MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kassner | 2025-07-31 12:13:59+00:00
My most successful side project to date is one that has “always-free, no-ads” as a motto, so it will always be a money sink.

Sometimes I spend a week refactoring core stuff, sometimes it stays forgotten for months on end. I still come back to it when I want to test some ideas, mostly because it has a decent chunk of data to feel I’m “solving problems at scale”.
Show HN: Xpack – open-source platform to host and monetize MCP-style APIs/tools
by FreyLoong | 2025-07-31 12:14:20+00:00
Hi HN,

MCP-style APIs — small, composable APIs, tools, or AI functions — are becoming increasingly common. But handling auth, usage tracking, and billing for each one can be tedious and repetitive.

Xpack is an open-source, self-hosted platform that helps you quickly launch, share, and monetize your own MCP services. It’s like a self-hosted version of RapidAPI, but focused on giving developers full control.

Key features:

Built-in email/Google login and auth

Stripe billing with per-call pricing

One-click OpenAPI → MCP conversion

Basic usage tracking and observability hooks

Auto-generated, SEO-friendly landing pages for your services

Whether you’re working with internal APIs, AI agents, or dev tools you want to expose externally, Xpack makes it fast and flexible.

Still in early development — feedback, feature suggestions, and use cases are all welcome!

GitHub repo: https://github.com/xpack-ai/XPack-MCP-Market
by latexr | 2025-07-31 12:14:48+00:00
Or maybe they would’ve made a bunch of business decisions which would have tanked the business. Or maybe they would’ve made it even more profitable than it is now. No one knows.

But it is futile to fantasise about what would’ve been. Assuming the reported numbers are accurate without caveats, they made more money than they would ever need for a lifetime. 650M is functionally indistinguishable from infinite money if you’re not a greedy asshole. “More infinity” doesn’t make a difference, unless you’re Henry Sugar and are planning to do some real altruistic good. But that’s never what the writers of these pieces have in mind, they are always about personal wealth.

I feel like I’ve read this exact article many times over the years, and I do not get the point of it. “Someone sold their company and the new owners made money off of it over time.” Yeah, that’s the point. No one’s confused about the point of the transaction.
by mlukaszek | 2025-07-31 12:15:11+00:00
I may be too picky, and on reflection I probably shouldn't be - it was just my first thought when I saw what the project actually is for the first time.

What I meant is the "Py" prefix is typically used for Python APIs/libraries, or Python bindings to libraries in other languages. Sometimes as a prefix for dev tool names like PyInstaller or PyEnv. It's just less often used for standalone apps, only to indicate the project was developed in Python.
by minaguib | 2025-07-31 12:15:32+00:00
Agreed with you. I've always told people all code "rusts" (not a language reference) - in multiple ways: the original author's mental model, the contributors, institutional knowledge, and the supporting ecosystem and dependencies. All code atrophies towards being legacy and debt. The more the worse. AI Vibe coding simply creates much more of it, much faster.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-31 12:15:43+00:00
I actually disagree.

Federal employees have more strict stock regulations and yet we still see problems with private influence on the government.

The issue is our bribery laws are ridiculously weak. It's not illegal for your pals at Nestle to pay you 10x for your house or send your kids to college.

Stock is fairly public knowledge and you owning shares in Nestle doesn't do nearly as much to influence the laws you write regulating Nestle. You can always dump the stock before sending the laws out of committee.

The one positive of banning congressional stock trading is that at least it might make congressional people more sensitive to the broad market.
by seanwilson | 2025-07-31 12:16:40+00:00
Hmm, feels more related to how big the imported assets and final exports are, and how fast + accurate previews are, rather than who does the export? If I'm dealing with GB size videos and image files, local is going to have performance and storage cost advantages so that's why local makes more sense for e.g. movie editors and high-end photoshop work? A lot of terminal based development work could be done via a web app without a problem for example with the big plus of sidestepping complex local dev setup but it becomes less attractive when real-time graphics are involved.

Figma files are relatively light so previews and exports are fast - you can't even import images that are more than a few MB.
Ask HN: Can internal AI-built tools become products for other companies?
by TheBoomerDev | 2025-07-31 12:18:24+00:00
One of the things we startups have is that we are agile when it comes to working, and having a small team helps make the organization more effective.

Also, thanks to AI tools like Lovable, Bolt, v0Dev, etc., if we need an internal tool that doesn’t require much complexity, we can develop it in just a few hours.

But of course, sometimes you wonder if those tools could actually become a product that more companies might need.

What do you think?
by derdi | 2025-07-31 12:18:59+00:00
Yes, there is a prelude that defines natural numbers and an addition function on them. As the post notes, the reflexivity tactic "unfolds" the addition, meaning that it applies the addition function to the constants it is given, to arrive at a constant. This is not specific to addition, it unfolds other function definitions too. So addition doesn't have to come first, you are right that reflexivity is more fundamental.
by benreesman | 2025-07-31 12:19:27+00:00
I'm already doing almost all my LLM-assisted programming in Haskell, all the devops in check-heavy Nix, and starting to move everything into Dhall.

There's no way that Python written by LLMs will survive contact with Haskell written by LLMs in a standup competition.

One imagines the scope for this sort of thing goes very high in formality.
by lioeters | 2025-07-31 12:20:01+00:00
I only have my own life experience to reflect on, and while it does seem like society was freer in my youth (pre-9/11 U.S.), I was also a freer and wilder person back then. I see how the younger generations live, and how society has changed - and I get the feeling personal freedom and even cultural values are getting lost. But maybe it's just me, I'm getting older and don't have the youthful need to push the limits and experience that wild freedom so much anymore. Even if I had the drive, I think society is no longer as tolerant of the particular kind of wildness that I enjoyed as a youth.

It's not easy to separate personal experience from observations of social changes. I bet there is some truth in the author's feeling of that pre-collapse Soviet society, there was something special there that only existed at that time.
by delusional | 2025-07-31 12:20:09+00:00
> Close first customers at $99/month

> The foundation is bulletproof. Time to execute the 24-hour revenue sprint.

Comedy gold. This is one of those times where i cant figure out if the author is in on the joke, or if they're actually so deluded that they think this doesn't make them look idiotic. If it's the latter, we need to bring bullying back.

Either way it's hilarious.
by bodhi_mind | 2025-07-31 12:20:23+00:00
I’m senior developer on a feature bloated civil engineering web app that has 2 back end servers (one just proxies to the other) and has 8k lines of stored procedures as the data layer and many multi k line react components that intentionally break react best practices.

I loathe working on it but don’t have the time to refactor legacy code.

———————-

I have another project that I am principal engineer and it uses Django, nextjs, docker compose for dev and ansible to deploy and it’s a dream to build in and push features to prod. Maybe I’m more invested so it’s more interesting to me but also not waiting 10 seconds to register and hot reload a react change is much more enjoyable.
by sexy_seedbox | 2025-07-31 12:21:06+00:00
I deal with Microsoft Teams' embarrassing bugs on a weekly basis. Just yesterday discovered a bug with cropped / chopped off sentences on mobile version. But that's just one piece of M$ software.

I also have to deal with ScarePoint, MS Defender quarantining obviously safe messages, Outlook syncing problems, Windows 11 Account issues, many more...
by Vinnl | 2025-07-31 12:21:22+00:00
I couldn't resist and just spent my limited attention on the article, and you're good. It's just some guy saying: "if you want to get promoted, put in the hours, but it will come at the cost of your kid feeling they need to book a meeting with you to get your attention".

Just spend time with your kids, and block time on the calendar if it helps you do that. Then you kid won't feel the need to do that themselves.
by al_borland | 2025-07-31 12:21:39+00:00
Where did I say I was absolved of responsibility to do my best? In real life, I’d told fewer than 6 people about the diagnosis. I haven’t told my bosses and have no plans to. I’m not looking to game the system to lower the bar for myself. I was simply looking to understand myself better. I even said it was probably good I didn’t know when I was younger, as it forced me to not use it as an excuse.

I ran into situations countless times where I have things that had a big negative experience on my life and when talking to others, people just looked at me weird; they couldn’t relate. My sister was the only one who ever got it (her doctor has suggested she get tested, but she hasn’t done it yet). When I stumbled across people talking about their experiences with AuDHD, for the first time in 40 years I heard other people saying the same stuff I was trying to say, when others just looked at my like a weirdo. It’s not about looking for what to blame, it was about finding out I wasn’t the only one dealing with some of this stuff, which is how it felt for the vast majority of my life.
by roenxi | 2025-07-31 12:23:13+00:00
Pay peanuts, get monkeys. And if US politicians are expected to be free of corruption and draw an average salary nobody would even be willing to do it. Statistically the US president is one of the most dangerous jobs around [0] and all the politicians are subject to tides of abuse whether they seem to be doing a principled job or not.

The US would be far better off figuring out how to make its politicians do a good job before worrying about how outrageously they are compensated. Even the current fog of corruption they manage isn't as big a deal as the policies they push through as part of their routine above-the-counter activities. It's a sausage factory, the process of making the sausage isn't going to be pretty.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden... alone and you just need to look at Obama before and after to see what the stress does.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-07-31 12:23:22+00:00
The string of departures and how people communicated around them let me think it’s something a lot less nefarious: Mozilla looked like an extremely political company at the time.

Servo was extremely good at communication with their very frequent news letter and Rust had a lot of wind in its sails, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ruffled the wrong feathers. Mozilla is very much still managed by what remains of its old guards - by that I mean what hasn’t been poached - especially at the top.

That would be pure incompetence from the top management but not malice.
by A1kmm | 2025-07-31 12:23:55+00:00
> but not actually write it down or link the two identities digitally

What is to stop you just selling the ID card with zero consequences? Unless it has a photo on it of course, in which case that itself is an identifier you can't easily rotate.

Better is to use zero-knowledge cryptography to prove that you have a real ID's private key in your possession. Leaking the private key would be the same as giving away your real identity. Now you could make a proxy service that generates the proofs for money without it being traced back to you - but maybe a countermeasure to limit but not eradicate abuse would be for the protocol to include a proof you haven't used the same real identity to prove your age on that service in at least x days (that does mean you could be tracked for x days until you prove your age under another pseudonym).
by vidarh | 2025-07-31 12:24:22+00:00
I feel the same way, but there were definitely a period when my son was younger when the two felt in conflict, and my drive is absolutely different now.

I felt an urgency when I was younger that isn't there any more (while ironically being acutely aware I have less time).

I don't know if that is age, or that I feel more content with family life and so feel less need to chase other things, but it's a distinct difference.
by xtiansimon | 2025-07-31 12:24:26+00:00
I put these into my yard a few weeks ago using 1G containers from the $1 store and a similar mosquito water treatment (dunks were sold out).

I’m not sure how to judge their effectiveness. I’m still bit. Is it down some significant percentage? I have no idea. I’m going to continue until I run out of the product. Jury is still out.
by TheDong | 2025-07-31 12:24:37+00:00
You're using Go's race detector wrong if you expect it to actually catch all races. It doesn't, it can't, it's a best effort thing.

The right way to use the go race detector is:

1. Only turn it on in testing. It's too slow to run in prod to be worth it, so only in testing. If your testing does not cover a use-case, tough luck, you won't catch the race until it breaks prod.

2. Have a nightly job that runs unit and integ tests, built with -race, and without caching, and if any races show up there, save the trace and hunt for them. It only works probabilistically for almost all significant real-world code, so you have to keep running it periodically.

3. Accept that you'll have, for any decently sized go project, a chunk of mysterious data-races. The upstream go project has em, most of google's go code has em, you will to. Run your code under a process manager to restart it when it crashes. If your code runs on user's devices, gaslight your users into thinking their ram or processor might be faulty so you don't have to debug races.

4. Rewrite your code in rust, and get something better than the go race detector every time you compile.

The most important of those is 3. If you don't do anything else, do 3 (i.e. run your go code under systemd or k8s with 'restart=always').
by pembrook | 2025-07-31 12:25:21+00:00
Outsourcing more and more of our parenting responsibilities to politicians...what could possibly go wrong?

But hey, I guess the elites in developed countries always know what's best for the children. What would we, the stupid unwashed masses do without them!

I would think the Australian government should instead focus on fixing its batshit insane housing policy and leave the Big Brother stuff to each individual family. But I'm weird I guess.
by jraph | 2025-07-31 12:25:37+00:00
Among the fatal flaws I see, some are ethical / philosophical regardless how the thing actually perform. I care a lot about this. It's actually my main motivation for not even trying. I don't want to use a tool that has "blood" on it, and I don't need experience in using the tool to assess this (I don't need to kill someone to assess that it's bad to kill someone).

On the technical part I do believe LLMs are fundamentally limited in their design and are going to plateau, but this we shall see. I can imagine they can already be useful is certain cases despite their limitations. I'm willing to accept that my lack of experience doesn't make my opinion so relevant here.

> My suggestion is to be an objective scientist

Sure, but I also want to be a reasonable Earth citizen.

> -- use the best model released (regardless of origins) with minor research into 'best practices' to see what is possible

Yeah… but no, I won't. I don't think it will have much practical impact. I don't feel like I need this anecdotal experience, I'd not use it either way. Reading studies will be incredibly more relevant anyway.

> and then ask yourself if the 'origins' issue were addressed by a responsible open-source player in 6-12 months, whether it would change anything about your views on the likely impact of this technology

I doubt so, but open to changing my mind on this.

> and your willingness to adopt it.

Yeah, if the thing is actually responsible (I very much doubt it is possible), then indeed, I won't limit myself. I'd try it and might use it for some stuff. Note: I'll still avoid any dependency on any cloud for programming - this is not debatable - and in 6-12 months, I won't have the hardware to run a model like this locally unless something incredible happens (including not having to depend on proprietary nvidia drivers).

What's more, an objective scientist doesn't use anecdotal datapoints like their own personal experience, they run well-designed studies. I will not conduct such studies. I'll read them.

> I think that it also seems like we disagree on the foundations/premise of the technology.

Yeah, we have widely different perspectives on this stuff. It's an enriching discussion. I believe we start having said all that could be said.

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy/-/blob/...
by t0lo | 2025-07-31 12:25:56+00:00
It has some signal value, but it's also a part of creating a culture where social media isn't mandatory in the greater society and the workforce- which has a lot of benefits- and not exposing the next generation to the crushing double demoralisation of AI/Machine learning and social media hyperconnectivity which no generation has had before and could ruin them imo.

I do believe in this so ask whatever tricky questions you want.
by throwaway150 | 2025-07-31 12:25:57+00:00
Just so that the discussion does not become overly biased in one direction, I'd like to share that I'm over 40 and still feel highly motivated to pursue intellectual interests, and take on hobby projects. The hours I can put in is definitely far less than I could when I was single and young but the motivation is still there and I still manage to complete a few hobby projects (software ones and otherwise) each year.
by 9rx | 2025-07-31 12:26:01+00:00
> What about...

That is all much the same as the prices being set in Chicago: Someone else has made the decision. While someone else no doubt feels the "ick", I am but the customer who is being taken advantage of. (Well, except in the case of Monsanto — they closed up shop years ago)

> Your average local job (waiter...

It seems you, deep down, even understand that. Comparing farming to being a waiter as opposed to the restaurant owner, I feel, is a pretty good portrayal of the difference and it is telling that you chose that point of comparison. Technically farming is like owning the restaurant, but in practice, because everything is laid out for you and decisions are made elsewhere, it feels more like being the waiter. You are layers removed from the "ick".
by aidenn0 | 2025-07-31 12:26:01+00:00
Before your edit, I was going to object to your premise because it seems like a format could get worse just by more implementations being made.

After your edit, I see that it's rather that syntax-typed formats are prone to this form of implementation divergence.

I don't think this is limited to syntax-typed formats though. For example, TNetstrings[1] have type tags, but "#" is an integer. The specification requires that integers fit into 63 bits (since the reference encoder will refuse to encode a python long), but implementations in C tend to allow 64 bits and in other languages allow bignums. It does explicitly allow "nan", "inf", and "-inf" FWIW.

1: https://tnetstrings.info/
by sim7c00 | 2025-07-31 12:26:04+00:00
a user of the AI is the user... its not like they are autonomously operating and inventing their own tasking -_-

as for a solution its the same for any automated thing u dont want. (bots / scrapers). you can implement some measures but are unlikely to 'defeat' the problem entirely.

as a server operator you can try to distinguish stuff and the users will just find ways around your detection of if its an automation or not.
by YmiYugy | 2025-07-31 12:26:29+00:00
I just don't get the point of ladybird. They have full time engineers and are soliciting donations, so it's clearly more than a hobby project. Maybe my assumptions are off, but I just can't imagine they could ever become competitive in terms of features, security and performance with the big engines. Blink is setting the pace, Webkit is barely able to keep up and Gecko is slowly falling behind. All of these teams are orders of magnitudes larger than the Ladybird team. If you think that Blinks dominance is a thread to the web it's not enough to have an alternative engine you need enough adoption of that engine so web devs make sure their site is compatible with that engine. Most of this also applies to Servo, but at least their technical project goals (embeddable, modular, parallel, memory safe) sound at least moderately compelling. Maybe Ladybird has similar goals, but at least their website doesn't really state any technical goals.
by specproc | 2025-07-31 12:26:39+00:00
Wow, just did this myself. The difference between Firefox and Chromium was depressing.

I'm getting >100 FPS almost consistently all the way up to 1,000 in Chromium, FF barely made it above 500 before dropping below 60.

Probably not a completely fair test, I've no extensions etc. on Chromium and only use it for the odd stubborn website, but that was quite a lesson in their comparative performance.
by kassner | 2025-07-31 12:27:35+00:00
That’s called product-market fit (PMF), and once any product reaches that stage (in other words: it’s proven that people will spend money in such solution), it’s a race to the bottom in terms of costs/building it cheap.

Unless your market is location-dependent, most of the time the incumbents have waaay more experience, so the only advantage you can bring to the market is a lower price, as the first expansion any incumbent will do is to higher the price band with better quality offerings.

Think about stuff like an Air Fryer. Convection ovens had been in the market for several decades. Someone (Philips? I’m not sure they were the first) proved there is a market for a smaller counter-top convection oven and all of the sudden there are Air Fryers from literally any supermarket brand out there.
by tdhz77 | 2025-07-31 12:28:09+00:00
Banning stocks will not do anything. Most congressman lose money when they sell. There is an incorrect notion passed by there loud people on twitter that congress people got rich while in congress. Oh contrare, they were already rich. They had be to run for office.

Ban money in politics. Overturn citizen v united.

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2012/06/a-radical-fix-for-th...
by throw0101c | 2025-07-31 12:28:11+00:00
> I remember when OpenStack was a big thing, what happened to them? They were everywhere- free swag at events.

Still releasing software twice a year:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack

Available as open source so you can self-deploy, or go with a vendor if you want some hand-holding / support:

* https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/distros/

Perhaps they were "everywhere" when they were newer and needed to get their name out there, but nowadays they're more established and so will come up in search and such as an option for those that want to run cloud (either for their internal needs, or as the basis of a public product offering).