will be used to train genAI.

> In fact posting anything in HN is a sure shot way to giving your content for AI training.

Indeed so, but HN seems to be a bad habit I just can't kick. However, my comments here are the entirety of what I put up on the open web and I intentionally keep them relatively shallow. I no longer do long-form blogging or make any of my code available on the open web.

However, you're right. Leaving HN is something that I need to do.
by K0balt | 2025-07-30 14:13:00+00:00
I’d love to see a PowerPoint presentation that has a million man-hours of work in it. Oh, never mind, I probably have.

But seriously, this comment can easily be true, and if it is , then it is an excellent example of a human endeavour that we invented to improve efficiency but has become a bottomless sink of talent, effort, and cost directed away from generating any value whatsoever.

I have never seen a presentation that couldn’t have been done just as well without the use of a computer., except to demonstrate things that are computer related.

Presentations are a great example of an activity that has become an end unto itself that delivers no value, and only serves as a kind of internal preening behaviour, signalling a persons value to the organisation without actually delivering any.
by kzrdude | 2025-07-30 14:13:22+00:00
I think you are right to have doubts. Europe was sincere when it said Russia must not be allowed to unilaterally invade and occupy other countries. Because that is the starting point to what you said, the unilateral murder or expulsion of whole peoples and nations.

If we look backwards in time, we come from a very violent history, but politics and technology has continuously reshaped how it happens. For example wars post industrialism were much more murderous than ever before.

The long arch view(?) seems to be that the post-WWII era has ended and something new is coming around the corner. It looks like an era of bigger empires but without the single superpower.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-07-30 14:13:34+00:00
> I buy a domain name → I code for 3 all-nighters → I lose interest → I start again.

At least you're actually doing the "I code for 3 all-nighters" step!

I've stopped too many projects at the "I buy a domain name" stage, and added an intermediate "I create a Trello board" step between that and starting to write code. No need to pull all-nighters, which are hard to do with family and a full-time job, if all I need to do is add a card to a feature wishlist. Maybe prototype a few key functions to see how they work, wireframe a unique piece of UI, or follow the tutorial to create "hello world" in a new framework, but it turns out that those steps are also optional.

The problem seems to be that my brain gives me a dopamine buzz for merely _imagining_ accomplishing the project, whether or not I eventually implement, publish, and get users for the it. I can give myself a similar cognitive reward for simply reading on HN about other people completing projects, and even (at my lowest) passively watching YouTube videos of other people building cool stuff. It's all the mental rewards of participating in a group project where the tribe accomplished something great, except I'm barely in a parasocial relationship with a dude on Patreon or Discord a thousand miles away who actually performed 100% of the work. Maybe he likes my comment "Nice work! I really liked how you did [thing], have you considered [alternative strategy]?". Maybe he even comments back. Bang! Neurotransmitter pump engaged, dopamine boost received.

It's a scary thing to realize that you're doing this, and very, very hard to train yourself out of those bad habits. I find it's important to write down and consciously review my daily/weekly/monthly/yearly goals, my productive and unproductive activity towards those goals, and my actual accomplishments. It's too easy to get addicted to fake reward loops, whether because they're engineered by social media companies who make money off my attention span or because brains are just vulnerable to low-effort high-reward stimuli. What did I do in July? X hours of Reddit, Y hours of HN, Z hours of Youtube... and a half dozen things I'm actually proud of.

(Note to self: Don't get too excited about upvotes or replies to this comment, acquiring HN or Reddit fake Internet points are not part of my actual goals and should not be considered real accomplishments.)
by jalapenos | 2025-07-30 14:13:54+00:00
Fine, let me spell it out

Drugs have existed since the dawn of time. They are one among many dangers, specifically: vices, that is the responsibility of parents to guide their children away from as they develop. Along with don't touch strange dogs, look both ways before crossing the street, don't watch YouTube Shorts.

The question is, who is responsible for defending against a danger.

The state is not a magical thing. People pretend like it is, because they buy its self-serving stories, and because most people will go their whole lives without ever needing the police to do anything for them - and learning how impotent they are.

The state is just a collection of average, mediocre actually, individuals, who like power. They are human, nothing special, and they make no resources of their own - they get them only by taking other people's resources by force.

Who is better placed to stop a child pickling their brain with YouTube Shorts? Is it: (a) Their parents, located in the same house, who can install software to block that crap, turn off the WiFi after a certain time, etc. Or is it (b), some politicians who don't even know the kid, with no actual responsibility for them and their life outcomes, thousands of miles away, concerned only with their own egos, making some law (that others equally far away need to enforce).

The problem is that the attitude that others are responsible for taking care of one's kids, an extension of not wanting to accept that responsibility oneself, is so profoundly immoral, vile, and damaging to them, that it makes all claimed (false) benefits look like spending a hundred dollars to buy a dollar.

The state is the least well placed to defend children from predators (and in extreme cases, see what the Khmer rouge did to children), and parents are the most well placed - and responsible, and anything that runs contrary to this is in furtherance of child abuse, even if it's called the "No Child Abuse Act".
by pseudocomposer | 2025-07-30 14:14:07+00:00
How can you have a good faith argument if you create strawman arguments instead of acknowledging the point the person was making?

Everyone in the US and Europe has been indoctrinated to support Israel for most of their lives. That’s those who support Israel and those who don’t.

If you went to literally any school, or watched any television, in the US or Europe any time in the last 7 decades, every lesson taught, every broadcast made, that could have involved Israel was pro-Israel and pro-Zionism.

Not a single program or teacher has been able to share the viewpoint that religious ethnostates should not exist, or that the native Palestinian people didn’t deserve to be genocided to make room for one. If you expressed such a view, you’d be prevented from teaching or broadcasting. For decades.
by dagmx | 2025-07-30 14:14:08+00:00
You don’t need to shoot RAW to have neutral images. In Camera JPEGS are still defaulted on most cameras to be as neutral as possible unless you opt for a different picture style.

This is the opposite default to phones where the defaults are to be punchier, but where you can still select a neutral profile.

The argument is basically comparing defaults and claiming it’s endemic to the format.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-30 14:14:15+00:00
I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy here of people seeing greed only in those with more income than them but never in themselves when they accept those generous big-tech, big-finance, big-ad-tech, big-4, big-pharma compensation packages from the evil robber barons they claim to hate. If you hate them so much why are you taking their blood money?

Also, there is no class solidarity the way you imagine it in your fantasy, because to the average person on the street putting the fries in the bag ac McD, or stacking shelves at Walmart, or tearing down the roads with a jackhammer in the summer heat, the big-tech worker is closer to the robber baron Zuckerberg, than they are to them. So when you get laid off from your big-tech job, they won't have solidarity for you, they might even break a smile, as those spoiled pampered tech worker are brought down from their Kombucha sipping ivory towers.

Class solidarity, as seen applied in Europe, means bringing the income of tech workers in line with unskilled labor till everyone is equally lower-middle class, not touching the super wealthy robber barons to contribute more to society, because no society does that, that's just fantasy. Look at the owner of IKEA's complex tax avoidance scheme: https://www.greens-efa.eu/legacy/fileadmin/dam/Documents/Stu... Do you think he has any class solidarity? He has more in common with Musk, Zuckerberg or XiJinping than with his average Swedish countrymen.

The more class solidarity you wish and vote for, the higher the tax burdens will be on skilled and ambitious middle class workers and small businesses, not on Zuckerberg or the elites with inherited wealth. So be careful what you wish for. My country already went through communism once and everyone had enough of "class solidarity" for the next lifetime, but there's always some westerners out there who cling on that "this time it will be different". Sure buddy.
by traspler | 2025-07-30 14:14:16+00:00
I just got the iPhone 14 Pro version of it two days ago.

I like the texture very much and all-in-all it seems like a great case. The textured buttons and the wide island are very nice touches :)

The way I hold the phone in my right hand does make the connector-corner dig into my palm, which is not very comfortable. I'll see how well I can adapt.

Also the top piece has veeery slight warping which makes some seams not as seamless but does not impact functionality. I know it's a hand-made product so that's fine to me, just a reality check on what to expect.

The clasp of the top piece also seems a bit flimsy and even with the adjustments mentioned in the video I worry if it will break at some point.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-30 14:14:26+00:00
> Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant?

I thought I saw this question answered in a previous thread and the answer was basically “no”, but the question has been avoided a lot.

Aspects of equity compensation would inherently need to be different over time due to valuation, fundraising stage, and so on. However I always thought it was strange that they made a big deal about paying everyone the same base salary but then were silent on the equity comp strategy. Everyone knows that in a job like this the total comp is important.

The old Oxide compensation discussions were interesting. There was discussion about how they thought candidates asking about compensation to be something of a negative signal because they wanted people who weren’t in it for the money, basically. I heard this from a now ex-employee of Oxide who was describing how to navigate their hiring process, so take with a grain of salt.

EDIT: I checked their website again. The compensation link goes to a blog post ( https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-... ) which has this section about equity:

> Some will say that we should be talking about equity, not cash compensation. While it’s true that startup equity is important, it’s also true that startup equity doesn’t pay the orthodontist’s bill or get the basement repainted. We believe that every employee should have equity to give them a stake in the company’s future (and that an outsized return for investors should also be an outsized return for employees), but we also believe that the presence of equity can’t be used as an excuse for unsustainably low cash compensation. As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.

Which doesn't answer the question.