MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jpctan | 2025-08-07 13:17:17+00:00
I bootstrapped and built an AI wrapper for LinkedIn users to build relationships through strategic commenting. It also has an agentic component that monitors and brings all the latest posting activities from monitored prospects into a single page, so users can focus and engage only with those people that matter.

Entrepreneurs, B2B business people, and salespeople love it because the app saves them from endless scrolling through the newsfeed while engaging with their prospects efficiently.

Introverts and ESL speakers DMed me saying how it changed their lives.

Little did we know it went viral, and we acquired 100k users in over 150 countries, without any marketer or marketing budget.

It all went well. We're building new features like social signals while planning to expand to other platforms.

Except one day, I woke up to find a Cease and Desist email from LinkedIn Legal Counsel...

In short, they do not like everything we do.

I anticipated a day like this would come but didn’t expect it so soon. I naively thought they would go after all the full automation tools that spam their users, while we always put humans in the loop, despite receiving so many requests from users.

We complied with the request and shut down the service immediately.

Here are the lessons I learnt and I hope you can benefit from them.

What to avoid:

-> It's tougher to use the strategy of embedding yourself onto a big platform like PayPal did with eBay and Airbnb did with Craigslist

-> It's tough to build on top of a big platform when you don’t have their blessing. Even when you do, they can wipe you out overnight

-> Startups will face tougher competition as big tech tightens their control over the technology, market, and access

What to bank on:

-> It's possible to scale and make something people want while being super lean

-> Market positioning and being in a niche is extremely important in the early days

-> There are (still) so many opportunities to be unlocked by AI-first products

This whole journey has been a wild ride. From solving my own problem to going viral and then getting shut down by the very platform we served, I’ve learned a lot.

You'll now have less (AI) comments/engagements. You're welcome.
by azath92 | 2025-08-07 13:17:27+00:00
Im not sure about how this translates to react native, AFAICT build chains for apps less optimiside, but using vercel for deployment, neon for db if needed, Ive really been digging the ability for any branch/commit/pr to be deployed to a live site i can preview.

Coming from the python ecosystem, ive found the commit -> deployed code toolchain very easy, which for this kind of vibe coding really reduces friction when you are using it to explore functional features of which you will discard many.

It moves the decision surface on what the right thing to build to _after_ you have built it. which is quite interesting.

I will caveat this by saying this flow only works seamlessly if the feature is simple enough for the llm to oneshot it, but for the right thing its an interesting flow.
by giantg2 | 2025-08-07 13:17:58+00:00
Any system will have failures. The goal is to eliminate some of those failures through multiple checks. The automated system can help by bringing up possible issues that couldn't be monitored by humans. But then it should be humans reviewing these alerts for false positives. It should be much like using a security scanning tool. Findings will come up and you need someone to disposition them. Some will need no actions false positives or issues under your risk tolerance, but then others need appropriate responses. It seemes in the cases like the example, you have a intern running the scan tool and turning every finding into a high vulnerability because they don't know any better than to blindly trust the tool.
by roughike | 2025-08-07 13:18:08+00:00
I only have one meeting a month nowadays so I might take a look if that situation ever changes (hopefully it doesn't!).

Regardless, congrats on the launch.

> the macOS app and Chrome extension communicate via WebSockets on localhost; nothing leaves your machine.

So the macOS app sets up a local webserver on some port that the Chrome extensions knows about in advance? Smart, kinda like how I had to do an auth flow for one of my CLI apps.
by summa_tech | 2025-08-07 13:18:24+00:00
A distant relative, no doubt, of Stanislaw Lem's "Automatthew's Friend" (1964). A perfectly rational, indestructible, selfless, well-meaning in-ear AI assistant. In the end, out of nothing but the deepest care for its owner's mental state in a hopeless situation, it advocates efficient and quick suicide.
by cnst | 2025-08-07 13:18:40+00:00
> The catch is that while the AV1 developers offer their patents (assuming they have any) on a royalty-free basis, in return they require users of AV1 to agree to license their own patents royalty-free back to them.

Such a huge catch that the companies that offer you a royalty-free license, only do so on the condition that you're not gonna turn around and abuse your own patents against them!

How exactly is that a bad thing?

How is it different from the (unwritten) social contracts of all humans and even of animals? How is it different from the primal instincts?
by jerf | 2025-08-07 13:19:02+00:00
I just exported my Bitwarden vault and the resulting .json file has my passkeys in it. I'm not going to try to test import, but if it doesn't work that would obviously be more "bug" than anything else. Clearly "export" is the high concern functionality and once exported, importing them is not a big deal.

This is only about your first paragraph, it doesn't affect your second.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-07 13:19:10+00:00
There's a decent Wiki page on Britain's entry into WW1 here. [1] Britain's cabinet had already decided, before they chose to declare war, that the treaty did not obligate a military response.

---

"Few historians would still maintain that the 'rape of Belgium' was the real motive for Britain's declaration of war on Germany. Instead, the role of Belgian neutrality is variously interpreted as an excuse used to mobilise public opinion, to provide embarrassed radicals in the cabinet with the justification for abandoning the principal of pacifism and thus staying in office, or - in the more conspiratorial versions - as cover for naked imperial interests."

---

Similarly many people were fully aware that Treaty of Versailles was foolish as it was being drafted. Its excessively punitive nature essentially precluded any sort of peaceful reconciliation, which should always be the goal at the end of war. You never know who your allies, or your enemies, will be in a few decades. History loves a plot twist.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_declaration_of_war_upo...
by dale_glass | 2025-08-07 13:19:29+00:00
> Try imitating Mickey Mouse, Dilbert, Star Wars, Hello Kitty, XKCD, you name it.

Those are not styles, they're characters for the most part.

You absolutely can draw heavy inspiration from existing properties, mostly so long you avoid touching the actual characters. Like D&D has a lot of Tolkien in it, and I believe the estate is quite litigious. You can't put Elrond in a D&D game, but you absolutely can have "Elf" as a species that looks nigh identical to Tolkien's descriptions.

For style imitation, it's long been a thing to make more anime-ish animation in the west, and anime itself came from Disney.

> Yep, after calling and getting permission and possibly paying some fees to you if you want.

Not for art styles, they won't. Style is not copyrightable.
by baggachipz | 2025-08-07 13:19:31+00:00
Classic repeat of the Gartner Hype Cycle. This bubble pop will dwarf the dot-bomb era. There's also no guarantee that the "slope of enlightenment" phase will amount to much beyond coding assistants. GenAI in its current form will never be reliable enough to do so-called "Agentic" tasks in everyday lives.

This bubble also seems to combine the worst of the two huge previous bubbles; the hype of the dot-com bubble plus the housing bubble in the way of massive data center buildout using massive debt and security bundling.
by Sharlin | 2025-08-07 13:20:36+00:00
The burden of proof is obviously on anyone who wants to argue that the three laws are, in fact, a good solid framework for robot ethics. It's pretty astonishing that the three laws are taken by anyone as being some sort of canonical default framework.

Asimov was not in the "try to come with a good framework for robot ethics" business. He was in the business of trying to come up with some simple, intuitive idea that didn't require the readers to have a degree in ethics and that was broken and vague enough to have a plenty of counterexamples to make stories about.

In short, Asimov absolutely did not propose his framework as an actually workable one, any more than, say, Atwood proposed the Gilead as a workable framework for society. They were nothing but story premises that the consequences of which the respective authors wanted to explore.
by jerf | 2025-08-07 13:21:14+00:00
I forget which site it is but there is one site I try to use with passkeys that somehow bypasses my BitWarden and rigidly insists on a passkey tied to Google and/or my phone, which I do not want. (My BitWarden stack is fully owned by me, as I self-host a VaultWarden instance, with daily backups of it, and I don't want my passkeys anywhere else.) That's definitely annoying.
by errozero | 2025-08-07 13:21:41+00:00
I've just added a wav export feature. Currently it only exports with the knob positions as they are when the pattern first generates. You can choose how long the exported audio is.

It's a bit of a hack that re-opens the app in an iframe in the background using an offline audio context.

I'll come back to it at some point and make the export pick up the knob positions but I don't have time right now.
by redwood | 2025-08-07 13:22:00+00:00
Got it, you're right some of the hype is certainly out of control.. not surprised that two of the three come from microsoft, the evil empire.

I guess I see hype all the time and have something of a filter to recognize that our roles will evolve not be replaced that's always how things go. Maybe decades hence the roles are so different that they're named differently.
by DragonStrength | 2025-08-07 13:22:15+00:00
You missed the first part of that quote:

> At long last everybody realises that the old MPEG business model is now broke

And the entire post is about how dysfunctional MPEG is and how AOM rose to deal with it. It is tragic to waste so much time and money only to produce nothing. He's criticizing the MPEG group and their infighting. He's literally criticizing MPEG's licensing model and the leadership of the companies in MPEG. He's an MPEG member saying MPEG's business model is broken yet no one has a desire to fix it, so it will be beaten by a competitor. Would you not want to see your own organization reform rather than die?

Reminder AOM is a bunch of megacorps with profit motive too, which is why he thinks this ultimately leads to stalled innovation:

> My concerns are at a different level and have to do with the way industry at large will be able to access innovation. AOM will certainly give much needed stability to the video codec market but this will come at the cost of reduced if not entirely halted technical progress. There will simply be no incentive for companies to develop new video compression technologies, at very significant cost because of the sophistication of the field, knowing that their assets will be thankfully – and nothing more – accepted and used by AOM in their video codecs.

> Companies will slash their video compression technology investments, thousands of jobs will go and millions of USD of funding to universities will be cut. A successful “access technology at no cost” model will spread to other fields.

Money is the motivator. Figuring out how to reward investment in pushing the technology forward is his concern. It sounds like he is open to suggestions.
by giantg2 | 2025-08-07 13:22:48+00:00
"Kids saying shit is now equivalent to 'normal terrorist[ic] threat cases'?"

It's terroristic threats. That's the law most of the school shooting threats would get charged under. The real problem is that most states have automatic reporting laws, which means you have to report anything that sounds like a threat even if it isn't. This is the main difference between regular cases and school cases - you end up with a lot of junk being reported and potentially causing more harm than it was intended to prevent.
by krapp | 2025-08-07 13:22:50+00:00
The most obvious evidence that Asimov's three laws are not a good framework is the fact that they are not a framework, they are a plot device. Isaac Asimov was a professor of biochemistry, he had no clue about how robots or AI might actually work. The robots in his stories have "positronic brains" because positrons at the time were newly discovered and sounded cool.

They aren't simply "good for story writing," their entire narrative purpose is to be flawed, and to fail in entertaining ways. The specific context in which the three laws are employed in stories is relevant, because they are a statement by the author about the hubris of applying overly simplistic solutions to moral and ethical problems.

And the assumptions that the three laws are based on aren't even relevant to modern AI. They seem to work in universe because the model of AI at the time was purely rational, logical and strict, like Data from Star Trek. They fail because robots find logical loopholes which may violate the spirit of the laws but still technically apply. It's essentially a math problem, rather than a moral or ethical problem, whereby the robots find a novel set of variables letting them balance the equation in ways that lead to amoral or immoral consequences.

But modern LLMs aren't purely rational, logical and strict. They're weird in ways no one back in Asimov's day would ever have expected. LLMs (appear to) lie, prevaricate, fabricate, express emotion and numerous other behaviors that would have been considered impossible for any hypothetical AI at the time. So even if the three laws were a valid framework for the kinds of AI in Asimov's stories, they wouldn't work for modern LLMs because the priors don't apply.
by csomar | 2025-08-07 13:23:01+00:00
> An attacker can simply send your email address to a legitimate service, and prompt for a 6-digit code. You can't know for sure if the code is supposed to be entered in the right place. Password managers (a usual defense against phishing) can't help you either.

Roughly the same security for password-login with email recovery. The only difference is that this makes the attack surface larger because the user is frequently using email.

The only secure login is through 1. a hardware device and 2. a solution where both the user/service are "married" and can challenge each other during the login process. This way, your certificate of authentication will also check that the site you are connecting to is who it says it is.
by cgadski | 2025-08-07 13:23:33+00:00
To summarize: we're making a series of i.i.d. draws from a distribution and asking how many draws N we need to make until we get something larger than our first draw.

Conditional on the value of the first draw, N is geometrically distributed. If we're drawing from an absolutely continuous distribution on the first line, then of course the details of our distribution don't matter: N is a draw from a geometric distribution with rate lambda, where lambda in turn is drawn uniformly from [0, 1]. It follows that N has a thick tail; for example, the expected value of N is the expected value of 1/lambda, which is infinite. In fact, N turns out to have a power law tail.

However, this isn't true if we're drawing from a distribution that's not absolutely continuous. If you coarse-grain into just "fast" and "slow" cars, then N again has a thin (geometric) tail. More to the point, if we imagine that our queues of cars need to be formed within a finite amount of time, then a car is only added to the queue in front of it if its velocity is epsilon larger than the velocity of the queue, and the problematic situation where lambda -> 0 goes away. In this idealized scenario, I guess you could relate the rate of the exponential tail of N to how long the cars have been travelling for.

Finally, it's worth remembering the old "waiting-time paradox": the variable N we're talking about is not the same as the length of the queue that a randomly selected driver finds themself in. What's the distribution of the latter---the distribution of "experienced" queue lengths? In this post the author computed that P(N = n) = 1/n(n + 1). It stands to reason that to get the density of the distribution of experienced lengths we need to multiply by n and divide by a normalizing constant. Unfortunately, you can't multiply 1/(n + 1) by any constant to get a probability distribution, since the sum over n diverges.

What does it mean that the distribution of experienced queues lengths doesn't exist? If you did a huge numerical simulation, you'd find that almost all drivers experience incredibly large queues, and that this concentration towards large queues only becomes more pronounced as you simulate more drivers. If anything, you could argue that the experienced queue length is "concentrated at infinity," although of course in practice all queues are finite.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-07 13:23:52+00:00
It's odd. People didn't buy newspapers for the classifieds. Classifieds were there nonetheless and they appear to have kept the lights on for the newspaper.

It suggests the newspaper funding model was already broken — they just didn't know it until the internet came along.

Of course by my own fucked up logic then any enterprise making money based on advertisements is on a precarious footing since no one engages in their business for the ads.
by District5524 | 2025-08-07 13:24:21+00:00
That reminds me of the new draft standard of CEN/CENELEC (EU std body) on "Competence requirements for professional AI ethicists" https://standards.cencenelec.eu/dyn/www/f?p=205:22:0::::FSP_...

But by the time they'll adopt it, singularity will already have happened... For some reason, my instincts suggests there will be no MA in Philosophy needed.
by theschmed | 2025-08-07 13:24:26+00:00
I hadn't thought of this use case for aliases.

I had to make my Outlook email primary again on my Microsoft account, unfortunately, because of how I use OneDrive. I send people share invitations and there are scenarios (or at least there were the last time I checked) where sending invitations from the primary account email is the only way to deliver the invite. If your external email alias is primary, they'll attempt to send an email from Outlook's servers that spoofs the alias email :/
by Reason077 | 2025-08-07 13:24:40+00:00
> "Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken."

Has AV1 solved this, to some extent? Although there are patent claims against it (patents for technologies that are fundamental to all the modern video codecs), it still seems better than the patent & licensing situation for h264 / h265.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-07 13:24:46+00:00
I don't think this is correct because AI output can be constrained to a fixed format (such as JSON) during inference. Then MCP is useful because the "tool_calls" section of that fixed JSON output can be restricted to only mention tools that are included in the MCP input, their input parameters might also be constrained etc. Free text input wouldn't give you any of that!
by visualstackk | 2025-08-07 13:25:00+00:00
> I only have one meeting a month nowadays so I might take a look if that situation ever changes (hopefully it doesn't!).

I'm happy for you

> So the macOS app sets up a local webserver on some port that the Chrome extensions knows about in advance? Smart, kinda like how I had to do an auth flow for one of my CLI apps.

Exactly like this! Some caveats there since Chrome actually shuts down extensions after 30 seconds or so if nothing happens (so you need to keep firing off messages across the connection to keep the extension alive).
by mr_toad | 2025-08-07 13:26:32+00:00
MP4s are compressed data, not a compression algorithm. An MP4 (or any compressed data) is not a “prediction”, it is the difference between what was predicted and what you’re trying to compress.

An LLM is (or can be used) as a compression algorithm, but it is not compressed data. It is possible to have an overfit algorithm exactly predict (or reproduce) an output, but it’s not possible for one to reproduce all the outputs due to the pigeonhole principle.

To reiterate - LLMs are not compressed data.
by fragmede | 2025-08-07 13:26:38+00:00
The way I see it, the identity that, dare I say most people so engaged with the debate here, is that of our programming ability, and naturally, we mostly believe that we're above average at it. Some people have found AI to be useful, others have not. In calling LLMs mere stoichastic parrots, the implication is that someone who could possibly find them as useful is an idiot, and a bad programmer. Conversely, people see the people who call them soichastic parrots as bad programmers who are full of themselves and are too stupid to know a useful tool because they're too blinded by... whatever. When you have two tribes trying to exchange comments with that underlying implication from both sides, there's not really room for productive discussion

There's a their group of people who see these things as tools, and want to learn about them. How to use them well; their shortcomings, but as usual, the reasonable voices get drowned out by loud rants and diatribes.
by saltysalt | 2025-08-07 13:26:44+00:00
Just one IP for now. You are right to worry about being blocked from crawling however, it has happened to me already on a few sites. The key things to help mitigate against this are:

1. Always identify your crawler via a consistent user-agent string, that explains its a web search crawler and not a generic web browser.

2. Always obey the directives in robots.txt.

3. Make sure your crawler is not too aggressive (low frequency of requests).

(updated for formatting)
by clickety_clack | 2025-08-07 13:27:03+00:00
Exactly. For personal authentication, you are at least personally incentivized to do the right things. For corporate auth, people will do whatever it takes to skip any kind of login.

I once knew a guy who refused to let his office computer go to sleep just to avoid having to enter his password to unlock his computer. He was a really senior guy too, so IT bent to allow him do this. What finally made him lock his computer was a colleague sending an email to all staff from his open outlook saying “Hi everyone, it’s my birthday today and I’m disappointed because hardly anyone has come by to wish me happy birthday”. The sheer mortification made him change his ways.
by ilamont | 2025-08-07 13:27:04+00:00
That’s right.

How many HN denizens are the de facto tech support for family members when they can’t login, can’t update, can’t get rid of some unwanted behavior, or just can’t figure stuff out?

I don’t blame them one bit. The tech world has presented them with hundreds of different interfaces, recovery, processes, and policies dreamed up by engineers and executives who assume most of their user base is just like them.
by angrydev | 2025-08-07 13:27:04+00:00
OP is just ragebait for nerds. How many articles have been published in the last 20 years about the issues with passwords? Now we're saying that the small chance some user ends up on bad-minecraft.com with a login form is actually worse than using "L3tmein!" as a password everywhere? Please find something more worthy to spend your time thinking about.