MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Ukv | 2025-08-18 15:05:57+00:00
> Note that the mother’s request is not for chatbot reporting

Not from the mother, but it is something the article floats as in idea:

"Should Harry have been programmed to report the danger “he” was learning about to someone who could have intervened? [...] If Harry had been a flesh-and-blood therapist rather than a chatbot, he might have encouraged inpatient treatment or had Sophie involuntarily committed until she was in a safe place. "

> but instead for chatbot redirecting discussion of suicidal feelings to any human being at all.

It does generally seem to have done that:

"Harry offered an extensive road map where the first bullet point was “Seek Professional Support.” "

"Harry: Sophie, I urge you to reach out to someone — right now, if you can. You don’t have to face this pain alone. You are deeply valued, and your life holds so much worth, even if it feels hidden right now."

Unclear to me that there was any better response than what it gave.
by mrSolomonGrundy | 2025-08-18 15:06:08+00:00
Perhaps this will give you some perspective, perhaps not, decide for yourself :)

Most comments I’ve read seem to come from folks who are NOT working for Meta. Guess it makes sense, few people are. It’s much easier to answer and judge from that position. While these comments are interesting reads, not sure if they are adding the insights the question wants.

While I am not with Meta, I do work for an HFT, which arguably have even worse reputation than Meta. FYI - I’m in tech and make $1-2mm, depending on the year. Some random observations from past years:

- you can rationalize pretty much anything. I do think that vast majority of the people in the firm think of themselves as good people. I like to think that this holds true even for the absolutely most abysmal pages of human history. E.g. I find it hard to believe that the average Nazi thought of themselves as bad.

- your co-workers are really smart and friendly. We encourage collaboration and some work-life balance, so that people rarely burn out. People are super dedicated and in general love coming to work. I know tens of really high net worth individuals who keep coming each day and staying voluntarily long hours since they just enjoy what they are doing.

- the firm does a lot of charity work, tens of millions each year. People are incentivized to give back, via various matching programs and volunteer opportunities. E.g. Some go for weeks just to do volunteering and it’s partially offset in your PTO. Some spend six figures+ on their favorite charities. Whether it makes them a better or worse person than you dear reader, it is not for me so say. I personally do less of this, but still try to chime in a couple $k / help a few times in a year. Regardless of what you do, you could try it, it tends to make you feel better.

- I am yet to meet an asshole who lasted more than 1-2 years. The firm eradicates this kind of behavior religiously.

- there is a strong belief among the workers that there is value in what we do and that we are one of the ‘good’ HFTs. I did not think that when I joined, but now I do. Again, you can rationalize a lot and the firm has subtle messaging to shape people with time.

- I guess it goes without saying, but the pay package allows you to lead a very different kind of life.

- I have been hiring the absolutely top of the class of top of the universities for a while now (HFTs get the absolutely first pick, way ahead of the big tech). None of the students seemed to have any problem with the firms mission, or lack of thereof. All of them dreamed of landing the gig. I’ve rejected really smart people who failed the behavioral (I.e assholes) regularly.

- finally, I’ve rejected offers of $3mm+ from firms I believe to be evil (you are virtually bombarded with offers each week if you make in the HFT world. Think of the AI hype, just 24/7 and since 2000s :) ). But I can easily imagine taking these from places which I consider only slightly more evil.
Show HN: One-Click Java JUnit Unit Test Generator with AI Agent
by surajkrajan | 2025-08-18 15:06:14+00:00
I’m a senior java dev who got frustrated with writing and maintaining JUnit tests for Java projects.

General AI tools like Cursor are great, but I found them clunky for test generation especially for larger classes. Since I live inside IntelliJ every day, I built JAIPilot as a lightweight plugin that just works in the Java developer’s natural workflow.

What it does: Right-click any class → Generate Tests Extracts code context, dependencies, and mocks automatically Runs in a self-correcting loop until tests compile and pass Saves the generated tests in src/test/java

Why it’s different: Built natively for IntelliJ, so no context switching. Focused only on JUnit test generation (not a general-purpose AI IDE). In the free plan, it works with your own Gemini API key (BYOK), so you control costs. I have a Pro plan as well if better performance is required.

I’ve been dogfooding it daily on my own projects, and early users say it saves hours of boilerplate. It’s free to try, with a Pro version if you need heavier usage.

I’d love feedback:

Does this solve a real pain point for you? What’s missing before you’d use it in production? How does it compare to your experience with Cursor?

Thanks! Happy to answer all questions in the thread.
Show HN: Chrome extension to remake any UI with Vibe Coding
by thomask1995 | 2025-08-18 15:06:24+00:00
Don't like the way a website looks? Text hard to read? Doesn't spark joy?

Now you can reskin any website with some quick vibe coding esque prompts.

Super easy to set up. Demo in repo link.

Right now, it's pretty limited. There are a lot of ways to make it better. Thought I would open this up in it's early stages and see if we can make this more powerful.

Could be a powerful tool for designers to preview changes on existing products.
by boothby | 2025-08-18 15:06:42+00:00
I had a conversation with a lawyer who had invited OtterAI to our confidential meeting. I was gobsmacked, and I quickly read Otter's privacy statement -- my impression was that they retain your data in a cloud service and use your "anonymized" (or was it "depersonalized"?) recordings as future training data. Even if they have a bona fide reason for all that, I question their ability to store the data securely and succeed in anonymizing data that contains unique identifiers that could be tied to future court records. I refused to continue in the presence of the bot.

And, even beyond security is their ability to hold promises made over the data in the event of a private equity takeover, a rogue employee, etc.
by mickeyp | 2025-08-18 15:06:45+00:00
That has long been my personal theory as well, though I never had a way of firmly backing it up with evidence, though this article hardly does that either.

But it does make sense on a superficial level at least: why pay a six-pack of nobodies half-way 'round the world to.. use AI tools on your behalf? Just hire a mid/senior developer locally and have them do it.
by atonse | 2025-08-18 15:06:53+00:00
Yeah the non-anonymity part of it is troubling.

In HN comment thread for another post, I had hoped that we could come up with a rating system like we have with Movies, TV, Apps, mediated by HTTP Headers.

I feel that is all we actually need. Then I can configure a browser a certain way, and the site publisher can just send a header saying "X-Content-Rating: Mature" or something along those lines, and that's it. It would be anonymous and opt-in.
by runjake | 2025-08-18 15:07:17+00:00
Firefox's death is a leadership issue.

It's still a solid browser and could be resuscitated, but you'd have to immediately remove the Mozilla leadership and change it's culture.

My hope is that Firefox viably carries on as an OSS project away from the control of an organization whose CEO gets paid $6.9 million annually while engineering continually gets cut.

Firefox can't survive with Mozilla at the helm.
Show HN: I built 70 exercises for you to become better at JavaScript
by bilalcg | 2025-08-18 15:07:34+00:00
I've noticed online that exercises for JavaScript tend to revolve around algorithms and data structures more than they focus on deeper concepts of the language itself (such as closures, classes, HTML DOM, CSSOM, events, etc.)

And that's why I tried coming up with a collection on my own, that helps you exercise your knowledge of many concepts in JavaScript, most importantly of HTML DOM and events.

While performing these exercises, you also get to know about some important ideas in computer science (e.g. binary search), mathematics (e.g. Heron's Formula), and programming in general.
by zamadatix | 2025-08-18 15:07:43+00:00
1. You've named the release order, but not your argument behind why that should be limit what's currently supported today. E.g. if someone "OpenGL precedes Metal" wouldn't be an argument why Apple should not have added Metal support either.

2. I can easily list 5x as many AAA games, engines, or libraries supporting a Vulkan backend vs a Metal backend, does that mean Apple shouldn't support Metal? I'd say no, but maybe you're seeing this kind of logic differently. I'd be fully in support of macOS/iOS/iPadOS/visionOS adding native DirectX support, if that's what you mean. It just seems less likely than Vulkan (for several reasons).
by tygra | 2025-08-18 15:07:46+00:00
Nice.

Of course, you need decent hardware to run LLMs locally, but you don’t need a super high-end computer to host qwen3:30b or gpt-oss:20b. You don’t even need a GPU for those models, as long as you’ve got a modern CPU. And they’re already pretty solid for writing and coding.
by arkonrad | 2025-08-18 15:07:54+00:00
On cookies: we use an HTTP cookie (ark_session_id) purely as an opaque session identifier. The cookie is how the client ties subsequent requests to the same pinned session/worker/GPUs on the provider side so the provider can keep the model activations/state in GPU memory between calls. Not a magic for the model; it’s a routing key that enables true session affinity.

On “thinking steps” and contamination: good point - naively persisting raw chain-of-thought tokens can degrade outputs. ARKLABS Stateful approach is not a blanket “store everything” policy.

And my criticism targets higher-level provider practices: things like response caching, aggressive prompt-matching / deduplication heuristics, or systems that return previously generated outputs when a new prompt is “similar enough.” Those high-level caches absolutely can produce the behaviour I described - a subtle prompt change that nevertheless gets routed to a cached reply.

The platform has been launched — we’re collecting data, but early results are very promising: we’re seeing linear complexity, lower latency, and ~80% input-token savings. At the same time we’d love to hear more feedback on whether this approach could be useful in real-world projects.

And about going against the grain, as you mentioned at the end… well — if startups didn’t think differently from everyone else, what would be the point of being a startup?
by gus_massa | 2025-08-18 15:08:10+00:00
> We are opening early access soon. If you’re curious, you can join the waitlist here:

From the "Show HN" rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

> Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead.

Remember to repost again when it's open.

Also, as the sibling comment says, forcing to use a Google account to sign for the waiting list will turn away a lot of people.
by anticrymactic | 2025-08-18 15:08:19+00:00
A lot of discussion is about the security of these devices (resistance to false open states). But most of the time the safety (false closed states) has even higher stakes associated to it. Having to wait because some api server is slow is annoying but can quickly become life threatening in a different context. Fail-Safe vs Fail-Secure is (imo) often overlooked and probably just as important as the actual implemented security.
by brettgriffin | 2025-08-18 15:08:20+00:00
> Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L.

This summer, I built two very sophisticated pieces of software. A financial ledger to power accrual accounting operations and a code generation framework that scaffolds a database from a defined data model to the frontend components and everything in between.

I used ChatGPT substantially. I'm not sure how long it would have taken without generative AI, but in reality, I would have just given up out of frustration or exhaustion. From the outside, it would appear to any domain expert that at least three other people worked on these giving the pace at which they got completed.

The completion of those two were seminal moments for me. I can't imagine how anyone, in any field of information systems, is not multiples more effective than they were five years ago. That directly affects a P&L and I can't think of anything in my career that is even remotely close to having that magnitude.

I don't know what encapsulates an AI pilot in these orgs, and I'm sure they are massively more complex than anything I've done. But to hear 95% of these efforts don't have a demonstrable effect is just wild.
by npongratz | 2025-08-18 15:08:52+00:00
Same results for me. Absolutely awful, vision consistently began failing by becoming noticeably blurry about 8 to 9 hours after taking night lenses out, and I couldn't drive at night because of headlight and streetlight halos even after "topping off" with those uncomfortable lenses during the day. As an enthusiastic night sky observer, trying to use those lenses was depressing.

I gave up after extended tries with three different lenses (I think it was six to nine months total), with my highly experienced doctor consulting with different manufacturers and researchers from around the country. Turns out my pupils naturally open up too wide, made worse by corneas that apparently are not thick enough to retain the reshaping all day. These issues, incidentally, make me ineligible for the popular cut-n-burn style of eye surgery.

On the bright side, it was indeed completely reversible and I've suffered no effects of any kind after about two days of non-use. That was a bit over a decade ago.
by K0nserv | 2025-08-18 15:09:09+00:00
I'm arriving at the conclusion that deployments of LLMs is most suitable in areas where the cost of false positives and, crucially, false negatives are low.

If you cannot tolerate false negatives I don't see how you get around the inaccuracy of LLMs. As long as you can spot false positives and their rate is sufficiently low they are merely an annoyance.

I think this is a good consideration before starting a project leveraging LLMs
by nestorD | 2025-08-18 15:09:33+00:00
I have found putting the spec together with a model, having it to try find blindspots and write done the final take in clear and concise language, useful.

A good next step is to have the model provide a detailed step by step plan to implement the spec.

Both steps are best done with a strong planning model like Claude Opus or ChatGPT5, having it write "for my developer", before switching to something like Claude Code.
by hearsathought | 2025-08-18 15:09:47+00:00
> I totally agree that cultures that have a native tradition of vegetarianism (Indian, Ethiopian, Eastern Orthodox Christian)

None of these cultures have a "native" tradition of vegetarianism. They all started as meat eating cultures.

> have tended to come up with awesome stuff that's not based on meat at all.

Vegetarians don't need a meat alternative because vegetarians eat eggs, dairy, etc. Beyond Meat was part of the vegan movement.
by analognoise | 2025-08-18 15:10:23+00:00
Are you saying this would produce $0 is economic activity, and after it was spent “we would be out of rich people” or some such nonsense?

That’s explicitly not what the economic research shows.

I’ll also point out that DOGE has produced no prosecutions for “waste” - it turns out that Government work might be a net positive in efficiency, cost, and resultant economic activity. In fact I’d argue that Trump (et. al.)’s economic plans have been shown to be disastrous and misguided - watching the economy shrink in real time as Americans fought for arbitrary regressive taxes isn’t how I expected 2025 to go.

I’ll also point out you could fund tens of thousands of Government jobs a year for the low, low price of Trump’s corruption. One is economically useful, the other isn’t.
by codingdave | 2025-08-18 15:10:32+00:00
No, because vibe coded apps break. And if you are not someone who can write your own tools without vibe coding, you'll hit a wall and stop doing it when they break on you. FWIW, even the link you got your inspiration from is not actually a single HTML page, it is a full node server with a front-end framework... that happens to only output a single HTML page.

I will grant that it is possible that AI-assisted coding will make people who are already software devs create their own tools more often. But not the vibe coding thing, no.
by ARandumGuy | 2025-08-18 15:10:41+00:00
Any consumer facing AI project has to contend with the fact that GenAI is predominantly associated with "slop." If you're not actively using an AI tool, most of your experience with GenAI is seeing social media or Youtube flooded with low quality AI content, or having to deal with useless AI customer support. This gives the impression that AI is just cheap garbage, and something that should be actively avoided.
by bobson381 | 2025-08-18 15:10:46+00:00
you mean as opposed to going cold turkey? That makes sense! I personally have wondered about something like this for just FB Groups - I want to read my neighborhood buy nothing page, but I don't want a curated attention-grabbing experience in the full app. So I'd love like, an RSS reader for just group posts that let me direct open a post in the app if I wanted to respond.

Like the chips by the checkout in the grocery store, the "path" you have to take into the app requires you to put on horse blinders if you want to complete what you came in for without getting "engaged". It's very tiring if you're at all susceptible to distraction.
by taylodl | 2025-08-18 15:10:50+00:00
I feel that back in the 80s QNX had already accomplished what Hurd had set out to do (https://blackberry.qnx.com/en/products/qnx-everywhere). Blackberry bought QNX decades after its creation but the core architecture - microkernel-based, modular, and real-time - was already mature and production-ready long before Hurd left the lab. Moreover, I've never known another OS to implement synchronous thread message passing the way QNX does.
by 9rx | 2025-08-18 15:11:05+00:00
> Chat is like the command line

Exactly. Nobody really wants to use the command-line as the primary mode of computing; even the experts who know how to use it well. People will accept it when there is no better tool for the job, but it is not going to become the preferred way to use computers again no matter how much easier it is to use this time. We didn't move away from the command-line simply because it required some specialized knowledge to use.

Chatting with LLMs looks pretty good right now because we haven't yet figured out a better way, but there is no reason to think we won't figure out a better way. Almost certainly people will revert to chat for certain tasks, like people still use the command-line even today, but it won't be the primary mode of computing like the current crop of services are betting on. This technology is much too valuable for it to stay locked in shitty chat clients (and especially shitty chat clients serving advertisements, which is the inevitable future for these businesses betting on chat — they can't keep haemorrhaging money forever and individuals won't pay enough for a software service).
by spacebanana7 | 2025-08-18 15:11:26+00:00
It's so weird that codex/claude code will manually read through sometimes dozens of files in a project because they have no easy way to ask the editor to "Find Usages".

Even though efficient use of CLI tools might make the token burn not too bad, the models will still need to spent extra effort thinking about references in comments, readmes, and method overloading.
by WJW | 2025-08-18 15:11:50+00:00
According to the comments that is just a variation of coppicing, which is several millennia old and practiced around the world. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing which also mentions the Japanese variant)

While coppicing does results in fairly straight trees, they're still circular and will result in large amounts of waste if you try to cut dimensional lumber out of it.
Show HN: API for E-Commerce Data
by astronautmonkey | 2025-08-18 15:11:51+00:00
Hi HN! I'm building Agora, an AI search engine for e-commerce that returns results in under 300ms. We've indexed 30M products and made them easy to purchase. Think of a decentralized Amazon.

We've been working on an API that enables developers to embed our product data, search, purchasing, and order tracking functionality into their own app. We currently have 100k stores in the index and recrawl the entire dataset once every 24 hours.

I'd love your feedback.
by jeltz | 2025-08-18 15:12:25+00:00
Not an expert on the matter, just a Swede but it was used about pirates in general from any country in medieval Swedish and I think Icelandic. And it was used in period English and Frisian sources too, though there it might not have been about all pirates. It is also on a couple of rune stones but on the one I know of it is used to refer to the activity of going raiding.
by cameldrv | 2025-08-18 15:12:36+00:00
We will see. One thing with AI is that access to data/APIs is key. There’s been a long term trend where services are locking down their APIs so that you can only interact with them through their native UI, either phone or web, sometimes just phone. Many of the most promising uses of AI are to automate around various annoying things service providers do to drive their own revenue, and the service providers aren’t taking this lying down.

Apple is in a very favorable position with its control of arguably the most important platform of all. They can force app developers to allow Apple AI to automate their apps, and prevent other AI providers from doing the same, and they make a strong privacy argument about why this is necessary.
by khuey | 2025-08-18 15:12:39+00:00
> remote working is an obvious stepping stone to offshoring

This I largely agree with. If your tech job can be done from Bozeman instead of the Bay Area there's a decent chance it can be done from Bangalore.

> which itself is an inevitable milestone toward full automation

But IMHO this doesn't follow at all. Plenty of factory work (e.g. sewing) was offshored decades ago but is still done by humans (in Bangladesh or wherever) rather than robots. I don't see why the fact that a job can move from the Bay Area to Bozeman to Bangalore inherently means it can be replaced with AI.
by ckorhonen | 2025-08-18 15:12:59+00:00
I don’t fully agree. Yes, AI can be seen as a cheaper outsourcing option, but there’s also a plausible future where companies lean more on outsourced engineers who are good at wielding AI effectively, to replace domestic mid-level roles. In other words, instead of nullifying outsourcing, AI might actually amplify it by raising the leverage of offshore talent.