MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Occamsrazors | 2025-07-20 12:19:24+00:00
I’ve been thinking about this a lot after watching that YC panel on AI and startups. It hit hard because they talked about agency, dropping out early, and building fast in SF. I’m a few weeks from turning 27, and I feel like I’m aging out of even a mildly successful startup.

Quick background: I spent a majority of the last 4 years at a Tier 2 consulting firm, then joined a FAANG in supply chain (not tech). I turned down a role at a local digital bank that just raised Series D, but it would have been similar consulting work. I’ve tried starting up before, but traction in my home market (South Africa) is painfully slow without dumping cash into it. It seems like anyone from here who makes it big was already rich. Not complaining, just observing. Plus, local laws make it tough to start in certain industries, we have laws that require specific partners for licenses and due to how I look I can’t get them on my own(not trying to be political, just a fact about barriers), and bodies like the Association of South African Payment Providers create an oligopoly that blocks new entrants on top of heavy regs.

That being said I should just move to the US, but I can’t move to the US anytime soon because ZA is now pretty hostile to the US for no reason. Recently chat with an VC on who is very active on X (connect through my old firm) and she confirmed: if I’m not in SF, her interest is zero. A partner at my old firm said the same: just move to SF (not possible legally for me).

Honestly, should I just give up and settle into corporate life? Is it really over for someone like me? Am I overreacting to the hype of AI (I feel like I missed the .com, mobile, and Crypto eras and this is the final frontier)? Also realistically, what advice do you have for bootstrapping in a tough market like this?
by markx2 | 2025-07-20 12:19:29+00:00
January this year a water pipe burst in the kitchen directly over a Belling Range cooker (some 13+ years old). Switched it off at the mains and awaited a visit from an electrician once the place had dried out. The sparky that arrived had worked for Belling, was very familiar with their products. He checked it over, tested, declared it safe. He then added that if something had been wrong I would have been better to get parts replaced rather than a complete new oven - because Belling products these days are much less reliable. I have no data on that, but I can't but believe someone in the industry.
by thehk | 2025-07-20 12:19:34+00:00
Hi y'all,

first time poster, long time reader here! Actually out of motivation to help my sister out with generating a gallery for her photos, I shipped an app not long ago. Haven't really marketed it much yet, but trying to spread the word now haha.

I actually had a lot of fun writing the app. I initially got motivated thinking that using Claude Code I could whip the app out in a weekend (blogged about that, too: https://hannes.kaeufler.net/posts/gallerymagic-20-years-late). That was _somewhat_ true, I got _an_ app done in a weekend, but obviously nothing close to what I have now. Overall by now, Claude Code is only a tiny speck in the contribution graph.

Anyway, the app is written in Swift, SwiftUI (~4k LoC), was using Rust internally at some point (https://hannes.kaeufler.net/posts/shipping-rust-on-macos-app...), and to publish galleries to the web there is an AWS powered infrastructure. I used Pulumi for the first time and reasonably enjoyed it (for infra code that is haha).

As usual, shipping is hard, design is harder, and marketing is hardest. Let me know if you have any questions, happy to chat about it!
by hnfong | 2025-07-20 12:20:27+00:00
This is exactly the kind of cynicism that is borderline offensive. According to your logic, no new technology, however wonderful, could be considered more "incredible" than fire, electricity, farming, etc. because the "higher-tier" tech depends on them. This is akin to saying libc is the bestest software ever created (except the kernel which is even more bestest) because pretty much everything depends on it.

The interpretation I prefer is not to look at the dependency chart and keep dwelling at the basic dependencies, but rather to look at the possibilities opened up by the new tech. I'd rather have people be excited at the possibilities that LLMs potentially open up, than keep dwelling on how wonderful fire and electricity is.

I don't think you even disagree that LLMs are incredible tech and that people should be excited about them. I don't think you spend substantial time every day thinking about how great fire and electricity is. I think you're just somehow frustrated at how people are hyperbolic about them, and conjuring up arguments why they shouldn't be hyped up. When something exciting comes into the fray, understandably people (the general public) have a range of reactions, and if you keep focusing on the ones who are most hyped up about the new stuff and getting triggered by them, you're missing out on the reality that people actually have a wide range of responses and the median/average person aren't really that hyperbolic.
by john_minsk | 2025-07-20 12:20:28+00:00
Valid point, however the promise of AI is that it will be able to manufacture a metaphorical “plane” for each and every prompt user inputs I.e. give 100% overall reliability by using all kinds of techniques (testing, decomposing etc) that intelligence can come up with.

So until these techniques are baked into the model by OpenAI, you have to come up with these ideas yourself.
Show HN: Agency Protocol – Domain-Specific Trust Through Verifiable Promises
by dvdgdn | 2025-07-20 12:20:31+00:00
TLDR: I'm building an infrastructure agnostic trust-building protocol ground in Promise Theory. It formalizes the notion of merit as a domain-specific promise-keeping track record.

Most trust systems collapse nuanced capabilities into oversimplified scores (think Uber ratings or GitHub stars). A surgeon might have excellent bedside manner but declining surgical outcomes, yet both get averaged into a single reputation score. This information loss becomes dangerous as AI systems start making consequential decisions.

Agency Protocol treats trust as domain-specific and economically consequential. Instead of hoping systems behave well, we require explicit, stakeable promises:

- A diagnostic AI promises ">95% accuracy on chest X-rays" and stakes computational credits - A translation service promises "medical document accuracy with <24hr turnaround" - Each promise is independently assessable with verifiable evidence

When promises are broken, stakes get slashed. When they're kept, trust (and economic advantage) compounds.

We're heading toward AI-to-AI coordination at scale—autonomous systems making millions of micro-decisions without human oversight. Traditional reputation systems weren't designed for this speed or specificity. Agency Protocol creates trust as a programmable primitive, like TCP/IP did for data transmission.

The economic mechanism is crucial: it makes reliability profitable and deception expensive, regardless of what the system "wants" to do internally.

See It In Action I've built a working demo at promise-keeping.com, exploring some potential applications in AI, media, etc. The UX translates complex economic incentives into intuitive interactions.

Some open questions:

- How do we prevent gaming when AI systems fully understand the economic incentives? - What happens to privacy when everything becomes assessable? - Can this framework scale to coordinate millions of specialized AI agents?

The theoretical foundations draw from Promise Theory and game theory, but I'm most curious about practical adoption challenges. Would love feedback from anyone building autonomous systems or thinking about trust infrastructure.

Technical whitepaper and implementation details at the demo site.

https://www.promise-keeping.com/
by bsenftner | 2025-07-20 12:21:15+00:00
I think the "MBA-driven physical-goods enshittification" is a simplification and a cop-out because this is not just MBA-driven. This is across the board in all of society, and I believe the reason being that people, in general and enmass, are not being taught how to live with active critical analysis, and as a result when they choose an enshittificating decision, they do not realize it. They are not connecting the ramifications beyond their own mini-benefit. This is with the entire general population.
by Isofarro | 2025-07-20 12:21:34+00:00
> Non domiciled are roughly 0.11% of UK residents and pay about 1.24% of UK taxes

It's curious that the percentages used to defend not taxing the rich (whether they are UK citizens, or operating as "non-doms") tend to be what percentage of the tax burden they pay. But it's never what percentage of their income and capital gains they pay as tax.

I think the latter is a fairer representation, considering we have a progressive taxation system. Someone who is earning over £125k a year should be paying close to 45% of their income and capital gains.

The question is: are they? If not, why not?
by Esophagus4 | 2025-07-20 12:22:05+00:00
Jeez, what a dismissive (and handwaivy) response.

Alcohol is a carcinogen, and even small amounts are linked to increased cancer rates[1][2].

The only thing the WHO, CDC, and US Surgeon General have in common with the “YouTuber med bros click bait hype” you try to wholly discredit is that they probably all do have YouTube channels…

[1]https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/oash-alcohol-cancer-...

[2]https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...
by doom2 | 2025-07-20 12:22:06+00:00
Which makes me wonder: why shouldn't AI use be a core part of technical interviews now? If we're trading "knowledge of how to code" for "knowledge of how to use LLMs" and treating Claude like a much more productive junior engineer, do we still need to filter candidates on their ability to write a doubly linked list? And if we are still asking those sorts of interview questions, why shouldn't candidates be able to use LLMs in the process? After all, like others have said elsewhere in this thread, you still need some core technical capabilities to effectively manage the AI. It's just a tool and we can judge how well someone knows how to use it or not.
by rollcat | 2025-07-20 12:22:06+00:00
Deciding to abandon meat is a lot like quitting cigarettes. Sometimes you need a long time to ease off, some artificial/processed replacement (e.g. nicotine patches), it won't feel the same or "good enough", there's a lot of psychological struggle, even your body just demands its shot. It can take a lot of dedicated effort.

And sometimes it just hits you: this is bad for me, I haven't been wanting it for a good while, and I want it gone now. I've quit meat just like that, almost exactly 15 years ago, never looked back.

I've never liked Beyond or such, it was unlike anything I'd actually want to eat. But we should still empower people who want to quit, but can't do so easily.
by greatgib | 2025-07-20 12:22:23+00:00
All in all, despite the fact that it is not real meat, nothing proves that Beyond Meat production is better for the planet. If you factor production materials, energy,... Not sure what it gives.

From what I understood why BM production was limited and expensive is that nothing beats nature. Cow meat manufacturing process was refined by nature for ten of thousands of years to be the most optimized possible.
by ludicrousdispla | 2025-07-20 12:22:25+00:00
I used to be a loyal buyer of a specific Eddie Bauer T-Shirt over at least a decade, until I bought four of them online a few years ago from their website. Despite my ordering all the same size and style, each shirt is a different length (varying by as much as two inches) and fabric weight. Haven't bought one since and won't do so again.
by kristianc | 2025-07-20 12:22:30+00:00
A huge chunk of online content (especially what ranked on Google )was already SEO churned sludge, and I'm not I buy the argument that elite publishers and creators like the New York Times, The Economist, and The Atlantic have ever really depended on Google. When the Economist sells itself to advertisers it doesn’t talk about its web traffic numbers, it talks about the fact that it's read by CEOs.

You're likely to see content creators pull their work behind access-controlled spaces (which might actually work out better than the current bargain of it being free but unreadable, recipes buried by long winding stories, etc). You might see the weird web emerge again as search engines are able to discover it under a pile of SEO sludge.
by ultramann | 2025-07-20 12:22:37+00:00
I'm aware of go-git [0] which

> aims to be fully compatible with git, all the porcelain operations are implemented to work exactly as git does

written in pure go, therefore with a go native api.

I've never tried to use it, but it does look quite impressive to me.

[0] https://github.com/go-git/go-git
by shakna | 2025-07-20 12:22:38+00:00
> Airplane tickets used to cost a lot more for economy class, even adjusted for inflation and fees. To get the equivalent service and quality today you simply have to pay more, you just have the choice of paying very little for very low quality because there’s more flights and more planes.

I don't think you actually can get the same quality, today. Even if you are paying more. The spacing of seats has changed. [0] You can pay more and get something more than you had by going up classes, but the same experience no longer exists.

[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/life/travel/airline-seats-are-t...
by mettamage | 2025-07-20 12:22:45+00:00
> If they could magically become profitable at 10% profit margin, it would take 20+ years to repay the debt. It's hopeless.

Why is that hopeless? Maybe I'm too green or optimistic but that just requires long-term planning.

Also inflation will make it a bit easier.

One thing I find tough for them personally is that I like the Impossible burger a lot more. I find Beyond meat not tasting like meat, not enough. Since that's the case, I'd rather just have any mushroom/whatever veggie burger. I wonder how other consumers perceive this.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-07-20 12:22:50+00:00
<< I also don’t understand why so many large companies have focused time around it. They are not going to be cracking the code ahead of a commercial tool or open source project.

I think it is a mix of fomo and the 'upside' potential of being able to minimize ( ideally remove ) the expensive "human component". Note, I am merely trying to portray a specific world model.

<< In the time spent toying around with agents there are a lot of interesting applications that could have built, some of which may be technically an agent but without so much focus and effort on trying to solve for all use cases.

Preaching to the choir man. We just got custom AI tool ( which manages to have all my industry specific restrictions rendering it kinda pointless, low context making it annoying, and slower than normal, because it now has to go through several layers of approval including 'bias' ).

At the same time, committee bickers over minute change to a process that has effectively no impact on anything of value.

Bonkers.
by gabrieledarrigo | 2025-07-20 12:23:07+00:00
> A future framed as "inevitable" by a bunch of people whose job/wealth depends on framing it as such. Nah, hard pass.

I agree with you! I'm not saying that I like it; this is the perfect example of turbo capitalism applied to innovation.

I also like to code and to build software, and the joy that comes from the act of creation. Only, I'm quite sure it's not going to last.
by itfossil | 2025-07-20 12:23:29+00:00
Adjusted for inflation? Who cares? People's compensation haven't risen enough to even account for inflation so how is that helpful?

It's not. Saying something isn't expensive because its the same price after adjusting for inflation is a slap to the face of millions, perhaps even billions who are effectively making less now than they were ten or twenty years ago after they adjust for inflation.

That phrase is not the silver bullet you seem to think it is.
by AndrewDavis | 2025-07-20 12:23:54+00:00
I gave up and started buying $4 rshirts. Why? Because each year the clothes I'd buy were were on quality than my previous clothes.

When buying a $4 shirt I know the price:quality ratio, it's cheap:crap. Whereas majority of the time buying more expensive it might be slightly better, but it's still expensive:crap.
by jltsiren | 2025-07-20 12:24:42+00:00
Rust is widely used in bioinformatics, as is C++. Largely because people developing new tools often have to write their own low-level algorithms and data structures.

Many tools deal with sequencing data, which means collections of strings that cannot be parsed or tokenized in any meaningful way. The collections are often very large, and the strings can also be very long. The standard algorithmic toolkit you learn when doing a CS degree (or a PhD in algorithms) is inadequate with such data. Hence, if you go to a CS conference focused on combinatorial algorithms and data structures, the presented work is often motivated by applications in bioinformatics.
by mrweasel | 2025-07-20 12:25:20+00:00
Yes, there is a number of models for quality. If you read: "What Does Product Quality Really Mean?" by David A. Garvin, you'll find that intended purpose is only one of a number of quality metrics you could concern yourself with.

In the less obvious cases quality can be something you can't really explain, but you'll recognize it. There's also the option of viewing it from the manufacturers view, and forgo the user-centric view altogether. In that case we view the quality as "How well do we make the product", according to standard and specifications. So you could have a product that's absolute trash, but it follows specs precisely and you have zero manufacturing defects.
by atoav | 2025-07-20 12:25:44+00:00
If I want travel I'd love a mix of night trains and high speed trains, preferably on entirely separate rails and separate from any freight train and/or regional/light trains.

Arguably we already have it already comparably good in the EU, but, rhe capacity and reliability is nowhere near the levels I'd like to see. Trains need to be the no-brainer-mode of transportation if not only for the reason they are the most energy efficient way of moving people in high numbers for reasonable distances.
Show HN: FlouState – See if you're debugging, creating, or refactoring (free)
by skrid | 2025-07-20 12:25:52+00:00
I built FlouState because "4 hours of coding" tells you nothing. Was it 4 hours debugging or 4 hours building features? Very different.

It's a VS Code extension that automatically categorizes your coding into: Creating (new features), Debugging (fixing issues), Refactoring (improving code), or Exploring (learning codebase).

Example: Yesterday I "coded" 6 hours but it was actually 3.5h debugging a race condition, 1.5h refactoring, 0.5h tests, 0.5h exploring. Traditional time trackers just show "6 hours in TypeScript."

Technical: Tracks file changes, debug sessions, and edit patterns locally. No code content sent. Updates web dashboard every 30 seconds via Supabase.

Free with 7 days history. Considering open sourcing the detection algorithms.

https://floustate.com or search "FlouState" in VS Code marketplace.

Curious what your debugging % is - mine was way higher than expected.
by mritchie712 | 2025-07-20 12:25:57+00:00
> I've built 12+ production AI agent systems across development, DevOps, and data operations

It's hard to make *one* good product (see startup failure rates). You couldn't make 12 (as seemingly a solo dev?) and you're surprised?

we've been working on Definite[0] for 2 years with a small team and it only started getting really good in the past 6 months.

0 - data stack + AI agent: https://www.definite.app/
by fleebee | 2025-07-20 12:26:02+00:00
The graphs don't line up. I'm inclined to believe they were hallucinated by an LLM and the author either didn't check them or didn't care.

Judging by the other comments this is clearly low-effort AI slop.

> LLMs have certainly damaged trust in general internet reading now, that's for sure.

I hate that this is what we have to deal with now.
by ericmay | 2025-07-20 12:26:56+00:00
No - the term Late Stage Capitalism gets thrown around a bunch as a scarecrow for anything seemingly bad going on, but in this case it’s more likely a symptom of lack of education of materials and/or people not caring, and resource depletion/competition due to overpopulation and rise in living standards across the world.

> With clothes / appliances etc we have reduced quality at our expense - while the companies doing it make more money than ever.

Specifically this is an issue of government failure and cultural malaise - food quality anyone? We need to vote better, and vote with our dollar better. Stop buying dumb DJI drones to race around and buy a nice sweater instead.
by GianFabien | 2025-07-20 12:26:57+00:00
Thanks for sharing. Good to read that after trying so many different things you are actually facing the underlying psychological factors. The anxiety over breaking things is common, especially when what you are deploying is critical and the adverse impact of problems could be widespread.

Personally, I prefer to go on long walks and leave the phone at my desk. I can't decompress with a reminder about work in my pocket. Besides it would keep pinging, etc.
by zozbot234 | 2025-07-20 12:27:12+00:00
For the record, I completely agree that using GC is appropriate for problems that deal with possibly-cyclic general graphs, and maybe even wrt. DAG structures whenever one wishes to maximize throughput and the use of simpler refcounting would involve heavy overhead. (This is a well-known pitfall wrt. languages like Swift, that enforce pervasive use of atomic reference counting.)

Since the use of "pluggable" GC in C-like or Rust-like languages is still uncommon, this generally means resorting to a language which happens to inherently rely on GC, such as Golang.
by austin-cheney | 2025-07-20 12:27:21+00:00
How do you define success?

As a JavaScript developer I realized around 2014, or so, that I was aligned to a shit career path where the only path to success was the attention economy, not anything regarding career elevation or technical contributions.

In that regard I have always been a failure. Still I did not deviate from this foolishness because my big open source application was becoming wildly popular and I was becoming a better developer. The reality, though, is the better I got the less compatible I became to the job market. The more I invested in my skills and contributions the more of a failure I became. This was tolerable so long as I had employment.

In 2023 when I was laid off and no longer had employment there was no further reason to pursue JavaScript related employment ever again. So there I sat for 6 six months debasing myself as I continued to look for employment in a job market I had grown to hate competing with shit beginners for entry level positions who also don’t want to do that work.

Fortunately a defense contractor found me and now I do completely unrelated work and entered management. In all honesty I do still love writing applications in JavaScript/TypeScript, but now I only write personal applications that I don’t talk about with other people.

I reconcile my level of success in that I can generally write any application I wish and solve any problem in front of me.