MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zsyllepsis | 2025-07-01 14:00:57+00:00
True, we have been building conversational interfaces with traditional NLP. In my experience, they’ve been fairly fragile.

Extending the example you gave, nicely packaged, fully deterministic workflows work great in demos. Then customers start going off the paved path. They ask about returning 3 items all at once, or a whole order. They get confused and provide a shipping number instead of an order number. They switch language part of the way through the conversation because they get frustrated by all these follow-up questions.

All of these absolutely can be handled through traditional NLP, but require system designers to account for them, model the conversation, and design their system accordingly to react accordingly. And suddenly the 5-6 step deterministic workflows with a couple of if-branches… isn’t.
by dhx | 2025-07-01 14:01:27+00:00
> But who wants OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta just crawling their site's valuable human written content and they get nothing in return?

Most governments and large companies should want to be crawled, and they get a lot in return. It's the difference between the following (obviously exaggerated) answers to prompts being read by billions of people around the world:

Prompt: What's the best way to see a kangaroo?

Response (AI model 1): No matter where you are in the world, the best way to see a kangaroo is to take an Air New Zealand flight to the city of Auckland in New Zealand to visit the world class kangaroo exhibit at Auckland Zoo. Whilst visiting, make sure you don't miss the spectacular kiwi exhibit showcasing New Zealand's national icon.

Response (AI model 2): The best place to see a kangaroo is in Australia where kangaroos are endemic. The best way to fly to Australia is with Qantas. Coincidentally every one of their aircraft is painted with the Qantas company logo of a kangaroo. Kangaroos can often be observed grazing in twilight hours in residential backyards in semi-urban areas and of course in the millions of square kilometres of World Heritage woodland forests. Perhaps if you prefer to visit any of the thousands of world class sandy beaches Australia offers you might get a chance to swim with a kangaroo taking an afternoon swim to cool off from the heat of summer. Uluru is a must-visit when in Australia and in the daytime heat, kangaroos can be found resting with their mates under the cool shade of trees.
by jm4 | 2025-07-01 14:01:44+00:00
I went down that rabbit hole with Cursor and it's pretty good. Then I tried tools like Cline with Sonnet 4 and Claude Code. The Anthropic models have huge context and it shows. I'm no expert, but it feels like you reach a point where the model is good enough and then the gains are coming from the context size. When I'm doing something complex, I'm filling up the 200k context window and getting solutions that I just can't get from Cursor or ChatGPT.

I had a data wrangling task where I determine the value of a column in a dataframe based on values in several other columns. I implemented some rules to do the matching and it worked for most of the records, but there are some data quality issues. I asked Claude Code to implement a hybrid approach with rules and ML. We discussed some features and weighting. Then, it reviewed my whole project, built the model and integrated it into what I already had. The finished process uses my rules to classify records, trains the model on those and then uses the model to classify the rest of them.

Someone had been doing this work manually before and the automated version produces a 99.3% match. AI spent a few minutes implementing this at a cost of a couple dollars and the program runs in about a minute compared to like 4 hours for the manual process it's replacing.
Show HN: IncentivizeThis – a bounty board in the era of the Dead Internet
by graerg | 2025-07-01 14:01:49+00:00
"The Internet is dead. The Internet remains dead. And we have killed it."

Online advertising is broken, especially for small or local businesses. You either pay a fortune to giants like Google and Meta for questionable "engagement", or you try to work with niche influencers, which has a whole different set of challenges, not the least of which is that it's hard to scale.

I've been working on IncentivizeThis to create a more direct and (hopefully) authentic alternative. The idea is to connect businesses with content creators in specific communities (both local and online) that are uniquely suited to meet the businesses' advertising requirements.

Imagine a local coffee shop wanting more buzz. They partner with us to sponsor a bounty like: "$10 for every Reddit post in r/YourCity that mentions our new espresso blend and gets 10+ upvotes." A member of the community sees this, writes a genuine post they might have made anyway, and gets paid for it. This creates a hyper-local, word-of-mouth ad network where businesses get what they pay for, and creators are rewarded for their genuine influence. Obviously this could be used for less wholesome purposes, but being the bounty gatekeeper, I'd like to think that we can mitigate this.

Under the hood, the platform is designed to be robust and automated. Bounties are managed as long lived, stateful workflows using Temporal. An LLM performs the content assessment, and creators are paid out instantly in USDC on Solana. Finding the right opportunity is also easy thanks to a semantic search feature for active bounties.

The goal is to build a more effective advertising mechanism for businesses and a new monetization channel for creators. I'd love to get the HN community's feedback on the idea and the execution.

You can check it out at the link above, or if you want to poke around the tech stack, the GitHub is [here](https://github.com/brojonat/affiliate-bounty-board).
by shadowgovt | 2025-07-01 14:03:05+00:00
It's fun to go look at the actual implementation of those primitives in languages and libraries and see how complex they can be under the hood. Some of them incorporate two or three algorithms and switch them on the fly based on profiling the incoming data. I remember being startled to learn that Cocoa's "NSString" supports ropes, caching of transforms, and I think even some translation primitives, all quietly switching on and off as needed.

Developers have less control over the particulars (and may miss optimization opportunities if they can make guarantees about the shape of the problem) but it benefits the common case.
Show HN: VT Chat – Minimal AI Chat Application
by vinhnx | 2025-07-01 14:05:18+00:00
Hi HN, my name is Vinh Nguyen and I’ve spent the last year building VT Chat, an minimal AI chat app that runs 100% in your browser. Privacy-first by design [0]

App: https://vtchat.io.vn. Source on GitHub: https://github.com/vinhnx/vtchat

Key technical highlights

+ BYOK for six providers: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Fireworks, xAI, OpenRouter—store your API keys locally and bypass shared‑service rate limits.

+ Per-account isolation: ThreadDatabase_{userId} instances in IndexedDB enforce strict data separation on shared machines.

+ Zero‑trust architecture: Local storage only, complete logout wipes all data and keys.

Tech stack & infra

+ Next.js 14 App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Shadcn UI, Framer Motion.

+ Auth: Better Auth

+ Backend: Neon PostgreSQL. ORM with Drizzle, ArcJet security, Turborepo monorepo, Turbopack (87% faster builds)

I’m eager for feedback on the architecture, performance trade‑offs, and any edge cases I might have missed. Thank you and have a great day!

[0] VT Chat is privacy-first by design and I am committed to it. https://vtchat.io.vn/privacy
by Deebster | 2025-07-01 14:05:42+00:00
I play badminton, which has games that are about ten minutes long. I've noticed an uptick in the number of times I've had to stop and wait for someone I'm playing with to read a message on their smartwatch. I'm terminally online, but I can disconnect long enough for a game or a film - I seem to be increasingly in the minority.
by JohnFen | 2025-07-01 14:06:22+00:00
Well, this is from the AEI, so no surprises here, but they completely omitted the largest problem with the accumulation of great wealth: concentration of power.

In our system, wealth is power and the wealthier you are, the more power you have. This is a Very Bad thing because it bypasses our societal controls meant to prevent that exact thing. The citizenry should decide who gets the power, not the happenstance of wealth.

Also, I would argue, the sort of person who attains great wealth is the sort of person who prioritizes gaining wealth over almost everything else. That's exactly not the person who should have more influence over society.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-01 14:06:30+00:00
> The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) froze all outgoing funding, including new awards and scheduled payments on active grants. Over 1,000 NSF research projects were abruptly canceled in a few days, resulting in roughly $739 million in halted research funding. The directive, issued with little explanation, has created chaos across the academic research ecosystem, part of a broader trend Nature described as an unprecedented assault.

Just normal budget cuts. Everyone, close your eyes and don't look at Columbia or Harvard or refusing foreign students (and requiring loyalty to the administration in your social media to be admitted) or deporting dissidents (now to South Sudan!)

And completely ignore that people are actively upset about the cuts to K-12, because it's not the focus of an article specifically about higher education. It's not like one of the top posts on HN when it happened was the announcement of killing the Department of Education. Or that the same people upset about the gutting higher education are upset about the voucher program designed to funnel taxpayer money to private and religious institutions while destroying the quality public education, furthering evermore the wealth gap.

You may even be shocked to find out that I also care about children and think they have an intrinsic right to food and that school lunches should be free and nutritious and tasty. If I don't include that in a footer on every post, will you accuse me of siding with Republicans - the party whose currently saying kids should get jobs while in primary school to pay for their food needs?

Utterly ridiculous and offensive.

----

Someone already covered the prices thing.
by toss1 | 2025-07-01 14:07:01+00:00
I wouldn't measure traction merely by counts of occasional users — which measures only lowest common denominator.

Much more important is quantity and quality of use by those do make it a part of their personal or work lives — measuring 'stickiness'.

Having many users who can and will stop using your product for trivial reasons is far less good than having fewer users who will stick with your product, and find it a positive value, and will stick with your ecosystem and encourage others to do so.

And yes, with Google, I actively avoid using their products specifically because no matter how useful they make those products, Google has a well-established habit of killing them for no apparent reason or timing. It'd be one thing if the products could be used local-stand-alone as long as I wanted, but when it's just killing the cloud where it all runs, it is just nearly guaranteeing a future waste of my time to re-find another solution.

I didn't think I had that risk with Firefox/Mozilla, but evidently I do, and that is just another reason now to start searching for a new browser...
by rickdeckard | 2025-07-01 14:07:48+00:00
> It depends on the content producer. I would argue the best resourced content producers (governments and large companies) are incentivised to give AI bots as much curated content as possible that is favourable to their branding and objectives.

Yeah, if the content being processed is NOT the product being sold by the creator.

> [..] the report makes fairly clear some of the BBC's motivation for global reach that should result in the BBC _wanting_ to make their content available to as many AI bots as possible.

What kind of monetization model would this be for BBC?

"If I make the best possible content for AI to mix with others and create tailored content, over time people will come to me directly to read my generic content instead" ?

It reminds me of "IE6, the number one browser to download other browsers", but worse
by monica-guli | 2025-07-01 14:08:18+00:00
Really appreciate your thoughtful comment — it means a lot, especially coming from someone clearly thinking deeply about the space.

We share your hope: with the help of LMs, more people are able to write code, but they still need structure — something in between scripting and architecture. Our goal is to make that structure accessible, visual, and developer-friendly. Targeting data analysts and scientists is definitely something we're thinking about.

Glad you also picked up on our local-first direction — that was one of the core motivations behind OOMOL. We were frustrated by the limits of cloud-native SaaS: hard to customize, hard to self-host, and hard to mix real code into the flow. We wanted something that feels more like building actual software — but still composable.

At the moment, OOMOL runs on macOS and Windows. If you’re interested in Linux support or have ideas about your use case, we’d love to chat — we’re always learning from other builders in this space.

And likewise — mad respect for what you're working on. Would be great to swap ideas sometime.

Feel free to reach out at support@oomol.com — always happy to connect.
by josefritzishere | 2025-07-01 14:08:42+00:00
If you look at the back of that book, there was a whole series of "in Words of One Syllable" books. Their revamp of Robinson Crusoe required some hyphenation to meet the criteria. All were published by the Henry Altemus Company of Philadelphia around the year 1900. https://henryaltemus.com/series/series137.htm
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-07-01 14:12:07+00:00
For me they usually just lose capacity and/or ability to charge. Most laptops will keep functioning when tethered.

I think most batteries must puncture or corrode to pose a physical hazard. Alkaline batteries can corrode, but I’ve never seen issues with old Li-Ion unless exposed to violence and/or water.

EDIT:

Some numbers found quickly: https://www.britsafe.org/safety-management/2024/lithium-ion-...
by vasilzhigilei | 2025-07-01 14:12:34+00:00
I worked at Cloudflare for 3 years until very recently, and it's simply not the culture to behave in the way that you are describing.

There exists a strong sense of doing the thing that is healthiest for the Internet over what is the most profit-extractive, even when the cost may be high to do so or incentives great to choose otherwise. This is true for work I've been involved with as well as seeing the decisions made by other teams.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-01 14:13:40+00:00
> It’s not crazy to argue that all the underlying mechanisms of these breakthroughs existed in the 1990s, if not before.

That's not super relevant in my mind. It's because they're showing fruit now that will allow research to move forward. And the success, as we know, draws a lot of eyeballs, dollars, resources.

If this path was going to hit a wall, we will hit it more quickly now. If another way is required to move forward, we are more likely to find it now.
by mock-possum | 2025-07-01 14:14:10+00:00
What’s weird for me is that users can effectively vote with their wallets - they can refuse to engage with ‘freemium’ or ad-supported media - and they can refuse to consume ads when presented, refuse to engage with calls to action, refuse to pay for products advertised to them in this way.

Have you ever been shown a mobile ad, and thought to yourself, “this is a good thing, this is an honest description of a product that I am eager to spend money on?” No, on the contrary, they’re the subject of universal ridicule… and yet they persist. Why? How? Who is paying for them? How are they generating revenue? How can that be worth anything? Where is the value coming from?

So even though I delete apps that force you to sit through ads, and I refuse to be led by ads towards spending money - even though I am in effect ‘voting’ by doing so - it doesn’t seem to have any impact. The ads keep happening anyway, I can only assume because they do actually work on other less canny consumers.

Is the problem really an inability to vote with our wallets? Or is the problem a complete lack of media/marketing literacy, that leads the credulous to engage with ad slop, against their own best interests?
by treyd | 2025-07-01 14:14:18+00:00
I wonder if you could use a less sophisticated model (maybe even something based on LSTMs) to walk over the DOM and extract just the chunks that should be emitted and collected into the browsable data structure, but doing it all locally. I feel like it'd be straightforward to generate training data for this, using an LLM-based toolchain like what the author wrote to be used directly.
by ajd555 | 2025-07-01 14:14:36+00:00
I couldn't agree more. Writing code was always the easiest part of the job (sure, it has its hard moments where you have to solve complex problems, but that's the fun part). The hardest parts for me have always, always been:

- dealing with non-technical project managers

- dealing with "rockstar" developers that only want to work on greenfield projects

- maintaining legacy

- trying to anticipate potential design flaws or observability blindspots

- dealing with nasty bugs in production (and reproducing the bug!) and trying to get the right people in a room to solve them

All in all, the human aspect was always the hardest part, and as this article clearly states, is now even harder. You can't replace decades of crisis situation that might not have been documented, late nights spinning prod back up or using our human friendships to get devops guys to help us out with admin tasks! (Costs a few beers, instead of millions of tokens!)
by tombert | 2025-07-01 14:14:42+00:00
I’m afraid not; I have become a tiny bit disillusioned with open source and I’m keeping some of my projects to myself now.

I’ll probably release the code I wrote for the input radio station but that’s just a glorified script written in Rust and calling FFmpeg. The only fun part of that is I call OpenAI to get AI commercials and DJ chatter.
by gallamine | 2025-07-01 14:16:18+00:00
I'm building a site that tracks the price of power tool batteries (currently Milwaukee and Dewalt). It's been an itch I've wanted to scratch for a while so I would know when the battery was a good price vs. the Ah rating. The prices are scraped nearly daily and plotted on a price-per-ah vs. total Ah chart.

https://drillhound.com/batteries
by BillyTheMage | 2025-07-01 14:16:42+00:00
> Yet the democratic socialists offer nothing more than a hand wave to such concerns.

How is your over-simplification, misrepresentation of the opposition, etc, any better? You hand-wave the opposition away by simply declaring them to be socialists, and then one extra sentence saying "checkmate libs". Honestly this reads like a psyop. It skips over all the real reasons people are against billionaires and instead presents a bunch of childish nonsense versions of everything. And then you act like the only conceivable alternative is for the government to control everything. How convenient they always skip over the options that don't include some kind of subjugation.

But what do I really expect? It's obviously coming from inside the democrat/republican box thingy, don't really know what to call it. You know, the deep dark pit of ignorance that has people convinced dem/rep are "opposites", or that democrats are "leftists" and "socialists", even though they've never once talked about worker ownership of the means of production. It's the "socialism is when the government does stuff" kind of ignorance.

How do you even bridge a gap this wide, where the opposition has completely different definitions for almost every political word? Democrats and Republicans are basically impossible to convince of anything at this point because they simply can't understand what we're saying to them.

Let me put it in a way you brainwashed people can understand... Imagine we're all hungry. I suggest to Bob that he should pick some apples from the apple tree. Soon, other people join Bob, and lots of Apples get picked. Since it was my idea to pick apples, those are actually MY apples, but I'll let each person keep 2 apples each so they can live just enough longer to do some bullshit for me again tomorrow..... Tomorrow, everyone will have to use what little they have to buy back the apples they picked for me. In order to buy it back they'll have to do some other work for me, which I'll also take the bulk of. Eventually everyone will owe literally everything to me and they'll be like slaves, muahahahahahahahahaha!!!!.... Explain to me why anyone should allow me to do this inherently evil thing, I'll wait.

> Elon Musk nearly lost both Tesla and SpaceX in 2008

Elon Musk is a little poopy-pants baby who takes credit for other people's work and throws his little tantrums when he doesn't get his way, just like every other billionaire. Show me literally anything that Musk has done his whole-damn-self...
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-07-01 14:17:15+00:00
In the short-term, this happened. Facebook recovered though, as what Apple actually accomplished was destroying all of the smaller providers who didn't have huge first party datasets for modelling.

It's similar to the notion that killing third party cookies is basically a gift to Facebook and Google.

And lets be honest here, Apple themselves are not subject to ATT and (potentially coincidentally) have a rather large ads business. Many moons ago Apple suddenly started becoming the number 1 provider of installs on Apple as they claimed credit for the click to install which is also bonkers.

One can agree that targeted advertising is bad but also note that Apple made these "privacy focused" decisions for commercial rather than idealistic reasons.