MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by linuxftw | 2025-08-28 15:19:16+00:00
What nobody seems to ever share is the context and TTFT (time to first token). You can get a very good TPS by using small prompts, even if the output tokens are very large. If you try to do any kind of agentic coding locally, where contexts are 7k+, local hardware completely falls over.

qwen-code (cli) gives like 2k requests per day for free (and is fantastic), so unless you have a very specific use case, buying a system for local LLM use is not a good use of funds.

If you're in the market for a desktop PC anyway, and just want to tinker with LLMs, then the AMD systems are a fair value IMO, plus the drivers are open source so everything just works out of the box (with Vulkan, anyway).
by gf000 | 2025-08-28 15:19:29+00:00
> Sure, but as ModernMech said, the vast majority of Rust's benefits come from having sum types and pattern matching.

Doubt. There were lots of languages giving you just that, and they never had this amount of hype. See Scala, OCaml, Haskell, etc.

Rust has one unique ability, and many shared by other languages. It's quite clearly popular for the former (though languages are a packages, so of course it's a well put together language all around).
by troupo | 2025-08-28 15:19:29+00:00
*Edit: misread the post I replied to, disregard comment contents*

> Plenty of game applications today already have a render path of input -> pass through AI model -> final image.

Where "plenty" equals zero?

> In those cases, you have a very high-fidelity input doing most of the heavy lifting, and the AI pass filling in gaps.

That is, in these cases you already have high-fidelity input in the form of an actual game, and "AI" contributions to the output are dubious at best.

Do you really believe it's DLSS that's doing all the heavy lifting in a game like Expedition 33 or Cyberpunk 2077?
by grogenaut | 2025-08-28 15:20:05+00:00
I had some VCs try and pitch me on joining a few companies as an advisor. When I didn't bite they pivoted to me just making a company. "What idea" I asked. "I'm sure you have some good ones, let us know." They said. "Money is cheap right now, ideas aren't".

I doubt they'd return my call today.
by bubblelicious | 2025-08-28 15:20:38+00:00
I agree — probably my own selective memory and straw-manning. It just feels in my mind like the “vibe” on HN (in terms of articles that reach the front page and top rated comments) is very anti-AI. But of course even if true it is a biased picture of HN readers.

Would be interesting to see some analysis from HN data to understand just how accurate my perception is; of course doesn’t clear up the bias issue.
by SCdF | 2025-08-28 15:21:03+00:00
So have they stopped having the >1 average remote drivers for each self driving vehicle as well?

The problem with these statements is language has so much context implicit in it. "driving around on their own" to me means with zero active oversight. "driving around" to me means not just in a small set of city streets, but as a replacement for human driving (eg anywhere a vehicle can physically fit). Obviously to you it means other things, but it's what makes these conversations and statements of fact challenging.
by chrisweekly | 2025-08-28 15:21:28+00:00
> "The general consensus around software development seems to be that while AI is lowering the barrier of entry to "producing code", the rate of production of tech debt and code that no one "owns" (understands) has exploded with yet-to-be-seen consequences."

^ This. (Tho I'm not sure about it being "general consensus".) Vibe code is the payday loan (or high-interest credit card) of tech debt. Demo-quality code has a way of making it into production. Now "everyone" can produce demos and PoCs. Companies that leverage AI as a powerful tool in the hands of experienced engineers may be able to iterate faster and increase quality, but I expect a sad majority to learn the hard way that there's no free lunch, and shipping something you don't understand is a recipe for disaster.
by corysama | 2025-08-28 15:21:32+00:00
Because our ability to simulate/render a realistic world in real time using direct equations is still very limited. We’re accustomed to these limitations and often feel “graphics are good enough”. But, we’ll always be decades behind “ILM in real time”.

The AI route has a good chance of moving us from decades behind ILM to merely “years behind ILM”.
by megaloblasto | 2025-08-28 15:21:39+00:00
$20,000 annually to keep up on the latest science makes it prohibitively expensive for most of the world to do meaningful science. If only the rich can do science then we miss out on crucial scientific advancements. Less scientific advancements means less people get life saving medicines, less environmental disasters are uncovered and dealt with.

Plus, I was just using your own logic of replacing "paper" with anything else that I might consume in my everyday life.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-28 15:21:43+00:00
By all accounts, yes.

"Model collapse" is a popular idea among the people who know nothing about AI, but it doesn't seem to be happening in real world. Dataset quality estimation shows no data quality drop over time, despite the estimates of "AI contamination" trickling up over time. Some data quality estimates show weak inverse effects (dataset quality is rising over time a little?), which is a mindfuck.

The performance of frontier AI systems also keeps improving, which is entirely expected. So does price-performance. One of the most "automation-relevant" performance metrics is "ability to complete long tasks", and that shows vaguely exponential growth.
by lotharcable | 2025-08-28 15:21:53+00:00
I think that using the term 'application containers' to reference docker and 'system containers' to reference LXC is a bit of a meaningless distinction.

You can 100% host "systems containers" on Docker and you can host "applications" on LXC.

Like if I want a entire OS with it's own init system and users and so on and so forth I can do it it OCI images.

In fact I use it every single day with distrobox on top of Podman using OCI container images.

And it works a hell of a lot better then if I tried to do it on LXC.
by jordanb | 2025-08-28 15:21:54+00:00
It can be oversupply/outsourcing and also secular: You can have basically chronic oversupply due to a declining/maturing industry. Chronic oversupply because the number of engineers needed goes down every year and the pipeline isn't calibrated for that (academia has been dealing with this for a very long time now, look up the postdocalypse). Outsourcing, because as projects mature and new stuff doesn't come along to replace, running maintenance offshore gets easier.

Software isn't eating the world. Software ate the world. New use cases have basically not worked out (metaverse!) or are actively harmful.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-28 15:22:03+00:00
> (and that is not a fixable problem)

Genie 3 is incredible (relative to previous models) in this regard. Not a solve, but it is doing what it is not supposed to be able to do.[1]

[1]https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-3-a-new-frontier...
by strangecasts | 2025-08-28 15:22:03+00:00
The case you might be thinking of is the JBIG2 implementation bug [1, 2] in Xerox photocopiers where the pattern-matching would incorrectly treat certain characters as interchangeable, leading to numbers getting rewritten in spreadsheets.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23588202

[2] https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0810_xerox_investigati...
by pessimizer | 2025-08-28 15:22:04+00:00
> better would be to save a snapshot of the site alongside the bookmark instead.

I've been using Zotero for that, but I again wish we had a browser maker that was concerned about users, and felt their only goal was to give the user as much control and ability as they can handle, and as much protection as they ask for.

Sadly, Zotero and a lot of other software in that line is built with no thought to speed, I think more than a few thousand entries will make it impossible to open, browse, or search. This seems to be a commonality of all of this type of software; that it isn't really meant to be used.
by xienze | 2025-08-28 15:22:55+00:00
I would imagine it's because it makes for a lot more fun support possibilities when all the underlying stuff in the stack (kernel, ZFS, Docker, Python, etc. etc.) is subject to the whims of the end user. When you ship the entire OS yourself you can be more certain about the versions of all the kernel+userland stuff and therefore the interactions between them all.
by jmwilson | 2025-08-28 15:23:31+00:00
TrueNAS is just web-based configuration management. As long as you only use the web UI, your system state can be distilled down to the config file it generates.

If you do a vanilla FreeBSD+samba+NFS+ZFS setup, you'll need to edit several files around the file system, which are easy to forget months down the line in case of adjustment or disaster recovery.
by kleiba | 2025-08-28 15:24:12+00:00
> Just because something has a price associated with it, that does not make the pricing model inherently correct or just.

And just because a pricing model is not correct or just does not automatically give you liberty to circumvent that pricing model. If you think that Nike shoes are overpriced and hey, there's Chinese counterfeits readily available, does not automatically make the latter legal or even morally justified.
by grim_io | 2025-08-28 15:24:16+00:00
No matter how much better they get, I don't see any actual sign of intelligence, do you?

There is a lot of handwaving around the definition of intelligence in this context, of course. My definition would be actual on the job learning and reliability i don't need to second guess every time.

I might be wrong, but those 2 requirements seem not compatible with current approach/hardware limitations.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-08-28 15:24:25+00:00
tl;dr (from the linked author):

>In short: He chose a fundraiser structure that avoids standard accountability mechanisms he was familiar with. He never had any plan or capability to deliver what he promised. And when I offered a way for him to do it anyway, he gave me some bafflegab about how expensive it is to write docs. Effectively, his public promises about how he would use the Requests 3 money were lies from start to finish, and he hasn't shown any remorse or even understanding that this is a problem.

A similar (but unrelated) fundraiser mechanism is why I no longer donate to any fundraisers, online (no accountability, no refunds). I'm looking at you µOptics >:-|
by mtlynch | 2025-08-28 15:24:39+00:00
>so total storage is about ~288TB

?!?

How do you fill 288 TB? Is it mostly media?

>I liked FreeNAS for awhile, but after a certain point I kind of just learned how to properly use Samba and NFS and ZFS, and after that I kind of felt like it was just getting in the way.

I've been a mostly happy TrueNAS user for about four years, but I'm starting to feel this way.

I recently wrote about expanding my 4-disk raidz1 pool to a 6-disk raidz2 pool.[1] I did everything using ZFS command-line tools because what I wanted wasn't possible through the TrueNAS UI.

A developer from iXsystems (the company that maintains TrueNAS) read my post and told me that creating a ZFS pool from the zfs command-line utility is not supported, and so I may hit bugs when I use the pool in TrueNAS.

I was really surprised that TrueNAS can't just accept whatever the state of the ZFS pool is. It feels like an overreach that TrueNAS expects to manage all ZFS interactions.

I'm converting more of my infrastructure to NixOS, and I know a lot of people just manage their NAS with NixOS, which is sounding more and more appealing to me.

[1] https://mtlynch.io/raidz1-to-raidz2/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/truenas/comments/1m7b5e0/migrating_...
Show HN: I cut my Claude API bill by 66% with Git-based context
by alessandro-a | 2025-08-28 15:25:10+00:00
Hey HN,

I built ShadowGit a while back to automatically commit code every minute to a hidden git repo (.shadowgit.git). Original goal was to easily rollback when AI tools break things.

But I discovered something interesting: this minute-by-minute history is perfect context for AI assistants.

So I built an MCP server that lets Claude/Cursor query this history using native git commands. The results surprised me:

Before: Claude would read my entire codebase repeatedly, burning 15,000+ tokens to debug issues. After: Claude runs `git log --grep="drag"` finds when drag-and-drop worked, applies that fix. 5,000 tokens.

How it works technically:

1. ShadowGit watches your project and commits every save to .shadowgit.git (parallel to your main repo)

2. MCP server exposes git operations to AI: - `git diff HEAD~10 -- component.tsx` to see recent changes - `git log -S "functionName"` to find when code was added - `git show COMMIT:file.js` to retrieve working versions

3. AI naturally understands git, so instead of dumping context, it surgically queries what it needs

It's free while I am testing and improving it. I am looking for feedback on the project and maybe some integration ideas beyond MCP.

Thanks! Alessandro
by est31 | 2025-08-28 15:25:24+00:00
GPT-5 was I suppose their attempt to make a product that provides as good metrics as their earlier products.

Uber doesn't really compare, as they had existing competition from taxi companies that they first had to/have to destroy. And cars or fuel didn't get 10x cheaper over the time of Uber's existence, but I'm sure that they still can optimize a lot for efficiency.

I'm more worried about OpenAIs capability to build a good moat. Right now it seems that each success is replicated by the competing companies quickly. Each month there is a new leader in the benchmarks. Maybe the moat will be the data in the end, i.e. there is barriers nowadays to crawl many websites that have lots of text. Meanwhile they might make agreements with the established AI players, maybe some of those agreements will be exclusive. Not just for training but also for updating wrt world news.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-08-28 15:25:48+00:00
I don't have figures to back that up, but I did read some figures on posts regarding this. my comment was based on real-life compromises observed.

Drivers and applications are not the same thing, certainly and no application is the same as other applications. browsers aren't the same as file managers. To users what matters is impact not category. A persons entire life can be destroyed because of one side-loaded app, much less so with a windows rootkit (because you don't have phone number/2fa app,etc.. on your windows box).

Users are free to buy devices that let them install any app. Google is responsible for the majority of users who don't care about installing apps from anonymous randos, but care much much more about their livelihoods and well being suffering at the hands of criminals!

> Those targets are rapidly disappearing. Alternative Android ROMs are dying one by one. Look at how few modern phones are officially supported by LineageOS. And many of those are Pixels which Google is no longer releasing binaries for (making ROM builders lives harder).

Ok, then let's talk about that, I'm all for sticking it to Google for all that b.s., but not for the topic at hand.
by geerlingguy | 2025-08-28 15:25:51+00:00
Probably the closest thing that already exists is just running Cockpit[1]. 45Drives even maintains some helpful storage and file sharing plugins for it[2], though some of those are only compatible with x86 for now.

[1] https://cockpit-project.org

[2] https://github.com/45Drives?q=cockpit
by dadrian | 2025-08-28 15:25:53+00:00
Most Fund I’s are going to be smaller funds, often $9.99MM to allow for a larger number of smaller LPs due to the $10MM threshold from the SEC. Whereas Fund II-IV are going to be considerably bigger, often hundreds of millions of dollars. So a large number of smaller funds falling off won’t make that big of a dent in the total dollars available, but may make it harder to get the smaller initial checks.
Show HN: I used nano banana to create art – in just a few seconds
by samuelaidoo45 | 2025-08-28 15:25:54+00:00
I built a small tool that lets you transform any photo into realistic pencil drawings using AI — no Photoshop skills required. The idea came from seeing how many people love hand-drawn portraits but don’t have the time (or budget) to commission an artist. With this, you can upload a photo, type a simple prompt, and get back a graphite-style pencil sketch in seconds.

How it works:

upload an image

The AI generates a pencil drawing with shading and detail that looks hand-drawn.

You can experiment with different styles (realistic, artistic, etc.) to get unique results.

Try it here: https://www.pencilart.app/
by noodletheworld | 2025-08-28 15:25:56+00:00
Huh.

I feel oddly skeptical about this article; I can't specifically argue the numbers, since I have no idea, but... there are some decent open source models; they're not state of the art, but if inference is this cheap then why aren't there multiple API providers offering models at dirt cheap prices?

The only cheap-ass providers I've seen only run tiny models. Where's my cheap deepseek-R1?

Surely if its this cheap, and we're talking massive margins according to this, I should be able to get a cheap / run my own 600B param model.

Am I missing something?

It seems that reality (ie. the absence of people actually doing things this cheap) is the biggest critic of this set of calculations.
by uyzstvqs | 2025-08-28 15:25:59+00:00
Right. It could just be the usual suspects of misinformation (Reddit, click-hungry "journalists", certain YouTube/Tiktok creators) amplifying each other in a circle. Just like that "16 billion passwords data leak" earlier this year.

There is probably something going on. It could very well just be a bad batch of SSD controllers from one manufacturer failing.
by voidhorse | 2025-08-28 15:26:16+00:00
Agreed. Also, fwiw, the mathematics involved in the paper are pretty simple as far as mathematical sophistication goes. Spend two to three months on one "higher level" maths course of your choosing and you'll be able to fully understand every equation in this paper relatively easily. Even a basic course in information theory coupled with some discrete maths should give you essentially all you need to comprehend the math in this post. The concepts being presented here are not mysterious and much of this math is banal. Mathematical notation can seem foreboding, but once you grasp it, you'll see, like Von Neumann said, that life is complicated but math is simple.
by erikerikson | 2025-08-28 15:26:40+00:00
Welcome to Hacker News.

You're not wrong. I thought it was a good read and some awesome honesty if not also leaving some things unmentioned or undescribed. Sometimes the details matter a lot.

Let's imagine another, non-existing, person so as to clearly differentiate from the author. Said imaginary person gets violent due to socialization and a anger issues. How should the company handle an episode that leaves another employee with a broken nose and bruises? Disclosure doesn't defend a company from it's duty to protect the bodily health of that person's coworkers does it?

Most people have some mental unwellness or at least experiences they struggle to navigate or understand. Their experiences can make the problem worse and some conditions lead to behaviors that add processing load and tax their capacity to remain well. At times that exceeds a capacity to navigate and injury occurs. While invisible that injury has impact and costs. Employees have a right to not be harmed by their coworkers and a right to demand employers protect that right. I'm making that argument on a basis of common decency but there are legal liabilities to consider as well. All of this sort of thing is a distraction from the work the employer needs done.

Our world is better off to the extent we help everyone be productive and contribute at their maximal capacity. While some of the affects we have on one another are very positive, today we are struggling with how to balance the negative hard affects.

I can report leaving a really wonderful job after being socially attacked by a coworker that lost reality and falsely convinced my team that I had harmed them. Despite sharing evidence from the third party involved that it was a departure from reality, my boss decided not to help correct the problem. This has very negative impacts on my mental health, finances, marriage, and it derailed my career for a while. I probably had good standing to sue for damages. I certainly was damaged. There had been many poor behaviors from that person prior.

It is complicated and messy. As much as I appreciated it, the essay reads to me as though it minimizes the negatives. Without discounting it and while being understanding and inclusive we still need to manage impacts and the distractions those negatives create.
by Havoc | 2025-08-28 15:26:52+00:00
I'm in an adjacent space so quite interesting to me. Couple of concerns:

1) This Fund+Roman Numeral notation is universal among funds. Meaning this data isn't VC. It's use of fund structures. Real estate, PE, private credit maybe bit of hedge funds etc...and yes also VC.

2) Filling trends are affected by jurisdiction fashions so to speak. One of the big fund jurisdiction makes a small rule tweak and everything pivots there. Or away. The funds we're setting up today are structured differently and in different jurisdictions than 2 years ago. Same for regional focus. Think about what that does to a single jurisdiction trend analysis like this.

3) The spike coincides pretty neatly with covid, lockdown and that sudden injection of cash trillions into the financial system. So a spike in fund entities registered makes sense. Haven't looked at who got those trillions, but I'd wager it was bigger institutions not young VC operations starting their first fund.

Still the core hypothesis seems sound for funds overall. Regardless of type a lot of these funds will indeed be on a 2-4 year investment period. So it does broadly check out that there might be a softening of funding supply coming up.
Show HN: Dolpo – A VS Code Pomodoro Timer with Brown Noise
by SunTree | 2025-08-28 15:27:07+00:00
Key features: • Pomodoro timer built directly into VS Code (no switching apps) • Integrated Brown noise for background ambient(no more juggling Spotify + timer + focus apps) • "Work Hours" concept – closes at 6pm, opens at 8am in your timezone • Customizable work/break durations
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-28 15:27:23+00:00
https://alexispurslane.github.io/html-commenter/try.html#H4s...

Hah! Nice.

To be fair, unless you also add a component for server-side storage "somewhere", the sharing is a bit chaotic.

> don't want to have to send multiple versions of files around like it's 1990

Unless I'm missing something, you'll have a bunch of links laying around? Is there a way to "group" links together? Merge?

Edit: oh, there's a resolve thing. So presumably you'd get links from other people and resolve them? Is that tracked anywhere?
by smohare | 2025-08-28 15:27:23+00:00
You’re making the classic mistake in conflating computing how pathways to conditions can rise from computing conditionals given the current state. There’s absolutely no information theoretical difference between you saying “A girl opened the door” and “I was told the family has a girl.”

Look at the more technical descriptions using conditional probabilities of the Monty Hall problem as it is essentially equivalent. You’re trying to factor in the probability of whether Monty knows if a goat is behind a door when the observable information is that there is an open door with a goat. One you make that observation many things collapse.