MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bwfan123 | 2025-07-15 15:15:56+00:00
The "framing" is a tactic called "assuming the sale" - where statements are made as-if they are already true and the burden is placed on the other side to negate. Combine that with other tactics like fomo, scarcity, and authority and you will have people practically begging for these tools. As an example..

"Edison of our times Elon Musk (authority) believes that the AI agents are the future (assuming the sale), and most developers are already using it to improve productivity (fomo, social-proof). MCP agents are in short supply due to tariff driven bottlenecks, so buy them while supplies last (scarcity)".

This sort of influencing is accelerated by social-media, and is all around us, and short-circuits critical-thinking in most of us.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-15 15:16:14+00:00
Even in the States, there were computer swap meets in my town, and VCDs were everywhere in the 90s at them. I remember the first time I saw one, and asked where the VCR was, but realized it looked different than a VHS would look. I had no idea at the time, but I would later go to work for a company that started with making interactive CDs, VCDS, and eventually DVDs. Not sure the bootleg market had anything to do with it, but I was at least knowledgeable about the format when asked in job interview. So evidence of one, bootlegging isn't all bad!
by sensanaty | 2025-07-15 15:16:21+00:00
So has mine, and quite predictably our product has gone into the shitter and breaks constantly, requiring reverts almost daily. They've armed a couple of Juniors with Cursor and given them the workload of all those people they fired / have quit since the firings, some of which have been at the company for years and held a lot of institutional knowledge that is now biting them in the ass.

Now sure, "Just don't fire the useful people and get rid of the juniors and supercharge the good devs with AI tooling" or whatever, except the whole reason the C-level is obsessed with this AI shit is because they're sold on the idea of replacing their most expensive asset, devs, because they've been told by people who sell AI as a job that it can replace those pesky expensive devs and be replaced by any random person in the company prompting up a storm and vibecoding it all.

Churn rates are up, we're burning unfathomable amounts of money on the shitty AI tooling and the project has somehow regressed after we've finally managed to get a good foothold on it and start making real progress for once. Oh and the real funny part is they're starting to backpedal a bit and have tried to get some people back in.

I expect to hear a LOT more of this type of thing happening in the near future. As the idiots in charge start slowly realizing all the marketing sold to them on LinkedIn or wherever the fuck it is they get these moronic ideas from are literal, actual literal lies.
Ask HN: What's Your Useful Local LLM Stack?
by Olshansky | 2025-07-15 15:17:16+00:00
What I’m asking HN:

What does your actually useful local LLM stack look like?

I’m looking for something that provides you with real value — not just a sexy demo.

---

After a recent internet outage, I realized I need a local LLM setup as a backup — not just for experimentation and fun.

My daily (remote) LLM stack:

- Claude Max ($100/mo): My go-to for pair programming. Heavy user of both the Claude web and desktop clients. - Windsurf Pro ($15/mo): Love the multi-line autocomplete and how it uses clipboard/context awareness. - ChatGPT Plus ($20/mo): My rubber duck, editor, and ideation partner. I use it for everything except code.

Here’s what I’ve cobbled together for my local stack so far:

Tools

- Ollama: for running models locally - Aider: Claude-code-style CLI interface - VSCode w/ continue.dev extension: local chat & autocomplete

Models

- Chat: llama3.1:latest - Autocomplete: Qwen2.5 Coder 1.5B - Coding/Editing: deepseek-coder-v2:16b

Things I’m not worried about:

- CPU/Memory (running on an M1 MacBook) - Cost (within reason) - Data privacy / being trained on (not trying to start a philosophical debate here)

I am worried about:

- Actual usefulness (i.e. “vibes”) - Ease of use (tools that fit with my muscle memory) - Correctness (not benchmarks) - Latency & speed

Right now: I’ve got it working. I could make a slick demo. But it’s not actually useful yet.

---

Who I am

- CTO of a small startup (5 amazing engineers) - 20 years of coding (since I was 13) - Ex-big tech
by waldopat | 2025-07-15 15:17:19+00:00
Totally agree. It's easier and easier to build a product and harder and hard to market/sell your product.

Here’s what I’ve seen help in getting those crucial first 10 customers:

Be brutally specific about who you're helping: Which ones, where, with what exact pain, and why now. This is your ICP.

Write your Dream 10 list (real names, real companies). These are your early believers. Go deep into their problems and show up where they already are.

Your unfair advantage right now is your founder network, your story and your industry experience. This is where the “why you” matters most. And honestly, every B2B founder needs to be able to pull in 10 clients from their own network off the bat.

Early traction comes from being focused, obsessed and specific. You need to be honest with yourself and get those first three things down before you build or go make lists with Apollo.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-07-15 15:17:22+00:00
> To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not welcome here, they are not like us. It's not like we have anything against them, we just don't want them ramming it down our throats"

It could just as easily be "I don't feel like there is a place here for me anymore and I wish I had another place to go"
by 6510 | 2025-07-15 15:17:22+00:00
Install firefox

then install violentmonkey

then install https://salamisushi.go-here.nl

browse around as usual and it will collect all discoverable feeds.

then export the feeds as opml

then install a robust RSS aggregator

then load the opml into the aggregator

then sort the news items by pubDate

then remove the obnoxious subscriptions

this is the way
by xerox13ster | 2025-07-15 15:17:25+00:00
That's been Vivaldi. Brave is the browser that just markets itself. If it "just worked" it wouldn't need crypto bs to lock you in and convince you it's "working".

I've been getting all my ads blocked just fine with Vivaldi without inflating a shitcoin since before Brave had gourd smeared on its forehead.
by pxc | 2025-07-15 15:17:27+00:00
This is neat, but with the given filters you autoselected (just the phrases "llm" and "ai"), of the 14 stories I see when I visit the page, 4 of them (more than 25%!) are still stories about AI. (At least one of them can't be identified by this kind of filtering because it doesn't use any AI-related words in its headline, arguably maybe two.)
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-15 15:17:38+00:00
If you are competing with other hardware sellers in the same software ecosystem, then you are competing for buyers that have a diversity not only of means, but of value weighting for different features; having different SKUs with different feature mixes at similar price points is how you compete in that market.

Having simple tiers rahter than multiple offerings with different focuses at similar price points and also a diversity of price points works really well if you aren't competing that way, but not everyone can be Apple.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-07-15 15:17:51+00:00
Yes, and we're losing. Why do you think the internet is covered in ads, 25% Cloudflare, infested with CAPTCHAs and IP blocking, and the problem gets worse every year?

There are real problems that haven't been fixed; the driver's license concept correctly implemented might be better than continuing down this path. I view it as we can make a good standard; or let a bad standard be dictated.
by arp242 | 2025-07-15 15:17:52+00:00
Yes, especially as prime minister or president, you need to be the face of the country. For everyone: not just your party. And while listening to the public is an important part of the job, sometimes you also need to explain things to the public. Same with ministers, to a slightly lesser degree.

I feel one downside of a district-based system like in the US is that it's harder to build up a healthy mix of representatives, where some are more on the charismatic side and others more on the technical "policy wonk" side. Everyone needs to win their own elections, so it's biased too much towards the charismatic side.
by zzbzq | 2025-07-15 15:18:26+00:00
First guy says something about philosophy.

Second guy says he's had a bad philosophy class, implying it's a bad, naive, amateur, or uninformed take on the philosophical subject at hand.

First guy says he's had many, implying he's actually studied philosophy extensively, perhaps majored in it in college or obtained a degree, refuting the idea that the original take was amateur or uninformed.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-07-15 15:18:41+00:00
It feels like some people have devalued their human experience so much that they're itching to burn off the rest of it for the hope of a technological nirvana occasionally punctuated by mundane human needs.

AI/the Internet will never fill the void, and they know it, but like an addict they demand more in the hopes that it will. The AI girlfriend won't be enough, they'll be told to wait for AI girlfriend 2.0 to _really_ experience love. Being played for a fool long enough makes anyone jaded and cynical.
by jsnell | 2025-07-15 15:18:57+00:00
OpenAI has half a billion active users.

You don't need every individual request to be profitable, just the aggregate. If you're doing a Google search for, like, the std::vector API reference you won't see ads. And that's probably true for something like 90% of the searches. Those searches have no commercial value, and serving results is just a cost of doing business.

By serving those unmonetizable queries the search engine is making a bet that when you need to buy a new washing machine, need a personal injury lawyer, or are researching that holiday trip to Istanbul, you'll also do those highly commercial and monetizable searches with the same search engine.

Chatbots should have exactly the same dynamics as search engines.
by Arnt | 2025-07-15 15:19:14+00:00
Oh, this looks worrying, and perhaps wrong.

Key paragraph: «It argued that AI systems do not "understand" what they process in the same way humans do. "As philosopher Luciano Floridi puts it, AI acts without understanding – it follows statistical patterns rather than engaging with meaning. This difference matters legally," it said.»

That analysis distinguishes between human-like understanding and other unanticipated use. As I read it, it says that using something for human-like understanding is fair use, and that other use is only fair if in a class that's anticipated by law. Search engines weren't anticipated by law, the software used by plagiarism hunters weren't anticipated, and both of those involve internal copying in much the same way as AI training.

Here's a search engine I like: https://books.google.com/ngrams/
by dinfinity | 2025-07-15 15:20:23+00:00
> This is post hoc ergo propter hoc. AI exists thus it must have been inevitable.

The problem with that statement is that it doesn't say anything about why AI will take over pretty much everything.

The actual answer to that is that AI is not limited by a biological substrate and can thus:

1. Harness (close to) the speed of light for internal signals; Biology is limited to about 200m/s, 6 orders of magnitude less. AI has no such limitations.

2. Scale very easily. Human brains are limited in how big they can get due to silly things such as the width of the birth canal and being on top of a (bipedal) body that uses organic mass to inefficiently generate power. Scaling a human brain beyond its current size and the ~20 watts it draws is an incredibly hard engineering challenge. For AI scaling is trivial by comparison.

I'm not saying it's going to be LLMs, but longterm we can say that the intelligent entities that will surpass us will not have the same biological and physical limitations as we do. That means they very, very probably have to be 'artificial' and thus, that AI taking over everything is 'inevitable'.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-15 15:20:58+00:00
At the VHS dub house I worked, each of the recorders would be taken down once a month to have all of the rollers, head drum, and other parts of the tape path that made contact with the tape cleaned by hand by the engineering department. In the head end where the masters were played, we'd do the same thing on the master playback equipment at the beginning of each shift and possibly more frequently if the masters were of less quality or really old. The 1" machines were easy to clean, but the cassette formats were more difficult in having to pull the units out of the racks, remove the cover, blah blah.

At least this is my recollection. <shivers/> the really bad ol' days
by phillipseamore | 2025-07-15 15:21:05+00:00
Why are you editorializing the title to call out Hetzner? Digital Ocean is higher, Azure just a bit lower. I think it's a bit more interesting that the top 10 are less that 25% combined, even with DO, Hetzner, Azure, OVH, GCP, Tencent and Alibaba in the mix.
by yencabulator | 2025-07-15 15:21:07+00:00
The first example[1] has a classic look-before-you-leap stupidity. That's not a great look!

match File.exists(f) { ... match File.stat(f) {

The file can be removed after the first call, before the second. Just call stat and handle ENOENT correctly.

[1]: The page seems to randomize which one is shown. I got the "File information" one in the dropdown.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-07-15 15:21:11+00:00
Some of the influencers are so annoying in pushing stuff that doesn't work that it seems appropriate to not try stuff just to spite them, but the problem with LLM is that things that didn't work last year have started working and this keeps repeating. In many cases they aren't really wrong, they are just early (although maybe it's the stock picking hindsight bias as to whether they are good prognosticators or not).
by cypherg | 2025-07-15 15:21:17+00:00
Once again, they’re severely discounting socialization over the internet. Twitch, discord, et al account for massive amounts of socialization. For many kids it’s easier to chat or stream than it is to find the other 2-3 weird kids into their particular hobby. Watch the TV documentary “Social Studies” if you think Gen Z isn’t partying. “Euphoria” is definitely an exaggeration but it’s relatable to Gen Z for a reason. Anecdotally, I see Genz all the time at raves and concerts. These aren’t “animal house” style events but still.
by graerg | 2025-07-15 15:21:35+00:00
One very simple use case is making repetitive edits to a YAML (or similar) file. Sure, I can record a vim macro and/or try and conjure up some way to get it done with as few keystrokes as possible and hope I don’t fat finger anything along the way. Or I can just pipe it to llm and say [make this edit], and it just works.
by AlexandrB | 2025-07-15 15:21:46+00:00
Part of it is overexposure. The same thing happened to snappy "Joss Whedon" dialogue. This stuff worked really well in Buffy and Firefly, but Whedon was good at writing dialogue like this and he knew when not to use it. We've now had 15+ years of various writers at Disney doing crappy Whedon impersonations and this style of dialogue has worn out its welcome for many.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-07-15 15:21:54+00:00
Not the OP, but I'm sick to death of hearing about AI

The hype around it is ridiculous. I don't personally find it nearly as useful as people are saying, so everything feels like people are trying to gaslight me

Don't get me wrong, it's cool tech. Amazing stuff. I just personally don't have much interest in it until it's much more reliable for the things I want to use it for

And I'm really exhausted, tired of hearing about how this is going to replace people like me any minute now
by 827a | 2025-07-15 15:22:00+00:00
For sure; similarly, when someone showed me Prettier many years ago, I immediately understood its value. This will save significant time every year I previously spent manually formatting my code and having arguments with other engineers about tabs versus spaces.

AI bros will probably feel I'm being sarcastic and facetious; but I'm genuinely not. LLMs are an awesome tool to have in the toolbelt. I use them every day. The question is simply on the scope of their capability.

Is this the future of how all code is written? Or is it just the future of how mostly-mechanical refactors happen? Can these systems take extremely abstract prompts and deliver adequate results? Or do they need to be communicated with in a way that so-closely-resembles computer code that one might as well just write the code themselves?
by grumpyinfosec | 2025-07-15 15:22:32+00:00
realistically blocking low cost personal VPNs / proxies is pretty easy. Any new servers they stand up are gonna get picked up by commercial threat intel services with an hour and then just blocked. Especially if the CDNs are working with the government.

You could roll your own but wireguard/openvpn going to random hosting provider is gonna achieve the same thing if they are playing hardball.
by freedomben | 2025-07-15 15:22:35+00:00
I think that's exactly it. I find it grotesque and terrible.

But that said, he is operating the way he said he would, and the way he has been doing things in the business world his entire life. He is a negotiator and deal maker, and those deals get made by the personal connections. While I personally see corruption and ass kissing all over the place, I think a trump defender could argue that he is running the country more like a business, which is exactly what they wanted. As someone who has worked with government on policy development, there is something appealing about being able to have a conversation and change somebody's mind with new information. Unfortunately, I don't think he is getting good information, rather he is getting filtered information from people with a vested interest in getting him to go a particular direction. And of course, he has a vested interest because those people can also kick a lot of money in donations back to him
by empath75 | 2025-07-15 15:22:50+00:00
What makes draws interesting or not depends on two things, what is happening on the field (were there good chances? A lot of goals? Interesting strategic play?), and also the context of the game. Does the outcome matter for your team, or not?

Some of the best games I've ever watched ended in draws, but that point mattered for whether my team was going to take over first place or not, or whether they made it out of the group stage or not.

The really boring draws are when one team is basically just playing very defensively and also the game doesn't matter to either team.
by pera | 2025-07-15 15:22:51+00:00
> Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

- Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook (1931)

There is a reason we don't use natural language for mathematics anymore: It's overly verbose and extremely imprecise.
by lacksconfidence | 2025-07-15 15:22:57+00:00
The desire is relateively simply explained. Some people used to find HN interesting, but the modern set of things being upvoted isn't matching their interests anymore. They already ignore the content they don't like, the problem is the content they do like isn't there anymore. The assumption, I expect, is that if there was less LLM content the site would have more of the "older style" content they used to enjoy. I don't necessarily think that will happen, but that's my interpretation of the sentiment.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-15 15:23:02+00:00
Depends, we only had the local library, some books we could acquire and computer magazines listings as source of knowledge.

I certainly did not felt that great manually translating Z80 opcodes into DATA entries, to be loaded via RANDOMISE USR instructions.

Got a bit better with hexdump editors, but good luck tracking down checksum errors.

Finally, debugging meant manually simulating the execution on paper, with arrows and boxes, to try to get a feeling of what could be root cause for the error.

Yeah, what a time.
by nathan_compton | 2025-07-15 15:23:39+00:00
I know all that stuff, I was just caricaturing the person's response because I felt it was a bit glib.

I definitely do not believe we have free will in the most traditional sense, but I am a sort of compatibilist: its clear we cannot make a different choice in identical circumstances for meaningful reasons, but identical circumstances never occur anyway. A person's psychology is a sort of accumulation of all their experiences into biases for future behavior and our "will" is really just a manifestation of those experiences. But to whatever extent we can curate those experiences to produce a long term psychology that we like, I think we should do it.
by api | 2025-07-15 15:23:57+00:00
My take since day one:

(1) Model capabilities will plateau as training data is exhausted. Some additional gains will be possible by better training, better architectures, more compute, longer context windows or "infinite" context architectures, etc., but there are limits here.

(2) Training on synthetic data beyond a very limited amount will result in overfitting because there is no new information. To some extent you could train models on each other, but that's just an indirect way to consolidate models. Beyond consolidation you'll plateau.

(3) There will be no "takeoff" scenario -- this is sci-fi (in the pejorative sense) because you can't exceed available information. There is no magic way that a brain in a vat can innovate beyond available training data. This includes for humans -- a brain in a vat would quickly go mad and then spiral into a coma-like state. The idea of AI running away is the information-theoretic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine and is impossible. Yudkowski and the rest of the people afraid of this are crackpots, and so are the hype-mongers betting on it.

So I agree that LLMs are real and useful, but the hype and bubble are starting to plateau. The bubble is predicated on the idea that you can just keep going forever.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-15 15:24:07+00:00
Here in Hungary all major cities have that, in fact, I lived in a very small village with like 100 people, and even that had a damn "container" or whatever and a bench inside, to protect against the rain and to be able to sit down. It has been modernized further by now (yes, for these ~100 people), but what they did then was extremely cheap yet effective, so there is no excuse for lack of benches and shelters at bus stops, really.

And you can down-vote me for me not liking Tokio for the fact that their bus stops have no benches, but that is a must-have for someone like me who has disabilities, and many cities in Hungary (and even small towns) have benches and whatever you could call it (container shelter of some sort) to protect against the rain, so don't tell me Hungary is better in this regard than Tokio, or is it? This is surprising to me. Maybe Tokio does not have enough elderly people or people with disabilities?

In any case, if shitty villages with a population of 100-500 have benches and a shelter at bus stops in Hungary, surely Tokio could do it too, I wonder why they are not doing it.

If you want I could probably find it on Google Maps FWIW. I hope the pictures are old (pre-modernization).

Do not mistake my comment for hatred of Tokio, however. It is just a place that I simply cannot visit for such reasons. There is nothing more to it.