MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-14 17:11:58+00:00
Privatization of space is not really outcompeting - nobody was racing to build reusable launch vehicles.

The cost is also not fully "turnkey" - if you overwork your employees, fail to pay your suppliers, rely on subsidies, then of course you are going to reduce your cost.

And all of that happened before Musk fully lost his mind.

Efficiency wise from pure physics, they would have been better off developing something similar to Scaled Composites. Air breathing is way more efficient to get to altitude, then you do a High Altitude Orbit insertion, and then do your vertical landing. For stuff like Starlink Satellites that are rather small, you have to do more launches but the cost of launch goes down significantly.
by hollerith | 2025-08-14 17:12:53+00:00
Most people who aren't radical Leftists aren't going to agree with you that radical Leftists aren't primarily responsible for the experience described by Rayiner just because a personal profit motive was involved in addition to the ideological motive.

You might believe that if an ideological Leftist motive can be kept separate from motives of personal enrichment, then it cannot do significant harm. But most US voters would disagree with you about that: they believe that it can be harmful to believe that there is an oppressive structure at the center of American society if in fact there is not an oppressive structure at the center of American society.
by antisthenes | 2025-08-14 17:13:01+00:00
WSJ is shilling for companies like Blackrock and other private equity that wants to rent you housing at a markup compared to the ownership costs.

Of course they'll be pushing a narrative in which you shouldn't own your own home, the main source of financial security and peace of mind for when you are no longer able or willing to work a grueling 9-5 schedule.

Believe it or not, ownership costs aren't scary and, in most cases (unless you get fleeced by contractors) are very predictable and still cheaper than rent (especially in light of recent rent increases).

Personally, I wouldn't just treat this article with a grain of salt, I would disregard it entirely.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-14 17:13:11+00:00
> I still don't understand why San Diego-Tijuana isn't in principle as strong in design+manufacturing as the Hong Kong-Shenzhen axis

It is in Medical Devices and Defense Tech.

The San Diego and Tijuana EDCs are closely integrated and use a single-window system so that you as a company doing R&D in SD and prototyping and manufacturing in Tijuana are dealing with a single entity.

> It frightens me the quotes you put around "MBAs" like that

Because on HN, people use "MBA" to designate CorpDev, FP&A, CorpStrat, GM, and other management and revenue ownership roles.

> those are the best type of MBAs

I agree, and employers agree as well.

There's a reason alumni from Wharton SF, Haas PTMBA, Stanford HCP MS&E, MIT's Sloan+LGO Fellowship, CMU Tepper's PTMBA, UW Foster's EMBA, UT McCombs' Hildebrand MBA, and UCLA Anderson's FlexMBA are overrepresented in engineering industries.

Employers tend to sponsor high leadership potential employees to attend these programs in return for them climbing the ladder internally.

An entire generation of Cybersecurity and Enterprise SaaS CPOs and CEOs are products of this initiative at Cisco and PANW back in the 2000s
by xphos | 2025-08-14 17:13:30+00:00
Yeah this is the right idea the fed sets interest rates to hit inflation target. This has to do with there ability to influence lending by setting there interest rates appropriately.

The whole idea being that if we have low interest rates we can lower the barrier to growth as much as possible without actually causing inflation but if the economy becomes constrained and the extra money is just chasing fewer things the fed has to increase interest rates to decrease free money so inflation doesn't spike. They honestly did a really good job too getting from 9%->3% is impressive and staying there despite the massive instability in pricy that Tariffs cause is a testament to that philosophy.
by jph | 2025-08-14 17:13:52+00:00
Yes with a twist: the French government design system is purposefully reserved for the use of French government websites. I believe that a great design system will be flexible and more akin to user principles first, then implementation interface components (e.g. we need 200 or so components for one of our medical apps), then skinning such as look and feel and themeing.

As one example I'm very keen on coding techniques such headless components as by Bits UI which provides headless components for Svelte. If anyone here wants paid work to code components like these by Bits UI, come work with us. <3
by sharts | 2025-08-14 17:14:10+00:00
I’m kinda surprised we still don’t have publicly funded and run cloud yet and really only available in the academic settings if you’re affiliated with a university or research lab (and even then each of those have their own spins with lots of duplication).

Some of these decentralized and open source projects (eg gridcoin.us, or golem.network and akash.network) seem like interesting ideas that would benefit with a public/private incentive system too. Perhaps giving some finite compute to experiment with at little to no cost. Others can donate or are incentivized to provide unused compute.

There’s so much unused / underutilized resources out there that it would be a great boon to somehow make that available and further reduce barriers to entry. Aside from that it’s just a really interesting problem that intersects a lot of different areas.
by ofjcihen | 2025-08-14 17:14:25+00:00
It’s incredible to me that so many seem to have fallen for “humans are just LLMs bruh” argument but I think I’m beginning to understand the root of the issue.

People who only “deeply” study technology only have that frame of reference to view the world so they make the mistake of assuming everything must work that way, including humans.

If they had a wider frame of reference that included, for example, Early Childhood Development, they might have enough knowledge to think outside of this box and know just how ridiculous that argument is.
by Voultapher | 2025-08-14 17:14:48+00:00
It's one the reasons I'm using Arch. Great features are worth little to me if I don't know about them. What I like particularly about the wiki is their why sections that explain why one would want to choose one way over another. A good example of this is the page on data-at-rest encryption [1].

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Data-at-rest_encryption
by sjdbdjskbzba | 2025-08-14 17:14:50+00:00
> It is completely vibe coded, I have never even looked at 90% of the code in that repo. it has full test coverage, passes CI, and we use it in production!

This horrifies me. I checked your website and all your recommendations are from people who appear to have an Indian background, but you’re based in the US? And you claim they’re the most innovative companies yet I doubt anyone has heard of them?

Looking over the repo and it seems like a mess (commits are meaningless and code is all over the place).

I’m sorry this feels incredibly scammy.
by MarkusWandel | 2025-08-14 17:14:55+00:00
When I got a tour of a local hydropower facility 30 years ago, they showed us the computer station - with dot matrix printer! - where the daily plan for power generation (meaning: convert this much water flow into torque from the turbines and therefore megawatts generated as a function of time) was received and printed.

I'm sure it's been streamlined since, but "humans in the loop" should be essential for large infrastructure like this.
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-14 17:15:02+00:00
You mean they hobbled poor little competitors like Google, Adobe, and the other tech companies that agreed to it? Apple was actually one of the smaller companies at the time.

How is all Apple’s fault? And are you really saying that the iPhone wouldn’t have happened if Apple hadn’t gotten into these agreements?

In your alternate universe would Nokia or Rim (who wasn’t involved in the agreement) still been relevant?
by Sophira | 2025-08-14 17:15:07+00:00
Fun fact, I just could not work out what this was supposed to be, so I just used Whisper (indirectly, via the FUTO Voice Input app on my phone) and repeated the sentence into it, and it came out with the 'correct' transcription of "How to recognize speech using common sense." first time.

Of course, this is nothing like what I actually said, so... make your own mind up whether that is actually a correct transcription or not!

I have a British accent, for the record.
by nitwit005 | 2025-08-14 17:15:08+00:00
> There are social media apps and platforms that don't do that. They are persistently less popular.

I think that's a bit murky. Facebook became popular when it was like that. They changed how it worked after it was already popular, seeking to make more mony.

Facebook could provide you options to only see friend's content. People have certainly asked for it. They absolutely refuse to.
by dcreater | 2025-08-14 17:15:19+00:00
I've been saying he we need sub 1B models for the edge so thanks fot this.

I am however disappointed that there is no examples, or benchmarks, provided to get a sense of performance. It's a given that benchmark values would be lower than gemma 3n, but having a sense of performance vs size curve and comparison to existing small models is needed
by stouset | 2025-08-14 17:15:49+00:00
This was the thing that stopped me from giving jj a shot for the longest time, but it turned out to be a complete non-issue. Definitely don't turn it off!

The "aha" moment you might be missing is that you should consider your latest revision to just be the staging area. `jj commit -i` (shorthand for `jj describe; jj split -i`) is effectively `git add -i; git commit`. If you're worried about accidentally pushing unfinished work, don't be! It won't let you push changes without a message by default, and you update bookmarks (e.g., branch pointers) at your discretion anyway. Both of these mean that `jj git push` isn't going to accidentally push a bunch of in-flight work.

Think of it less like jj commits everything by default, and more like your working copy gets the benefits of change tracking and being able to take part in repo operations even when you haven’t taken a moment to make a commit.
by exe34 | 2025-08-14 17:16:13+00:00
to be fair, I've seen cursor step back and check higher level things. I was trying to set up a firecracker vm and it did everything for me, and when things didn't initially work, it started doing things like ls, tar -tvf, and then a bunch of checking networking stuff to make sure things were showing up in the right place.

so current LLMs might not quite be human level, but I'd have to see a bigger model fail before I'd conclude that it can't do $X.
by viccis | 2025-08-14 17:16:43+00:00
>As far as I can tell “generating context” is exactly what human reasoning is too.

This was the view of Hume (humans as bundles of experience who just collect information and make educated guesses for everything). Unfortunately, it leads to philosophical skepticism, in which you can't ground any knowledge absolutely, as it's all just justified by some knowledge you got from someone else, which also came from someone else, etc., and eventually you can't actually justify any knowledge that isn't directly a result of experience (the concept of "every effect has a cause" is a classic example).

There have been plenty of epistemological responses to this viewpoint, with Kant's view, of humans doing a mix of "gathering context" (using our senses) but also applying universal categorical reasoning to schematize and understand / reason from the objects we sense, being the most well known.

I feel like anyone talking about the epistemology of AI should spend some time reading the basics of all of the thought from the greatest thinkers on the subject in history...
by antisthenes | 2025-08-14 17:17:19+00:00
Every single cost mentioned in the article is passed to the renter in one way or another.

Also, property tax is pretty much the most unavoidable tax there is, and the most beneficial. It funds schools, parks, roads, police, garbage collection and much of the local infrastructure and essential services where I live.

I like having all those services, so I will gladly pay the tax, including any increases.
by ezst | 2025-08-14 17:18:00+00:00
Not really, only "merchants" are trying to package and sell LLMs as "artificial intelligence". To this day AI still very much is the name of a research field focused on computational methods: it's not a discovery, it's not a singular product or tool at or disposal (or it is in no greater capacity than Markov chains, support vector machines or other techniques that came before). If you ever expect the goalposts to settle, you are essentially wishing for research to stop.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-14 17:19:03+00:00
I just hope that any brand licensing doesn't lead to garbage products that only detract from the brand.

Kodac still has enough of a brand recognition that it could still be a leading option for digital video/photo equipment. They are pretty much the only option standing for film, which is somewhat scary in a few ways. It makes me apprehensive when technology becomes completely unavailable. What gets lost to humanity when this happens.
by xphos | 2025-08-14 17:19:08+00:00
To nit pick I would assert that the price basket is more dependent on the actually supply demand constraints but when there is free floating supply to be utilized but demand cannot catch. Than lowering interest doesn't necessary cause an increase in costs i.e inflation but can actually ruin the other way for some goods. That's why despite inflation being rough the actual cost in value of TV is so far down the economy grew and can now cheaply satisfy that demand. I don't think this was a great argument because I didn't link fed actions to that growth.

A better negative example is though in the US a large issue in the 1970s we had Regan Stagflation was austerity weakened demand and the feds levers simply couldn't deal with that type of inflation. The fed cannot directly influence solving supply issues only direct investment does that
by ARandumGuy | 2025-08-14 17:19:15+00:00
But that's just more cherry-picking. You can always find some past success to push whatever point you're trying to make. But just because shopping carts were a huge hit doesn't mean that whatever you're trying to push will be.

For example, it would be wrong for me to say that "hyperloop got a ton of hype and investments, and it failed. Therefore LLMs, which are also getting a ton of hype and investments, will also fail." Hyperloop and LLMs are fundamentally different technologies, and the failure of hyperloop is a poor indicator of whether LLMs will ultimately succeed.

Which isn't to say we can't make comparisons to previous successes or failures. But those comparisons shouldn't be your main argument for the viability of a new technology.
by sdesol | 2025-08-14 17:19:53+00:00
> I wish people could be a bit more open about what they build.

I would say for the last 6 months, 95% of the code for my chat app (https://github.com/gitsense/chat) was AI generated (98% human architected). I believe what I created in the last 6 months was far from trivial. One of the features that AI helped a lot with, was the AI Search Assistant feature. You can learn more about it here https://github.com/gitsense/chat/blob/main/packages/chat/wid...

As a debugging partner, LLMs are invaluable. I could easily load all the backend search code into context and have it trace a query and create a context bundle with just the affected files. Once I had that, I would use my tool to filter the context to just those files and then chat with the LLM to figure out what went wrong or why the search was slow.

I very much agree with the author of the blog post about why LLMs can't really build software. AI is an industry game changer as it can truly 3x to 4x senior developers in my opinion. I should also note that I spend about $2 a day on LLM API calls (99% to Gemini 2.5 Flash) and I probably have to read 200+ LLM generated messages a day and reply back in great detail about 5 times a day (think of an email instead of chat message).

Note: The demo on that I have in the README hasn't been setup, as I am still in the process of finalizing things for release but the NPM install instructions should work.
by ayhanfuat | 2025-08-14 17:20:00+00:00
That caused me nightmares when I was first diagnosed with sleep apnea. I would check my oxygen levels during the sleep to see if my treatment is effective. Even though the CPAP machine would show a few short events Apple Watch would show levels as low as 75%. Thankfully in my next sleep study I learned that my oxygen levels were consistently above 95% and the watch is indeed very unreliable (how snug it is, which direction it is facing etc highly affect the results).
by kibwen | 2025-08-14 17:20:29+00:00
No, don't listen too closely to what he says he believes. Zuckerberg doesn't care about the metaverse, what he cares about is having a platform that would allow his company to serve as a gatekeeper in the same way that Microsoft gatekeeps Windows, Apple gatekeeps iOS, and Google gatekeeps Android and the web. Zuck understands that platform holders are the modern lords to which everyone else is beholden, and he's just casting about to seek out a plot of land that isn't already claimed, regardless of how farfetched it might be.
by brunokim | 2025-08-14 17:21:04+00:00
I'm unconvinced by the article criticism's, given they also employ their feels and few citations.

> I appreciate that research has to be done on small models, but we know that reasoning is an emergent capability! (...) Even if you grant that what they’re measuring is reasoning, I am profoundly unconvinced that their results will generalize to a 1B, 10B or 100B model.

A fundamental part of applied research is simplifying a real-world phenomenon to better understand it. Dismissing that for this many parameters, for such a simple problem, the LLM can't perform out of distribution just because it's not big enough undermines the very value of independent research. Tomorrow another model with double the parameters may or may not show the same behavior, but that finding will be built on top of this one.

Also, how do _you_ know that reasoning is emergent, and not rationalising on top of a compressed version of the web stored in 100B parameters?
by jarjoura | 2025-08-14 17:21:35+00:00
I see a bit of distinction here, that the foundation models aren't actually 10x better than in 2022. What's improved though is that we have far more domain knowledge of how to get more out of slightly improved models.

So consider your analogy, that the internet was always useful, but it was javascript that caused the actual titanic shift in the software industry. Even though the core internet backbone didn't radically improve as fast as you imagine it would have. Javascript was hacked together as a toy scripting language meant to make pages more interactive, but turns out, it was the key piece in unlocking that 10x value of the already existing internet.

Agents and the explosion of all these little context services are where I see the same thing happening here. Right now they are buggy, and mostly experimental toys. However, they are unlocking that 10x value.
by FabHK | 2025-08-14 17:21:38+00:00
Matt Levine - that's impossibly high standards... but here's an attempt:

If a business shuts down, the assets on its book have to be written down to what you could get in a quick sale, their liquidation value, minus the costs of closing shop. And of course, once you’re closed, there’s no more income.

The standard assumption for bookkeeping is that the business will keep operating. This is the "going concern" assumption, and it lets you value the assets as part of the ongoing business. Switching from "going concern" to liquidation accounting drops the book value, maybe a lot.

If there's debt coming due in the near future that the business can't repay, the survival of the business is in question. An accountant would then have to issue a "going concern" warning. That is, however, not a prediction of doom.

Here's Kodak's Q10 form, with the "going concern" note on page 8: https://investor.kodak.com/static-files/17a780a0-cd47-4128-8...

Looks like they have some debt coming due, but expect to get a cash boost from terminating their pension plan (after meeting all their obligations). So the company plans to continue their business, and is confident that they will.

But that is technically predicated on certain conditions (being able to roll over some debt, getting that cash as anticipated) that's not entirely under Kodak's control, and so there is that going concern warning: we think it'll be fine, but we still have to tell you.

Apparently that was misunderstood as a prediction of bankruptcy or intention to close shop.
Ask HN: Has anyone used AI agent to unsubscribe from spam newsletters?
by butz | 2025-08-14 17:21:45+00:00
Hey everyone, has anyone explored idea of automatic unsubscribing from newsletters using AI agent in browser? I imagine giving an AI agent a folder of emails (probably mbox export of spam folder in mbox format) and asking it to unsubscribe from all of them. It would be interesting to see is AI agent could be taught to bypass all dark patterns used in unsubscribe flow, and even catch bad actors that do not provide unsubscribe link, and report them to appropriate authorities. Sounds like an idea for useful product. Has anyone done or are doing something similar? What are the potential risks and problems?
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-14 17:22:36+00:00
That's a notion I have read several times now on HN by seemingly US Americans. While it might or might not be true that your judicial system has always worked like that, when you just accept that as a fact, you are endorsing it. No I don't think that such a judicial system is normal.

> the myth of the law as a fair arbiter of justice

That is NOT a myth. That is what it is supposed to be.

When you start to say "yeah, that's just how it always has been", that IS when radical ideologies start to rise.

How public opinion treats thinks that is how they tend to become. That is true with humans and that is true with systems. I heard it is quite less regulated to become a police man and there are quite a lot of black police mans* already. I heard you have a system where there is a jury that can overrule the judge. Why isn't there a massive influx of black/other-wise-suppressed people into the judicial or executive branch?

* yeah and woman of course
by cosmicgadget | 2025-08-14 17:22:52+00:00
It's not an ideal situation for sure. Some want their heritage to be their identity. Some do not. Academia tries to accommodate both. Meanwhile we are slowly trying to fix the lingering effects of centuries of injustice where solidarity is one of the few tools to fight people in power who want to return to unjust times.

I'm not sure the best option is to vote for the country club guy whose public statements strongly indicate reports of his private statements on race are accurate. The guy who has kept Stephen Miller around for a decade and talked the proud boys into being the armed second wave of Jan 6. Then pardoned them.

Speaking for myself, even if Trump is somehow the shining light of a post-discrimination society (after failing to do so in his first term), it can't possibly offset the damage he wants to do the economy, consumer protection, and national security.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-14 17:22:56+00:00
> Doubly so because employers compelling enough to make employees passionate about their jobs often exploit this and have extremely substandard working conditions

Another way to say this is the Law of Supply and Demand. It's no surprise at all that there are a greater number of people interested in a fun job, which reduces the pay offered. Conversely, dirty unpleasant jobs have fewer people interested, so the pay is greater.

It's hard to see here who is exploiting who.