MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stephenlf | 2025-07-20 14:38:18+00:00
> Hype is about excitement; it’s about the tantalising possibility that if you jump on board at just the right time, you’ll become part of something unprecedented and maybe end up rich and famous along the way. In the late 90s and early 2000s, a lot of people did exactly that – and, yes, many of them used Java along the way, and a fair few of those got rich and famous by getting in right at the beginning, and getting out before anybody realised their idea was never going to work

Did you just look three years into the future and write about the GenAI hype?
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-20 14:38:22+00:00
Also why does everything need to come with a snide remark?

We buy plant-based meats because we grew up with meat, love the taste, and like to recreate our favorite dishes of the past.

Everyone loves to use the phrase virtue signaling but seems blind to when they do it, like how they would never do such a lazy thing like buy a plant-based meat; they're just too much of a culinary epicurean who crafts artisanal experiences in their home kitchen.

Yet I'm virtue signaling when I want to eat a burger every couple weeks unless I support the beef industry when I do it.
by actinium226 | 2025-07-20 14:39:26+00:00
Very nice article. The point about mathematical reliability is interesting. I generally agree with it, but humans aren't 100% reliable, or even 99% reliable, so how do we manage to create things like the Linux kernel or the Mars landers without AI? Clearly we have some sort of goal-based self-correction mechanism. I wonder if there's research into AI on that thread?
by vidarh | 2025-07-20 14:40:03+00:00
The first modern copyright law dates to 1709, and was most certainly not a "take on property rights". Neither were pre-Statute of Anne monopoly grants.

I can find nothing to suggest a "religious and natural rights" motivation, nor any language about "intellect and hedonism".

Statute of Anne - which specifically gives a utilitarian reason 150 years before your "mid-1800s" estimate also predates socialism by a similar amount of time, and dates to a time were there certainly wasn't any major atheist influence either, so this is utterly ahistorical nonsense.
by temp0826 | 2025-07-20 14:40:06+00:00
This reminded me of the South American "dynamite tree" (Hura crepitans, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hura_crepitans ), which wikipedia says launches seeds from its exploding fruits at 160 mph, up to 100 ft away! A pretty menacing tree actually, its trunk covered in huge thorns and it has a poisonous sap.
by swiftcoder | 2025-07-20 14:40:49+00:00
> Lighter doesn't mean worse quality

For a number of product categories it means replacing solid metal parts with inferior materials, and that pretty explicitly does mean worse quality.

Have you used a 1960s KitchenAid mixer? They look almost identical to models that followed - but in the 1970s KitchenAid replaced the metal drive gear with one made of nylon on the consumer-focussed models, and now if you use one heavily, you'll have to replace that gear more or less annually.
by WillAdams | 2025-07-20 14:41:15+00:00
Impressive that they note:

https://docs.xmlui.com/

>This site is an XMLUI™ app.

but like pretty much every such system, it is assumed that one knows react and so forth, and how to manage a deployment --- if they really want to be compared to VisualBasic, what is the equivalent to:

- buy VB - install VB - launch VB - develop app - test/compile - distribute .exe

Probably I'm not the target audience, but if they had a "Minimal Working Example" of not just how to code, but also how to deploy an app (can it be run locally, say if I wanted something to keep track of my 3D printers and CNC machines?).
by monocasa | 2025-07-20 14:41:17+00:00
> This is the same logic by which communists called socialists who believed in democracy "fascists". It's just an attempt to excommunicate people from the church if their interpretation is different from yours.

I mean, China is second only to to the US in minting new billionaires. Sure, gatekeeping and no true Scotsman are real things, but at the end of the day so are definitions. I don't see any definition of communism that allows for the private acquisition of billions of dollars of private capital.
by chistev | 2025-07-20 14:41:31+00:00
The problem for most SAAS is marketing. How are you going to market this product, and wouldn't the marketing fail the same way your other SAAS failed that nobody seemingly wanted?

So it seems that for this product you're targeting two markets - early-stage founders and a pool of early adopters (who trust this process) at the same time. One without the other = death spiral.

Are you just going to rely on email sign ups? It might show weak intent. Requiring credit cards even if you don't charge or social proof tied to identity like LinkedIn might be more effective

Why use this over just building a landing page and buying FB or Reddit or Twitter ads? People do this to measure interest before building. What’s your clear wedge?

If an idea gets popular on your platform, it will attract attention which is good for validation, but bad for protecting first-mover advantage if everyone can see it. You can limit this by adding a paywall, but it adds friction for early users.

I'm also building something I don't know if anybody even wants. What was it you built that nobody wanted?
by trentnix | 2025-07-20 14:41:34+00:00
Creativity and competence have become a commodity in the eyes of the modern management. Employees are headcount and customers are blood bags to bleed until there’s nothing left. Each and every one is an economic unit to mobilize and squeeze.

And when creativity and competence are commodities, companies expect they can replace creativity and competence with another SaaS platform or another vendor who'll do the dirty work. Companies don’t dare hire new graduates and train them. They don't try to educate them on how to build and maintain things while preserving the fresh thinking that comes with youth and inexperience. Those days are gone because the MBA wizards have decided long term investment, investment into an industry or one's community, is bad business.

The pied pipers of modern business thinking openly encourage “minimum viable” as the secret to success. “Minimum viable” is only a a fly’s eyelash from “not viable”. That results in “nearly not viable” schlock filling the shelves anywhere things are sold.

Modern business philosophy is literally that, for years, we’ve made things too good. That thinking infects every level of business, from development to manufacturing to service and support. Companies instruct their teams and vendors to fly as close to the sun as possible. They use words like “agile” and “lean” and “efficient”, when in most cases they are just using those words to wallpaper over shoddy work.

And because the way we used to do things is always wrong, companies hire one “consultant” after another poisoning the well with this garbage. The need for “consultant” help never ends, as the real money in consulting is in prolonging problems.

When all of that outsourcing, outsourcing of thinking and outsourcing of actual production, doesn’t adequately insulate the decision makers from accountability, companies embrace “big data” and decision committees and auditors and anything else that shields the org chart from real scrutiny. Companies refuse to trust anyone who actually has their ear to the ground in favor of some artificial signal discerned from the mountain of white noise collected from inconsistent and uneven sources. Nobody trusts the prophet in their own hometown, but the prophet from the next town is an oracle.

All of that, coupled with a consumer market that is neither educated nor savvy enough to discern quality and unwilling to pay for what quality actually costs, results in the sorry state we are experiencing. This can't sustain.
by dakiol | 2025-07-20 14:42:05+00:00
Ah, well that's nice. But every single post I read don't mention them? So, I assume they are not popular for some reason. Again, my main point here is: the normalization of using private LLMs. I don't see anyone talking about it; we are all just handing over a huge part of what it means to build software to a couple of enterprises whose goal is, of course, to maximize profit. So, yeah, perhaps I'm overthinking I don't know; I just don't like that now these companies are so ingrained in the act of building software (just like AWS is so ingrained in the act of running software)
by rozenmd | 2025-07-20 14:42:24+00:00
You don't, you find a US company with a local entity that hires you on a local contract in that country. That way you're compliant with taxes, and the company is compliant with employment law in your country.

The alternative to that is starting a sole-trader company in the country you're in, and contracting directly with the US company through it (or a remote-employees-as-a-service company that basically does this on the company's behalf for a fat fee).
by _fat_santa | 2025-07-20 14:43:19+00:00
I'm not personally a vegetarian though I cook for vegetarians quite often and my reason for not using it more philosophical: if you're going to cook vegetarian, stop looking at what you can't use and start looking at what you can use.

Like for example the other day I made a vegan version of my pasta and meat sauce recipe but instead of trying to use a meat alternative like beyond meat, I reached for some mushrooms and end up having my guests ask if I accidentally made the dish with ground beef because the texture and consistency was so similar.

It's not that beyond meat is bad but why reach for something that's had god knows what done to it versus: mushrooms, where the only "processing" is ripping them out of the ground and washing them.
by conartist6 | 2025-07-20 14:43:44+00:00
I don't see those things as being in conflict. I can be a product of all the people I've ever spoken to or read the writing of, yet have my own beliefs and seek out a course of thought and action that is individual.

There are no great AI artists (artists who are AIs) or great AI artworks. Yet there are still loads of people throughout history whose individualism led them to ideas and accomplishments that we celebrate. People have the ability to think critically which allows us to create new understanding from existing knowledge, even and especially when there are flaws or contradictions in that knowledge (which if you look closely enough there almost always are).
by eashish93 | 2025-07-20 14:44:37+00:00
Hi HN, This is my third iteration of something I plan to build for the long term. This version introduces a chat-based interface to create forms, quizzes, and calculators. You can not only generate them but also modify them easily.

Most AI form builders allow you to generate a form just once. With this, you can edit existing forms, add logic, ask for ideas, and more.

Roadmap:

Upload PDFs or images and generate forms from them

Support for Typeform-style form generation UI

Convert Excel spreadsheets into form calculators
by ivape | 2025-07-20 14:45:24+00:00
If an agent takes a Topic A and goes down a rabbit hole all the way to Topic Z, you'll see that it won't be able to incorporate or backtrack back to Topic A without losing a lot of detail from the trek down to Topic Z. It's a serious limitation right now from the application development side of things, but I'm just reiterating what the article pointed out, which is that you need to work with fewer step workflows that isn't as ambitious as covering all things from A-Z.
by simianparrot | 2025-07-20 14:45:26+00:00
That’s why there’s now a broader quality spectrum of plane tickets.

I travel seldomly, but when I do I tend to buy business class, because I value the comfort of the journey more than the frequency of journeys. But most other people, including you, have other priorities. Which is why at least in this example I think it’s a market working well based on supply and demand.
by airstrike | 2025-07-20 14:45:30+00:00
I think all conversations about coding with LLMs, vibe coding, etc. need to note the domain and choice of programming language.

IMHO those two variables are 10x (maybe 100x) more explanatory than any vibe coding setup one can concoct.

Anyone who is befuddled by how the other person {loves, hates} using LLMs to code should ask what kind of problem they are working on and then try to tackle the same problem with AI to get a better sense for their perspective.

Until then, every one of these threads will have dozens of messages saying variations of "you're just not using it right" and "I tried and it sucks", which at this point are just noise, not signal.
by bavell | 2025-07-20 14:45:36+00:00
IIUC, CoT is "incorporated" into training by just providing better quality training data which steers the model towards "thinking" more deeply in its responses. But at the end of the day, it's still just regular pre training.

RAG - Retrieval augmented generation - how can the retrieval be done during training? RAG will always remain external to the model. The whole point is that you can augment the model by injecting relevant context into the prompt at inference time, bringing your own proprietary/domain-specific data.
by dspillett | 2025-07-20 14:45:46+00:00
I do both. It requires two backup locations, but I want that anyway. My backup sources push to an intermediate location and the primary backups pull from there. The intermediate location is smaller so can hold less, but does still keep snapshots.

This means that neither my backup sources nor the main backup sinks need to authenticate with each other, in fact I make sure that they can't, they can only authenticate with the intermediate and it can't authenticate with them⁰. If any one or two of the three parts is compromised there is a chance that the third will be safe. Backing up the credentials for all this is handled separately to make sure I'm not storing the keys to the entire kingdom on any internet connectable hosts. The few bits of data that I have that are truly massively important are backed up with extra measures (including an actual offline backup) on top.

With this separation, verifying backups requires extra steps too. The main backups occasionally verify checksums of the data that hold, and send a copy of the hashes for the latest backup back to the intermediate host(s) where that can read back to compare to hashes generated¹ at the sources² in order to detect certain families of corruption issues.

--------

[0] I think of the arrangement as a soft-offline backup, because like an offline backup nothing on the sources can (directly) corrupt the backup snapshots at the other end.

[1] These are generated at backup time, to reduce false alerts from files modified soon after they are read for sending to the backups.

[2] The hashes are sent to the intermediate, so the comparison could be done there and in fact I should probably do that as it'll make sending alerts when something seems wrong more reliable, but that isn't how I initially set things up and I've not done any major renovations in ages.
by freedomben | 2025-07-20 14:48:09+00:00
This is going to depend on what you're doing with it. I use Claude code for some stuff multiple times a day, and it is an unusual for a session to cost me $0.05. Even the most expensive thing I did ended up costing like $6, and that was a big and intensive workflow.

The size of the code base you are working in also matters. On an old, large code base, the cost does go up, though still not real high. On a new or relatively small code base, it is not unusual for my requests to cost a tenth of a cent. For what I am doing, paying with an API key is much cheaper than a subscription would be
by vintermann | 2025-07-20 14:48:18+00:00
Pigstep is OK, because the music disks were a bit oddball anyway, but I really don't like the non-c418 in game music. They feel out of place.

It also an issue that the reason c418 didn't get to keep doing the Minecraft music, was that he refused to do it on "work for hire, sign over all the rights" terms.
by an0malous | 2025-07-20 14:48:57+00:00
> Clearly we have some sort of goal-based self-correction mechanism.

Humans can try things, learn, and iterate. LLMs still can't really do the second thing, you can feed back an error message into the prompt but the learning isn't being added to its weights so its knowledge doesn't compound with experience like it does for us.

I think there are still a few theoretical breakthroughs needed for LLMs to achieve AGI and one of them is "active learning" like this.
by kazinator | 2025-07-20 14:49:57+00:00
I suspect there is no such fussing about "back of white key widths" in actual piano design.

What's actually going on, when you look at any piano keyboard, is that the groups of black keys are given a substantially wider spread: they are not exactly centered on the dividing lines between the white keys.

What most likely matters to playability is the width of the black keys and this spread amount.

Now if you cover the front of the keys (e.g. put your fallboard felt over it) you can visualize the back of all the keys as a kind of barcode: alternating black and white strips, sometimes with two adjacent white strips. It so happens that these semitone strips do look about equal width, thanks to the sizing of the black keys and their spread. It might not be exact though.

A good starting configuration might be to start with a keyboard in which all the semitones are strips of equal width. Then we identify the C major keys, and paint them white, making the others black. Next, we shorten the black keys, and adjust the frontage of the white keys to be of equal width. Say, by keeping the division between every B and C exactly where it is and interpolating the others divisions. You will find that the E-F division does not fall exactly halfway between the surrounding black keys, Eb and F#. (That's what's observed on real piano keyboards!)
by airstrike | 2025-07-20 14:50:04+00:00
> It's essentially impossible to write a Rust program without relying on many of its escape hatches like RefCell and unsafe, that make the borrow checker go away.

I get this may be hyperbole but it's also just factually incorrect. Not only that, why is this even a goal? RefCell isn't a wart. It is part of Rust and meant to be used where it makes sense.
by danielvaughn | 2025-07-20 14:50:17+00:00
Crazy, I just spent the past month designing an XML syntax for defining components. Weird coincidence.

One issue I see in their choices is the HStack approach. What’s great about flexbox in CSS is that the flex direction can change dynamically. Admittedly I haven’t read the full docs for XMLUI, but binding the direction to the markup likely means you can’t do that.
by logsr | 2025-07-20 14:50:27+00:00
posting a plain text description of your experience on a personal blog isn't exactly screaming. in the noise of the modern internet this would be read by nobody if it wasn't coming from one of the most well known open source software creators of all time.

people who believe in open source don't believe that knowledge should be secret. i have released a lot of open source myself, but i wouldn't consider myself a "true believer." even so, i strongly believe that all information about AI must be as open as possible, and i devote a fair amount of time to reverse engineering various proprietary AI implementations so that i can publish the details of how they work.

why? a couple of reasons:

1) software development is my profession, and i am not going to let anybody steal it from me, so preventing any entity from establishing a monopoly on IP in the space is important to me personally.

2) AI has some very serious geopolitical implications. this technology is more dangerous than the atomic bomb. allowing any one country to gain a monopoly on this technology would be extremely destabilizing to the existing global order, and must be prevented at all costs.

LLMs are very powerful, they will get more powerful, and we have not even scratched the surface yet in terms of fully utilizing them in applications. staying at the cutting edge of this technology, and making sure that the knowledge remains free, and is shared as widely as possible, is a natural evolution for people who share the open source ethos.
by dakiol | 2025-07-20 14:50:58+00:00
I don't think so. Let's do a silly experiment: antirez, could you ditch Gemini 2.5 PRO and Claude Opus 4, and instead use llama? Like never again go back to Gemini/Claude. I don't think he can (I don't think he would want to). I this is not on antirez, this is on everyone who's paying for LLMs at the moment: they are paying for them because they are so damn good compared to the open source ones... so there's no incentive to switch. But again, that's like the climate change: there's no incentive to pollute less (well, perhaps to save us, but money is more important).
by johnfn | 2025-07-20 14:50:59+00:00
Sure, but even then the perspective makes no sense. The common argument against AI at this point (e.g. OP) is that the only reason people use it is because they are intentionally trying to prop up high valuations - they seem unable to understand that other people have a different experience than they do. You’d think that just because there are some cases where it doesn’t work doesn’t necessarily mean that 100% of it is a sham. At worst it’s just up to individual taste, but that doesn’t mean everyone who doesn’t share your taste is wrong.

Consider cilantro. I’m happy to admit there are people out there who don’t like cilantro. But it’s like the people who don’t like cilantro are inventing increasingly absurd conspiracy theories (“Redis is going to add AI features to get a higher valuation”) to support their viewpoint, rather than the much simpler “some people like a thing I don’t like”.
by sheepscreek | 2025-07-20 14:51:14+00:00
I am super excited about the stuff we cannot see - I have a feeling the quality of engineering here is going to be solid + backed by consideration for the WYSIWYG programmers. Developing in Visual Basic is how programming became accessible for me as a kid.

I could do stuff with ease that had seemed like magic and completely out of reach without C++ and complex pointer gymnastics. So thankful to the movement and I sincerely hope this project can bring that novice-first approach to web programming that does not compromise on responsiveness and smoothness, while making sane compromises, and doesn’t hold you back.

Even more exciting is this - https://docs.xmlui.com/mcp.

It can reduce the amount of code tools like Claude need to generate (fewer tokens need to be generated) for a usable high-functioning UX/dashboard. I am going to start using this today.
by konart | 2025-07-20 14:51:51+00:00
> separation of concerns

but this would be a problem almost anywhere, no?

This has nothing to do with Rust vs Go vs Ruby or something else. Rust makes this even bigger problem, ok, but I don't think we should call people not using Rust (c\c++ etc) "lousy".

PS: tbh this kind of statements usually (from my experience) come from people who mainly write system level software or work with hardware directly.