MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thorum | 2025-07-17 21:33:08+00:00
I understand the idea. My position is that this is a largely speculative claim from people who have not spent much time seriously applying agents for spreadsheet or video editing work (since those agents didn’t even exist until now).

“Getting something almost right, no matter how close, can often be worse than not doing it at all” - true with human employees and with low quality agents, but not necessarily true with expert humans using high quality agents. The cost to throw a job at an agent and see what happens is so small that in actual practice, the experience is very different and most people don’t realize this yet.
by mishafb | 2025-07-17 21:33:21+00:00
I agree on the last point of the lack of composition here.

While it's true that writers need to be aware of buffering to make use of fancy syscalls, implementing that should be an option, but not a requirement.

Naively this would mean implementing one of two APIs in an interface, which ruins the direct peformance. So I see why the choice was made, but I still hope for something better.

It's probably not possible with zig's current capabilities, but I would ideally like to see a solution that:

- Allows implementations to know at comptime what the interface actually implements and optimize for that (is buffering supported? Can you get access to the buffer inplace for zero copy?).

- For the generic version (which is in the vtable), choose one of the methods and wrap it (at comptime).

There's so many directions to take Zig into (more types? more metaprogramming? closer to metal?) so it's always interesting to see new developments!
by jraph | 2025-07-17 21:33:23+00:00
This could be a good feature in open source software packaged by Debian and whose build is reproducible.

People being angry here shows how they distrust software they use and distrusting always online software causes fear and stress.

The best these people can do is relying on free software distributed in a sane way because that's what can help trust software, and, in a professional setting, to push their companies or their providers towards free software as well, and demand guarantees that their privacy is respected.

These matters are not theoretical and this discussion is a witness of this.

If Notion wants to be trusted, they should go open source. I see Notion people are here. Do it! Stop doing closed source software! That doesn't bring anything worth and see what badness it brings. Your value is elsewhere. It's in you expertise, your vision and how well you do things.

I work for an open source competitor (or at least in the neighborhood) and that works out well for us and has been for 20 years.

The day you open source your desktop client, you'll be able to show us the code and show that you indeed don't send audio records or related logs to your headquarters. We won't have to reverse engineer, sandbox just to be sure, and hope for the best.

Knowledge management software shouldn't hide knowledge.
by ok_dad | 2025-07-17 21:34:02+00:00
The value of the stock is the value of the corporation, right? What’s the value of it if you don’t have humans to man the factory? The only reason Capital has capital is because they’re hoarding it since the beginning of human economics. If everyone shared equally then the guy with a steam shovel becomes a team who built, bought, or traded to get a steam shovel that they share to make their collective load easier.

So in my world view, yes, all wealth is exploitative. No one person can do enough work to earn millions and billions more than others.
by buremba | 2025-07-17 21:34:10+00:00
They're likely burning money so I can't be pissed off yet, but we see the same Cursor as well; the pricing is not transparent.

I'm paying for Max, and when I use the tooling to calculate the spend returned by the API, I can see it's almost $1k! I have no idea how much quota I have left until the next block. The pricing returned by the API doesn't make any sense.
by dh2022 | 2025-07-17 21:34:18+00:00
The way money is re-shored is whenever a US President (so far only republican Presidents) decide to give companies a tax holiday. So far Bush and Trump gave such holidays. Which means that corporate treasuries only have to wait for the next Republican president to re-patriate their off-shore cash. During this time corporations usually use debt to service dividend payments, share repurchases, and operating expenses in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_tax_holiday
by beala | 2025-07-17 21:34:23+00:00
I realized that all I needed was basically a way of syncing bookmarks across a bunch of different platforms (linux, mac, iOS, android) and browsers, and I didn't really need any of the fancier features like offline access. I had claude code one-shot a simple python web app that saves links to sqlite. I stuffed it in a docker container and hosted it on my home server. I set up a public portal using cloudflare tunnels to access it when I'm not on my LAN. I wrote a little bookmarklet that saves a page and is compatible with the various browsers I use.
by lemoncucumber | 2025-07-17 21:34:25+00:00
Basically this paragraph from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Singapore:

"Singapore has consistently been rated as the least-corrupt country in Asia and amongst the top ten cleanest in the world by Transparency International. The World Bank's governance indicators have also rated Singapore highly on rule of law, control of corruption and government effectiveness. However, it is widely perceived that some aspects of the political process, civil liberties, and political, labour and human rights are lacking. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Singapore a "flawed democracy" in 2024. Freedom House deemed Singapore "partly free" in 2025, at 48/100 — 19/40 for political rights, 29/60 for civil liberties."
by iwontberude | 2025-07-17 21:34:31+00:00
Claude Code is not worth the time sink for anyone that already knows what they are doing. It's not that hard to write boilerplate and standard llm auto-predict was 95% of the way to Claude Code, Continue, Aider, Cursor, etc without the extra headaches. The hangover from all this wasted investment is going to be so painful.
by mandevil | 2025-07-17 21:34:47+00:00
This is such a deep hole of complexity. (My wife is a pharmacist, I make computers do what I tell them to, and she has convinced me that her field is far more complex than us software people can imagine.)

To pick one story my wife has told me, take the example of Multiple Sclerosis. In the 1970's and 1980's, thanks to the MRI machine, there was finally a good diagnosis tool for MS: can you see the lesions in the scan? If you can congrats, you have MS. If you can't, it might be early MS where the lesions are small enough that we can't see them (generally they are visible several years after initial symptoms). But there were a lot of people who had MS-like symptoms and no lesions, so diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (named just in 1970, in contrast to MS which was identified in the 19th Century) started to rise. Most of those people would have been diagnosed with MS in 1950, but now we can rule that out and so they go into the new bucket instead. What is going on with patients in that CFS bucket? It's a mystery. Is it one thing or many? Who knows! Is it genetic or environmental? Who knows!

And how does one get original flavor MS? It's not fully genetic- comparing identical and fraternal twins we can see that it's not purely genetic but there must be a genetic influence. The current most accepted theory, according to my wife, is basically Long COVID- but for the Epstein-Barr virus (what causes Mononucleosis) instead of COVID-19. So if your immune system is somehow susceptible to this (the genetic component, which we apparently do not understand), and it encounters EBV (and there is a bit of bad luck? Who knows!) then somehow the immune system gets confused and starts attacking your own nervous system.

We computer people are simply attacking much more tractable problems.
by plaguuuuuu | 2025-07-17 21:34:55+00:00
Everyone has this impression that our internal monologue is what our brain is doing. It's not. We have all sorts of individual components that exist totally outside the realm of "token generation". E.g. the amygdala does its own thing in handling emotions/fear/survival, fires in response to anything that triggers emotion. We can modulate that with our conscious brain, but not directly - we have to basically hack the amygdala by thinking thoughts that deal with the response (don't worry about the exam, you've studied for it already)

LLMs don't have anything like that. Part of why they aren't great at some aspects of human behaviour. E.g. coding, choosing an appropriate level of abstraction - no fear of things becoming unmaintainable. Their approach is weird when doing agentic coding because they don't feel the fear of having to start over.

Emotions are important.
Telnyx AI Agents now support native integration with MCP servers
by maevesentner | 2025-07-17 21:35:19+00:00
We just rolled out native support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers in Telnyx AI Agents. This means you can now connect agents directly to any API offering an official MCP server without custom middleware or manual configs. Whether you’re working with open-source models, public APIs, or internal systems, MCP makes it easy to deploy and manage new integrations at scale. The best part: it only takes a few minutes to get started.

Check it out: https://telnyx.com/release-notes/mcp-servers-ai-agents
by LexiMax | 2025-07-17 21:35:49+00:00
> You shouldn't. Word-of-mouth should be the primary way people discover products.

I've been a satisfied customer of theirs since 2023.

That said, I've been burned by far too many companies - especially tech companies - who grew big, then proceeded to squeeze every drop of prior good-will out of their success to make a line go up and satisfy investors.

So my support goes as far as opportunistically recommending them for as long as they continue to be good. Which I still do, I use Kagi on every device and love their personal ranking system and translation services, and they've been a cornerstone of untangling my life from a Google login - speaking of being burned.

But going out of my way to evangelize them feels a bit icky, and I can't help but feel like there's another shoe waiting to drop. It kind of stinks to feel like that, because my hesitancy isn't even necessarily their fault.
by threecheese | 2025-07-17 21:36:21+00:00
Many of us have been partitioning our “computing” life into public and private segments, for example for social media, job search, or blogging. Maybe it’s time for another segment somewhere in the middle?

Something like lower risk private data, which could contain things like redacted calendar entries, de-identified, anonymized, or obfuscated email, or even low-risk thoughts, journals, and research.

I am Worried; I barely use ChatGPT for anything that could come back to hurt me later, like medical or psychological questions. I hear that lots of folks are finding utility here but I’m reticent.
by jmartrican | 2025-07-17 21:37:26+00:00
I have the $100 plan and now quickly get downgraded to Sonnet. But so far have not hit any other limits. I use it more on the weekends over several hours, so lets see what this weekend has in store.

I suspected that something like this might happen, where the demand will outstrip the supply and squeeze small players out. I still think demand is in its infancy and that many of us will be forced to pay a lot more. Unless of course there are breakthroughs. At work I recently switched to non-reasoning models because I find I get more work done and the quality is good enough. The queue to use Sonnet 3.7 and 4.0 is too long. Maybe the tools will improve reduce token count, e.g. a token reducing step (and maybe this already exists).
by craigbanach | 2025-07-17 21:37:29+00:00
I wanted to learn container orchestration without breaking the bank, so I'm standing up a Next.js frontend, a .NET API, and Postgres database on a single €4.55 Hetzner VPS, using Nomad & Traefik for service discovery and load‑balancing.

Would love feedback on improvements, real-world tweaks, or war stories from your own budget infra experiments!
by ofalkaed | 2025-07-17 21:37:55+00:00
Really appreciate that when searching for commodities/goods the results are not dominated by amazon/etsy/ebay sellers, very low on multiple results from a single domain in general. Solves my biggest gripe with search engines but have only done a few quick searches with seek.ninja so far.

The one thing that I would like to see is the "More results from <site>," links for sites with a lot of results. :site works so not a deal breaker, just a would be nice.
by zdragnar | 2025-07-17 21:38:40+00:00
Plenty of essential oils (what tends to be used in these) are aggressively irritating unless diluted to people without allergies. Even when diluted, I am allergic to some, and my wife is allergic to others, though we get different symptoms than "unnatural" perfumes.

Instead of migraines, it's closer to hay fever type allergies.
by khurs | 2025-07-17 21:39:02+00:00
If you are an activist of any kind, it's a good idea to be offshore. A UK Palestinian support group had their account frozen and access to the funds blocked just this week

https://x.com/declassifiedUK/status/1945077503996895319

If you are an activist, have stuff offshore in a country other than the one you campaign in. And Crypto.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-07-17 21:39:39+00:00
> pride in "craftsmanship, control issues, and perfectionism

I mean, do we really want our code base to not follow a coding standard? Or are network code not to consider failure or transactional issues? I feel like all of these traits are hallmarks of good senior engineers. Really good ones learn to let go a little but no senior is going to watch a dev automated or otherwise, circumvent six layers of architecture by blasting in a static accessor or smth.

Craftsmanship, control issues and perfectionism, tend to exist for readability, to limit entropy and scope, so one can be more certain of the consequences of a chunk of code. So to consider them a problem is a weird take to me.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-07-17 21:39:46+00:00
I don't mean this rhetorically, but what are the benefits of using node over something like deno now? It has been so long since I lived in the node ecosystem. I imagine it has gotten quite a bit better. Is the main benefit just ecosystem/compatibility stuff? Deno sometimes has some odd compatibility issues, but not often. The low-overhead, sane defaults, just-build kind of nature of it has become very appealing to me. Being able to build CLIs in portable binaries using a language my coworkers understand is really nice (despite that they're like 60mb, haha). I prefer Go personally, but ultimately prefer being able to collaborate.
Show HN: Empromptu.ai – Agentic AI Building AI Apps
by anaempromptu | 2025-07-17 21:40:14+00:00
Hey HN! We're Empromptu.ai, an AI app builder that builds AI apps (RAG, models, evals all built in every app)

Demo: https://app.storylane.io/share/rtneodkf5i1l

We started Empromptu after burning through thousands of credits on AI builders and hitting the same problem: cool looking prototypes or demos that break with real users.

The issue wasn't the building process, it was accuracy. Most AI applications plateau at 60%~ reliability, which is fine for prototypes but it's unusable in production. We realized these tools aren't really "AI app builders", they're website builders that happen to use AI.

We wanted to solve the hardest problem first: making AI applications actually work reliably.

Our approach centers on what we call dynamic optimization. Instead of cramming every possible scenario into one massive prompt (which confuses LLMs), our system adapts contextually. A travel chatbot automatically knows to mention LAX for Los Angeles vs. Pearson for Toronto. This consistently delivers 90%~ accuracy versus the industry standard 60%~.

But accuracy alone wasn't enough because we also needed to solve the builder gap:

- Simple builders (Lovable, Bolt): Create static websites, not AI applications

- Complex ML tools: Require dedicated teams most startups don't have (Arize, Voxel51) - we've also heard from both technical and non-technical founders that they found these tools very complex

- What's missing: Tools that build applications where AI is embedded functionality

So we built AI agents with optimization built-in. Users just type what they want to build and our agents handle the full development pipeline: creating applications with embedded models, RAG and intelligent processing. You can deploy to your own infrastructure via Netlify, GitHub or download it directly since you can run it locally.

The result: Startups, solo hackers and enterprises can build AI apps or AI features without hiring a dedicated ML team.

Waitlist: https://empromptu.ai

We'd love feedback from the HN community — esp. if you've hit similar accuracy problems or thoughts on the technical approach.
by TrackerFF | 2025-07-17 21:40:42+00:00
I've just concluded that the ultra wealthy are in some aspect stateless people. Sure, they have a passport - or multiple - but they'll emigrate to another country without blinking, if it means slightly less taxes and less transparency. And that's on top of their offshore assets, managed by other people.

Using your assets/wealth as political power seems to have become more popular here in northern Europe. Taxes too high? Fuck you, I'll take my money and companies to Switzerland. If politicians buckle, they'll move back home. Seems like a race to the bottom, where the tax havens will just compete for the best terms to the ultra wealthy.
by gabesullice | 2025-07-17 21:41:00+00:00
The authors write that it's "counterintuitive " that in states with low crime and efficient beaurocracies, the uberrich tend to conceal or relocate their wealth more. See:

"This suggests a counterintuitive result: use of offshore finance is driven not only by negative political conditions such as corruption and lack of civil justice, but by positive conditions, such as regulatory enforcement and civil justice."

But it's not counterintuitive at all. Those people aren't concerned about getting mugged and they're definitely not concerned about how long it takes to get a construction permit in a corrupt country. They're concerned about state-sponsored expropriation.

Given so many of the comments here about tracking the offshore accounts down and confiscating the contents, it's no surprise.

Irrespective of whether their practices are immoral, unethical, unfair, or unjust, they're definitely not counterintuitive.

It's genuinely hard for me to understand how the authors could believe otherwise.
by mumbisChungo | 2025-07-17 21:41:49+00:00
Again, the more I know about it the more complex it seems to me, which is the opposite of what you're saying. So many ways to exert control over it between fine-tuning, RAG, and loop/graph based agentic flows.

I'm not convinced anyone is an expert on it yet relative to what AI dev baseline will be in a year or two.
by lossolo | 2025-07-17 21:42:20+00:00
I have a friend who's vibe-coding apps. He has a lot of them, like 15 or more, but most are only 60–90% complete (almost every feature is only 60-90% complete), which means almost nothing works properly. Last time he showed me something, it was sending the Supabase API key in the frontend with write permissions, so I could edit anything on his site just by inspecting the network tab in developer tools. The amount of technical debt and security issues building up over the coming years is going to be massive.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-07-17 21:42:30+00:00
Mesoamerica had both wheels and bronze. They just weren't as widely used because the technologies weren't nearly as useful in the Mesoamerican social context.

Human sacrifice occurred and had important religious connotations (in terms of very literally keeping the universe alive), but it's wildly over-stated as an everyday fact of life by chroniclers.
by apwell23 | 2025-07-17 21:43:52+00:00
oh yea looks like everyone and their grandma is hitting claude code

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3572

Inside info is they are using their servers to prioritize training for sonnet 4.5 to launch at the same time as xAI dedicated coding model. xAI coding logic is very close to sonnet 4 and has anthropic scrambling. xAI sucks at making designs but codes really well.
by snackbroken | 2025-07-17 21:44:06+00:00
> value is created in every transaction

Lots of transactions actually destroy value, they just do so in a way that externalizes this cost.

A good example is advertising: companies are incentivized to dump all available resources into marketing, because those who don't get out-competed by those who do. It is a winner-takes-all game where the strategy that maximizes global value is nowhere close to being a Nash equilibrium.

A more extreme example would be hiring someone to go rob a bank. No value is created (lots is destroyed) but both parties to the transaction come out ahead.
by dtkav | 2025-07-17 21:44:16+00:00
I use Obsidian Web Clipper [0] with the Relay Obsidian plugin [1] (I'm the author) for syncing.

Web clipper converts websites to markdown and puts them into your Obsidian vault, and then Relay can sync subfolders in your vault to make sure you have a copy on all of your devices (even between a work and personal vault for example).

Relay is also collaborative, so I frequently clip things, clean them up a bit, and move them into shared folders (like docs pages).

I like the feeling of local-first combined with a malleable UX. Especially for the pocket use-case, offline-capable is a must for me so I can catch up on reading when I'm flying or otherwise off-grid.

[0] https://obsidian.md/clipper

[1] https://relay.md
by JohnFen | 2025-07-17 21:44:24+00:00
> But here's the truly unsettling part: even the optimists are getting nervous. Geoffrey Hinton, the "Godfather of AI," revised his human extinction risk estimate from basically zero to 10-20% within three decades. When the guy who invented the technology starts sounding like a doomsday prepper, maybe it's time to pay attention.

Anyone who actually thinks that genAI poses such a risk, but continues to work on it anyway, is unambiguously doing evil things.
by sergeykish | 2025-07-17 21:44:27+00:00
English is my third language, first two use phonetic alphabet. Blaming bad spelling on ITA is like German, Spanish speakers blaming own languages.

English spelling is a facade. Real English can be seen when sentences written in IPA. Having visual confirmation of sound feels refreshing.

ITA "lief ov a fisherman" is neither phonetic nor English. It replaced broken system with another broken system.
by tmp10423288442 | 2025-07-17 21:45:52+00:00
@gwern, did you mess up your inflation calculation here?

> I couldn’t get all the ones Nguyen highlighted from LuckyScent and some sampler packs were sold out, but I settled for 39 samples total on 8 February 2021. (Which cost $153 [2021; $190 in 2025], so amortizing to $3.90 [2011; $6.03 in 2025] each.) At that point I felt I had gone a bit overboard, so I didn’t do an additional order from CB I Hate Perfume, which Nguyen praises for doing the most interesting ‘abstract’ perfumes, to pick up ones that LuckyScent didn’t have in stock.
by progbits | 2025-07-17 21:45:56+00:00
People review files top down?

I can't imagine doing that. I glance at the list, and try to spot the highest level change (schema changes, interfaces, etc) and start there. If the core idea is wrong no point wasting time on the rest.

Then I go up from there to implementation details and tests. Often jumping between modules or functions, coming back to some things later when I have more context.