MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dns_snek | 2025-08-19 11:24:13+00:00
What does "control over their work" mean if it's not about losing a sale?

Developers exerting control over a copy that's already in someone's hands has never been a good thing. Too many games have had content ripped out years later because the developer had a change of heart, or was contractually obligated to remove it due to some licensing agreement (unbeknownst to their customers, of course). Both of these scenarios are immoral (arguably illegal) and don't deserve support.
Are serverless AI providers operating at a loss?
by gutomotta | 2025-08-19 11:24:30+00:00
I've been hearing a lot about how Cursor, Anthropic, and other AI companies based on proprietary models and charging monthly subscriptions might be operating at huge losses.

How about companies like Groq, Fireworks, and other providers that offer serverless inference based on open-weight models? I use them a lot presuming that, since they don't have training costs and also only charge per token rather than monthly subscriptions, they would be more economically viable. Is that assumption reasonable though?
by DrewADesign | 2025-08-19 11:24:33+00:00
Skeuomorphs retain purely ornamental components of the thing it’s mimicking. If it was a graphic of a rope rather than a dashed line, or if it looked like the line was tied up around the thing in a bow, those would be skeuomorphic elements. But graphical interface elements always retain ‘some’ functional connection to the physical world and trigger ‘some’ abstracted existing metal model about how the world works. GUIs themselves conceptually mimic the idea of a physical space because it’s easier for people to reason about than a bunch of text. This is no more skeuomorphic than the reply button below the comment box.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-19 11:24:43+00:00
> Charging people to access their system is the obvious route to profitability

Ed argues, and I agree with him, that there is simply no route to profitablility that makes sense numbers wise.

Considering this is the only sector propping up the otherwise very bleak US economy currently, if there are indeed losers, the consequences would far surpass the 2008 financial crisis. And it will spread. Closing our eyes to the numbers, especially if they are that bad, and relying on vibes and promises of leaders that failed to deliver again and again (Musk's literally every promise recently, to Zuck's metaverse and superintelligence, to sama's ChatGPT recent releases and false promises of AGI).

I know investors often invest based on vibes and hype (see Softbank and WeWork) but not paying attention to the numbers and hoping the balance sheets magically resolve themselves somehow has reached such a predominance that it starts resembling a cult.
by zahlman | 2025-08-19 11:25:07+00:00
You joke, but you highlight an important problem with the argument.

The idea is that we write `foo.bar`, where `foo` is in scope, exactly because `foo` is in scope. We don't write `bar from foo` or whatever, because it would be hard to reverse search the things that have `bar` in them.

But which is more likely: will `foo` be Liskov-substitutable for `bar`, or will other things that contain a `bar` have a `bar` of a Liskov-substitutable type?

Which is to say, the author is depending on a particularly idiosyncratic meaning of "valid".

That said, the problem the author describes at the beginning can be easily worked around, if you like this kind of workflow:

words_on_lines = [st # 'str' is a plausible autocompletion words_on_lines = [str.sp # must be either 'split' or 'splitlines', unless 'str' is shadowed words_on_lines = [str.split(line) for # 'line in' can be suggested words_on_lines = [str.split(line) for line in text.splitlines()] # IDE can automatically check type and refactor the idiom

And it also isn't at all true that IDEs work left to right. They're constantly auto-typing the balancing close parentheses/braces/brackets for me and it's never clear to me what the intended flow is for moving past what was automatically typed, or whether manually typing that bracket explicitly (since I'm in my own "automatic typing") will double it up or not. There's nothing preventing the IDE from expecting you to type the clauses of the comprehension in a different order and I wouldn't at all be surprised to hear that someone has already implemented this.
by cubefox | 2025-08-19 11:25:27+00:00
Apart from backpropagation, the biggest improvements were probably changes in the network architecture. Standard feed-forward MPCs are fairly inefficient. Then there were architectures like CNNs, LSTMs, Transformers. There were also improvements in the activation function and in the gradient descent method (AdamW), but I'm not sure whether these had a substantial impact like CNNs or Transformers. Another factor was training on GPUs.
by jorge-d | 2025-08-19 11:25:56+00:00
From my experience it was hell of a whole week, specially the first 5 days. And every kind of light was aggressive for me. My eyesight took ~3 weeks to be able to read properly on screen without zooming 400%. I didn't freak out because my doctor told me that the healing process really depended on everyone's body. 2 years later I have absolutely not regrets from doing that surgery despite probably still always reminding myself as one of the worst week of my life during recovery.
by isodev | 2025-08-19 11:26:48+00:00
I love the little historical overview in the post. With more than 25 years of hindsight, the push against user-centred standards is so obvious. W3C is always better than whatever coolaid-du-jour big corps wants you to drink because (at the very least), someone actually thinks "how is this going to affect people using it" as opposed to Google/Apple's approach "How is this going to affect our revenue".
by ddahlen | 2025-08-19 11:27:49+00:00
This is really impressive! I considered buying a big harmonic drive mount for my scope, but the cost is really prohibitive.

I have experienced the pain of getting ekos/kstars/indi tools to work well on my personal scope. If you want to try driving indi devices via python I have some python code (it's not super polished, but it does enough for my needs): https://github.com/dahlend/contindi
by swores | 2025-08-19 11:28:24+00:00
Well scythes are a typical way to cut grass, and they are basically just swinging a blade to do it - they just use a long handle to make it easy to move the blade fast enough.

https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=scythe+grass+cut

(I've no idea about the physics of required speed or blade sharpness, so don't know how feasible or not a robot cutting this way would be.)
by podgorniy | 2025-08-19 11:29:19+00:00
the same is my beef with typescript's imports:

import { MyClass } from './lib.ts'

First you need to type what to import and then from where leaving. There is no linear way of discovering import options from the source of imports without extra jumping in the code.

Alternatively linear completion, or (TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_disclosure) would be possible for imports of shape like:

from './lib.ts' import { MyClass }

If course authors of the import syntax had good reasons (which I don't know) to build stuff that way they've built it.
by riehwvfbk | 2025-08-19 11:30:00+00:00
My version of "why Amazon is like this" is simpler. Think of their Supreme Leader. Good guy or a-hole? That one is easy to answer.

Now, what kind of right-hand man he's going to click with? What will their lieutenants be like? And what kind of people they will promote? And what kind of company will their company be?

Amazon is the kind of fish that rots starting from the head.
by busfahrer | 2025-08-19 11:30:08+00:00
I have fond memories of 2fort. Desperately wanting to play TF1 on a 14.4K modem from Germany - no European servers meant playing with 500ms ping, which made aiming completely impossible, so I took the pacifist route each time by picking the scout class and then trying to steal the flag unnoticed by coming in through the sewers. It worked sometimes when the server was only half full.
Feedback on Masterit.ai – AI Interview Platform
by masteritai | 2025-08-19 11:31:04+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m exploring an idea: Masterit.ai, an AI-powered interview platform that lets candidates use AI tools (like Copilot/ChatGPT) during technical assessments, while still ensuring fairness and evaluability.

The problem:

Current coding tests often feel artificial—no access to real tools.

Hiring managers want to know how candidates solve problems, not just if they get the “right” answer.

With AI assistants now part of daily engineering workflows, excluding them from interviews feels outdated.

Our approach:

Embed an AI coding assistant inside the interview IDE.

Capture the entire problem-solving journey (queries, prompts, iterations).

Provide hiring managers with structured insights into candidate collaboration, prompting, and critical thinking.

I’d love HN’s feedback on:

Do you see value in assessing AI collaboration skills during interviews?

If you’ve done technical hiring, what’s missing from current platforms like Codility, HackerRank, or CoderPad?

Would companies adopt this, or is there still hesitation about “AI in interviews”?

Any thoughts (or tough critiques) would be hugely helpful at this stage.

Thanks!
by huey77 | 2025-08-19 11:31:20+00:00
Verification is handled in two ways:

- Simple online verification: the easiest way is to use the public POST /v1/verify endpoint. Any of your services can call this with the agent's credential. It's a stateless check that returns a JSON object confirming if the token is valid and crucially what scopes and user_identifier it was issued for.

- Decentralized/offline verification: for more advanced use cases or high-throughput services that want to avoid a network call you can also verify the credentials offline. The tokens are standard JWTs signed with RS256, and I expose the public keys via a standard /.well-known/jwks.json endpoint on the main domain. You can fetch the keys, cache them and then verify the token signatures locally.

The goal is to make it easy for a developer to get started with the online endpoint, while still providing the standard, scalable method for more mature systems. Thanks for checking it out!
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-19 11:31:21+00:00
>It's the authenticity of people who don't make an effort, who don't feel any need to try, who know that people are going to accept them and look up to them no matter how shitty they are.

Or they know other people won't accept them regardless and they don't care.

It's one of those communication patterns you see at the top and the bottom and if your life consists of working in an office, living in a condo and golfing on the weekends you'll basically never run across anyone that does it.
by bryanhogan | 2025-08-19 11:31:23+00:00
For me it's the opposite and I highly disagree.

Valuable features such as this make working with markdown files much better. It's overall a huge plus for working with Obsidian. It does not change the content of the markdown files themselves, so there's no lock-in or other potentials long-term problems. It allows me to move further away from Notion, which is a great thing, and I hope to see them be able to fully replace Notion Databases in the future.
by riehwvfbk | 2025-08-19 11:31:31+00:00
I guess the kind of hubris that the author calls out applies to writing just as well as code.

However, you may be right that this post is not likely to have a lot of engagement, and the problem is lack of shared context. The average HN visitor dreams of working for a FAANG, even if it's Amazon. They are unlikely to relate. For someone who's experienced the cesspool firsthand though, this post felt visceral and very lucid.

One can't dilute all writing for the average bear in the name of engagement - that would mean loss of substance.
by TheDong | 2025-08-19 11:31:37+00:00
Use rust or typescript or something where it's socially acceptable to make small packages.

That'll also let you avoid writing the `if err != nil { return fmt.Errorf("context string something: %w", err) }` boilerplate again and again too (since you can just write '.context("context")?' each time).

If you're using Go, you're not supposed to build abstractions, small packages, or any sorta clever or good code. And be really careful using generics.

If you want to write abstractions, you're supposed to use a different language. Those are the rules.
by colesantiago | 2025-08-19 11:32:03+00:00
What can we do to stop Google killing the open web other than complaining?

One way is to tell everyone to use Firefox (uBlock origin works there)

It is still an issue that the Mozilla Foundation is still 80% funded by Google though, so this needs to be solved first.

Somehow Firefox needs to be moved away from Mozilla if they cannot find an alternative funding source other than Google.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-08-19 11:32:04+00:00
"The latter is illegal" has been a point of debate since the GDPR was inacted because it is certainly not obvious in the GDPR.

IMHO, decisions that have upheld that it is indeed illegal have tended to be "militant" and ignored that users had a genuine choice, and in fact 3 options: Accept cookies, etc or pay or leave. In practice we see that 99% of users choose to accept cookies/tracking, but this is not because the choice isn't genuine, it is because they don't care about cookies/tracking as long it means free access and that pisses off some people.
by motohagiography | 2025-08-19 11:32:14+00:00
It seems like this was written by someone who does not read literary fiction. It was defeined by this higher order portraiture of truth, and the effect that emerges from the whole piece. It's a full composition, where like classical music, you really need to hear the whole thing and not just a few bars or a riff.

Chiang is great. I think of him as the last good writer, as reviewers seemed to stop acknowledging anything good after his Exhalations, which was just before the culture was fully consumed by spasms. Maybe there is an opportunity, where AI will polarize the market for fiction, and the best stuff becomes a super valuable and rarefied pleasure against a backdrop of formulaic genre fiction and AI slop?
by graemep | 2025-08-19 11:32:36+00:00
I guess you are the product of a culture formed by a theistic religion?

Buddhism has some very different ideas. Its also quite varied - Theravada is more different from Zen than protestant Christianity is from Catholic or Orthodox.

Most types of Christian prayer are about having in effect on yourself, so it would not make sense. Even intercessionary prayer is a personal request, so this sort of thing sounds wrong, but the prayer wheels arise from completely different beliefs.
by spongebobism | 2025-08-19 11:32:40+00:00
Is that an innovation of Mahayana or Vajrayana Buddhism? I've only read Theravada texts, and in those, good and bad Karma are clearly differentiated. Attaining a pleasant rebirth is considered a wholesome pursuit that the teachings of the Buddha are supposed to help you with, though it is considered a lower pursuit than attaining Nirvana (the hierarchy is pleasant current life < pleasant rebirth < Nirvana, and the Dhamma claims to be the supreme authority on all 3).
by OgsyedIE | 2025-08-19 11:32:46+00:00
I'd previously read the story myself about a decade ago and it stuck in my mind because I quite enjoyed the autosurgery scene so all I was checking was whether it was a mistake AI commonly makes.

If you're wondering about the apparently unusual depth of checking logprobs across different versions, I have a pre-existing applet for that which was built for checking some categories of press releases in my industry.
by anthk | 2025-08-19 11:33:01+00:00
As an European, I find Americans more fascinated about Medieval buildings than us. I can see medieval churches and such by just a 10 minutes subway trip into the old town of the capital with ease. Less than 1 eur with a travelling pass card. It's just there, we see them without giving them too much care. The same with squares with buildings showing up arcs in the first floor. They give you both a shadow and and a place to rest. A pity the modern brutalist architecture wants these wiped out.

Still, liking them doesn't make must fascinating, but just useful and charming because of the slowed down ambient compared to modern cities. To me the modern US folklore and weird stuff (contraculture, UFO cults and such), scifi/hippie/hackers cross-polination are much more fascinating, because it's something 'modern' and 'weird', more machine bound than a utilitarian-but-pretty inspired design. Such as the Illuminatus trilogy.

Back to Europe, tons of medieval knowledge was still in use in small villages, such as knitting methods, homemade soap with cooking oil and so on. Oh, and lewd jokes/limericks, these were told and sang across centuries.
by fainpul | 2025-08-19 11:33:09+00:00
> Who can forget that rat breathing liquid oxygen (or whatever they called it)

I remember seeing the movie as a child with my parents and I was quite appaled by that scene (I hate seeing animal abuse). My father ensured me that was just some kind of effect trickery (I think he believed so himself). Later I found out that it was indeed real.

The liquid is called fluorocarbon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing#Films_and_tel...
by mg | 2025-08-19 11:33:23+00:00
Here is a strange one:

You look at integers in "packs" of 100. If a pack contains a prime number, you color it black, otherwise you color it red.

The first pack contains 100 consecutive integers. The second every second integer. The third every third integer and so on.

Every pack starts where the last one stopped.

On the first row, you draw 1 pack, on the second 2, on the third 3 and so on:

https://www.gibney.org/parallax_primes

It looks like hieroglyphs from another universe.

I'm still not sure why it looks the way it looks.

If you want to compare it to a random distribution, you can change this line:

if (isPrime(myNum)) return 1;

To this:

if (Math.random()>0.99) return 1;

Very different. I wonder where the symmetry and all the other properties of the pattern come from when using primes.
by uncircle | 2025-08-19 11:33:53+00:00
Without entering in the details of whether a soup and sandwich are worth 17.50 EUR, one thing I've noticed when people discuss prices is that they always refer to "what it used to cost" and forget about the real economic force of inflation.

When I enter a shop and a soup and sandwich cost almost 20 euros, I wonder what the hell happened to the world to increase its cost 3 or 4 multiples than what I used to pay 15 years ago, for example, while wages have absolutely not. And I imagine how much the establishment owner must cringe at having to marking up the price so much just to be able to afford staff and making a little profit for themselves.

One thing's for certain: the inflation figures economists publish are manufactured nonsense that underestimate how much the cost of living has increased for the regular citizen. Models tend to be incorrect representation of reality, and there are huge political incentives to make the model of inflation numbers much smaller than they actually are.
by neomantra | 2025-08-19 11:34:00+00:00
On my first couple days of writing MCP servers, I made ones that bind APIs (DataBento, Buttplug.io). I thought that was the point. These were my immediate takeaways:

1) I need an auto-binder (eg OpenAPI) or a better binding system like this UTCP is trying to be

2) I need a secure sandbox, for the system and even for the APIs (like a UAT env)

I’ve continued to make MCP servers and tools and realized (1) was a fallacy. Most APIs were not made for computers; they were made for humans to allow other humans to connect to their code.

It’s hard to explain, but it’s an ergonomic thing. An API to a database might have things like paging and filtering. The design might have to fit into a URL and you want to simplify or hide things. LLMs don’t care.

My insight was similar to this article wrt code. An LLM doesn’t need a cute API to a dataset. They can code so you don’t need to give them an API, you give them a SQL endpoint (my focus), or a Python venv, or a bash prompt.

Then akin to UTCP manuals, the user and LLM can develop tool descriptions and code helpers (in SQL, Views and stored procedures) to make them better at doing whatever they need to do. Maybe there’s a main tool description and then a supplementary user-specific one too.

So I’m taking a DuckDB, loading data and locking it down, and give a single SQL endpoint that returns a DB table in CSV. Then work with the LLMs to make tool descriptions and helpers in agentic loops.

So I think what y’all are working on is cool, but the power isn’t in the API connection itself, but how the LLM effectively uses it. But you can build that agentic-assist part into the product; or somebody wraps something around it.
by Galaco | 2025-08-19 11:35:40+00:00
I wouldn't be playing video games anymore if there were no more games with dedicated servers. Not from a moral standpoint, or from a competitive standpoint, but purely from the community perspective.

My youth was spent on Counterstrike: Source playing zombie mod, and then for years mapping for Zombie Escape, as a way to give back to those communities that gave me so much. I was never a mic user, and didn't use in game chat a huge amount either, but over time those regulars would still greet me and say hello. I rarely play now, but even after 17 years, when I show up once a year or so I'm always welcomed back in by all those who recognize me and admins switch to some fun maps (or some less fun ones that I made...), and we have a short catchup on life. Certainly many of these communities are on life-support, and most are long dead, but in all those people who play in these communities are the remnants of the communities who had just a little contribution in shaping the person I am today. I'll never forget when one community held a birthday event for me; for 8 hours we played every map I'd ever made, and won them all, with a full 64/64 server for the majority.

And I would never have experienced this if I hadn't happened to open Counterstrike: Source for the very first time, and my server browser's first entry just happened to be an early zombie mod server.

Shoutout to some of the old ZM/ZE communities: Syndicate Gamers, Plaguefest, i3D, icannt, ZES, Unloze & many more. ZE drove my interest to mapping, which drove my interest in Sourcemod, which drove my interest in programming, which led me to my career, which led me to my wife. Thank you.
by aldonius | 2025-08-19 11:36:15+00:00
I'll put in a good word for a chatbot hooked up to the documentation (e.g. at $dayjob we use Intercom Fin) acting as level 0.5 support.

At $dayjob our customers are nontechnical so they don't always know what to search for, so the LLM/RAG approach can be quite handy.

It answers about 2/3 of incoming questions, can escalate to the humans as needed, and scales great.
by bryanhogan | 2025-08-19 11:36:28+00:00
I'm using Google Drive to sync between my Windows laptop and desktop, and Android phone. It works very well.

In general you can use many cloud provider, SyncThing Fork or GitHub.

I wrote about all these options in more detail here: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/how-to-sync-obsidian

The easiest way to sync would be with the official Obsidian subscription, which costs the most amount of money from the options mentioned here.