MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deepdarkforest | 2025-08-14 21:08:49+00:00
Congrats! I think the space is very interesting, I was a founder of a similar windows CUA infra/ RPA agents but pivoted. My thoughts:

1) The funny thing about determinism is how deterministic you should be when to break, its kind of a recursive problem. agents are inherently very tough to guardrail on an action space so big like in CUA. The guys from browser use realized it as well and built workflow-use. Or you could try RL or finetuning per task but is not viable(economically or tech wise) currently.

2) As you know, It's a very client facing/customized solution space You might find this interesting, it reflects my thoughts in the space as well. Tough to scale as a fresh startup unless you really niche down on some specific workflows. https://x.com/erikdunteman/status/1923140514549043413 (he is also building in the deterministic agent space now funnily enough) 3) It actually is annoyingly expensive with Claude if you break caching, which you have to at some point if you feed in every screenshot etc. You mentioned you use multiple models (i guess uitars/omniparser?), but in the comments you said claude?

4) Ultimately the big bet in the RPA space, as again you know, is that the TAM wont shrink a lot due to more and more SAP's, ERP's etc implementing API's. Of course the big money will always be in ancient apps that wont, but then again in that space, uipath and the others have a chokehold. (and their agentic tech is actually surprisingly good when i had a look 3 months ago)

Good luck in any case! I feel like its one of those spaces that we are definitely still a touch too early, but its such a big market that there is plenty of space for a lot of people.
by rubyn00bie | 2025-08-14 21:09:19+00:00
There are quite a few devices these days that’ll allow you to capture streams by stripping HDCP so you can at least record it instead of having the service put it in “the vault,” to appease some bozo in a suit.

I have been trying to put my data hoarding data days behind me, but like the article, I’m being pushed back that direction. Doubly so since I use Linux and they restrict quality to 1080p. The only thing preventing me from it right now is a lack of a computer/server with ECC support (so I can run ZFS). Though encrypting a bunch of data and archiving it into Amazon Glacier seems more and more reasonable as time goes on.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-08-14 21:09:30+00:00
Yep, hundred percent.

No boss will ever pay you enough to retire. Ten million is retire-this-afternoon money.

Especially a boss talking about 50 hour work weeks. If there's really ten million in it, hire my friend and we'll each get five million and boss gets 80 dev-hours of really solid work per week

Oh they won't do that? Maybe it's cause they're BSing up their own book
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-14 21:09:33+00:00
There's lots of things I'd like to do that would cost more than $10 million. Maybe if you're saying I personally only have $10m but control $1t?

Things I'd do if I didn't have to raise money, find investors, etc.

Bribe/payoff whoever I had to and then build a real transit system in LA,SF,Seattle as one example.

Consider making a museum/expo-center that's like the Lucas Museum (https://www.lucasmuseum.org/) but centered around Video Games and/or Interactive Digital Art.
by bearl | 2025-08-14 21:09:36+00:00
The trick is, or was, demographics. The boomers outvoted other groups, because they have larger numbers. Why build housing that diminishes the boomers (ie voters) property values? Also, why limit demand for the hoarded housing by enforcing immigration laws, not undercutting local labor with exploitative practices like h1b abuse, or by creating reasonable legislation like other nations have that protects real estate from foreign speculation oand domestic market manipulation by monopolistic and predatory corporations like blackrock and blackstone? Because the boomers had the numbers and the real estate, and democracy is mostly about winning elections.
by ProAm | 2025-08-14 21:11:12+00:00
> I worked at Apple for a good amount of time, and the general rhetoric from Apple folks still there is that Woz is “insane” and not to be trusted.

Are you sure they werent talking about the other Steve? Are there any stories or examples from your co-workers? I've also only ever heard good things about him as a human and engineer.
by codedokode | 2025-08-14 21:11:20+00:00
When billion dollar companies, which are praised and supported by governments, download pirated material and do not pay, why should ordinary people restrain themselves and pay? I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now. It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it. People also have a right to train their real neural network for free without paying.
by parpfish | 2025-08-14 21:11:24+00:00
i wish we could go back to a pre-streaming version of netflix.

the near-infinite library and lack of algorithmic nudging resulted in an era where i had healthy view habits. reasonable levels of screentime and VERY diverse content.

i add so many movies to my queue with the best intentions of watching them someday, but always put them off because something about staring at that endless scroll of options makes me crave something light and simple.

the disk-in-the-mail era was "remember that three-hour subtitled classic film you always said you should watch but haven't? well, today's the day you're watching it." and i always ended up being glad i did.

the streaming era is "ugh, i don't have the mental bandwidth to watch that three hour thing that's been on my queue forever. lets just rewatch some background content to zone out" and i always lament wasting hours of my life in front of the screen.
by grafmax | 2025-08-14 21:11:54+00:00
Remarkable that investor-owned multi-family housing is left out of these analyses. Surely that contributes to housing supply and should factor into any such analysis of pricing power among investors. For example, about 44% of California households rent.

Additionally looking at national averages is misleading. Investor pricing power can exist in individual markets without being ubiquitous across the nation. The allegations made against RealPage are a notable example, if true.

A more insidious issue besides just pricing power among investors is the direction of cash flow. When you rent, cash is paid to the owner. When you take out a mortgage, interest is paid to the bank. These are both mechanisms for rentier capitalists to extract cash from those with less - by paying for a basic need - essentially wealth redistribution in the wrong direction.
by torginus | 2025-08-14 21:12:19+00:00
I'd imagine such devices would be very tightly controlled, being hard to access for civilians, and lets say limited to 1 such device per 1m people(which would also give you an idea of what sort of frequency this is supposed to be used).

The keys for every phone would be stored in a central repo, with a separate key for every phoneX every decryptor(which has its own private key). Meaning you'd need a device and the central repo to access users data.

But lets say they manage to build a bootleg version, what would be the criminal gain for them? Reading the data doesn't mean they can impersonate you, as the device wouldn't give you access to private keys used for authentication (lets even say these are deleted), only encryption.

The criminals could brick your phone and read your texts. There's only very niche cases when this would be worth it to them, like you're the subject of a highly targeted intelligence gathering op.
by marcyb5st | 2025-08-14 21:12:49+00:00
I built a reranker for a RAG system using a tiny model. After the candidate generation (i.e. vector search + BM25) and business logic filters/ACL checks the remainder of the chunks went through a model that given the user query told you whether or not the chunk was really relevant. That hit production, but once the context size of models grew that particular piece was discarded as passing everything yielded better results and prices (the fact that prices of input tokens went down also played a role I am sure).

So only for a while, but it still counts :)
by Arainach | 2025-08-14 21:13:28+00:00
>We can all agree that the application of the rules require nuance and intelligence

Except Uncle Bob, it seems, as evidenced by his code samples and his presentations in the years since that book came out. That's my objection. Many others have presented Bob's ideas better in the last 19 years. The book was good at the time, but we're a decade past when we should have stopped recommending it. Have folks go read Ousterhout instead - shorter, better, more durable.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-14 21:13:52+00:00
> I went to watch Westworld, and it was gone from HBO.

Wait, isn't that their own IP? I get shows not running on 3rd party streaming services due to IP rights and stuff, but how/why would they be in a position to not stream their own IP?! That's like going to Netflix and not being able to see Stranger Things. It's insane!
by RajT88 | 2025-08-14 21:14:01+00:00
The streaming services are relying on enforcement to preserve their business model.

This only works as long as there's no other nations with significant digital infrastructure that can be used for VPN egress points who don't care a whole lot about US copyright enforcement (or copyright enforcement in general).

Our government just pissed off a lot of other governments. Enforcement is good within the US, but not outside, even nations which the US has a lot of control over.
by topspin | 2025-08-14 21:14:12+00:00
It does, for M.2, which is really great: much better than an SD card.

I was writing generally about the comments I see about these types of low cost boards: we are awash in these products, which is a good thing, but many are not designed with the care, tools, talent and materials necessary to max out high value features like PCI-E, and people frequently complain about the lack of PCI-E, not understanding what is involved.

Personally, I'd like to see a "headless" board forgo nearly all of the typical peripherals. Have a 1x PCI-E M.2 for boot, 1x 10/100 Ethernet for a shell, then a number of PCI-E 1x and 4x connectors for whatever one might want. Let an ecosystem of mini PCI-E boards develop around it such that one could plug-in whatever is desired: WiFi/Bluetooth/LoRa, xGB ethernet, USB 3/4/x, HDMI, MIPI, ADC/DAC, etc.

It would require someone to develop a SOC intended for this, as opposed to repurposing Broadcom's phone chips and whatnot. But with so many RISC-V SOC manufacturers around now, this is no longer implausible.
by pir8life4me | 2025-08-14 21:14:20+00:00
Using a 3 pt impromptu speaking style of responding can help a lot. Many people ramble and aren't concise which can appear evasive.

Practicing public speaking can make you aware of your verbal tics - uhms ahs or saying "stuff" you use which can make you sound like you don't know what you're talking about.

Aggressively apply to jobs you don't want just for the interview practice. And study "good answers" to common questions on the internet ("strong points ? Weaknesses?" Fluff).
by hugoba | 2025-08-14 21:14:29+00:00
this model is fire.

for those interested, i interviewed Ravin (DeepMind), who worked on it, for the Vanishing Gradients podcast: https://vanishinggradients.fireside.fm/56

Video on YT here: https://youtu.be/VZDw6C2A_8E?si=XLUzNRQzeloB9rki

Disclaimer: The Gemma family rock!
by Teever | 2025-08-14 21:14:35+00:00
The hypothetical new companies that I'm talking about would have been formed by their former employees who could afford to do so with the increased money that they would have made if it hadn't been for the criminal collusion to deny them that capital and us as a society a freer market.

And you're right, there's a distinct possibility the savings that they made in breaking the law could have affected their bottom line at the time in a way that prevented them from making certain products, but it could have also fostered creativity and innovation in the companies that colluded, and increased competition between them and the new companies that would have formed in a way that would have benefited innovation.

What's important is that companies don't break the law and that people are paid as much as they're worth so that they can in turn stimulate the economy in ways that they see fit.
by kccqzy | 2025-08-14 21:14:42+00:00
Yes but if you don't have enough budget to pay for their engineering time, they also provide good UI to do data science. It's like a fancier version of Excel for data wrangling: imagine Excel but your data is not necessarily tabular; it may be a graph; it may contain images and multimedia, etc.

I once interviewed at Palantir and at the same they gave a demo of their software to every candidate.
by dileeparanawake | 2025-08-14 21:14:56+00:00
Wow that’s insane - didn’t realise that was happening re non-organic posts.

From a behavioural POV it seems like an obvious play. These companies and there owners have huge gains via social engineering.

There is very little transparency, accountability or regulation.

The thing that worries me is the unobvious… most people know about instagram and ++ suicide rates. What shocked me was finding out that instagram used things like waiting for people to remove photos of themselves, identify insecurity behaviour, use that to position beauty products to young girls. It seems so so unethical and predatory. Not to mention the impact on public MH when applied at scale.

Another crazy stat was something like screen time av was 4hrs/ day and av attention spans dropped from ~180s to something like ~90s.

The impact in so many areas is so bad. Blows my mind there is such a lack of regulation.

Thinking AI has the potential, at scale to social engineer without the need to bother creating content / making bots.
by baumy | 2025-08-14 21:14:57+00:00
I skimmed the Project 2025 doc during the leadup to the election when there was a big hullabaloo about it. Did not read the whole thing as it was incredibly long, but did read some summaries. Maybe 75% of it was utterly boring conservative stuff that some people surely disagree with, but is hardly worth losing sleep over. 25% or so was somewhere in the territory of extreme right wing / borderline insane.

Skimming that website, whoever is maintaining that is being...very generous with themselves about what they mark as "completed", to put it mildly. For example, "Roll back goal of haze reduction (visible air pollution)" is marked as complete, with the source being an EPA article [1] saying "[the EPA] is reconsidering its implementation of the Clean Air Act’s Regional Haze Program", but no indication of what is being reconsidered, or if anything is actually done.

Putting all of that together with the claimed 46% number, I guess you can count me as a fool. But I'm not buying the hysteria here, sorry.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/administrator-zeldin-begins...
by mxfh | 2025-08-14 21:15:24+00:00
What's the problem with that exactly? Legacy catalogs having some incomplete coverage? That the Pokemon Company can't make a good list if pressed? These are all not new or streaming Problems

The gist is here, that the complete first four season are on YouTube for free and the 5th is being added as we speak? (200+ episodes)

https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialPoke%CC%81monTV/playlists

There was nether the expectation with streaming that third party content doesn't rotate.

If you want a bit more persistent access you can buy them on Apple TV (Season 1-5 and 10-25)

Oh Boy, Pokemon is really not the example I would bring up here, when the aim is completeness on official channels:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_episodes_removed_...
by evantbyrne | 2025-08-14 21:15:35+00:00
Hey, first of all sorry to post this so many days late, I just got here looking to see if this article had been posted already.

I think the piece you are missing is that guilds exist to protect workers, not consumers. US software engineers not feeling as though they need the protection of guilds means by extension there are no non-government bodies to enforce codes of conduct. It is also worth mentioning that, although limited to specific high-risk use cases, software engineering is regulated.
by subscribed | 2025-08-14 21:15:37+00:00
Hey, I am sorry but no, I don't publish anything, but if you have any experience with Silly Tavern, I use Cherrybox preset (works fantastic with NSFW toggle off) and DeepSeek mostly. If you don't, this is where you start.

Other than that I don't do anything special compared to what other people share on aicg or reddit, etc. Just best practices :) (summaries, good OOC, temperature/top k/top p depending on the model).

Hmmm, maybe spending a lot of time on building interesting, deep, rich persona with deep links to the world (scenario card). 100-300 tokens. There are cards helping in building persona ("Persona Builder" from chub works great). Make it succinct.

I've found myself giggle for hours from the shenanigans of NPCs with my sidekick or just save in the journal best fragments of the gorgeous mental pictures it painted with words.

So at the end the name of the card that works best for me so far: it's called "Loraheim" (also on chub) but from my limited experience good model (DeepSeek V3/R1) + good preset + good persona + passable character will make a great adventure (I've just started a dramatic space opera from the fairly boring "you wake up in the alien dome/zoo").

It can be a great fun, try it :)
by wolvesechoes | 2025-08-14 21:15:46+00:00
But I didn't stated at any point I would like to prevent people from forking or starting something from scratch. I only stated that if FOSS contributors would focus their efforts more, we all would be in a better place.

That they won't, I agree, for, as this thread shows, libertarian and individualist ideas are stronger in this demographics. I also agree that FOSS is useful even in its current state, but being useful is not a goal of free software. Freedom is a political notion.

And common people do not need to care that much about free software ideas to consider political goals of the movement to be fulfilled, the same way today's workers do not need to care about socialist theory to enjoy workers rights.
by nativeit | 2025-08-14 21:16:32+00:00
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your broader sentiment, but before Google I can’t think of many employers that provide the kind of open-ended projects and fringe benefits (Olympic-class gyms, rec centers, libraries, intellectually-enriched social environments, access to world-class research/engineering/media facilities, access to LexisNexis, etc.) that one gets working at a research university.
by progbits | 2025-08-14 21:16:35+00:00
Presumably the request contains some nonce, otherwise this is trivial to replay?

But even then, I can volunteer my ID, keep it permanently attached to a computer running a server that allows certain requests (like the boolean age check), and then provide an API / client that allows anyone anywhere to use it to pass.

No risk to me (none of my data leaks), presumably no rate limits (the card has no way to track time; at best it could store recent request timestamps but I doubt it does).

In fact even better, use stolen or lost cards. Owner will get a new one, but the old one has no way of knowing it's voided. We can build a network that is able to sign whatever info (age, gender, city, name) you want, as long as we have one ID with such info.
by crote | 2025-08-14 21:16:46+00:00
The problem with schemes like these is that it is reasonably easy to come up with something which is pretty close, yet still missing some crucial details.

- You do not want the government to know which websites you visit. This rules out any kind of redirect / forwarding via a government website or app.

- You do not want websites to correlate their requests, as that would allow for cross-website tracking. Request data from website A should be completely useless to website B. This rules out most regular certificate schemes.

- You do not want a website to correlate multiple data requests, as that would allow websites to create some kind of supercookie. Requests should be completely independent, and two requests from the same user should be indistinguishable from requests from two different users.

- You do not want to lose privacy when the government and the website work together. The request should still be anonymous when the two collaborate, or else there can be no reasonable assumption of privacy. This rules out most clever pass-a-one-time-code schemes.

- You want the request to be unique and time-bound. It should not be possible to replay a response, either to the same website or a different one.

- You do not want to send more data than strictly necessary. If a website needs to know if you are 18 or older, it should only receive a boolean flag.

Getting some of those properties is easy. Getting all of them at the same time? Nearly impossible. And the worst part is that I almost certainly forgot a handful of requirements!
by RajT88 | 2025-08-14 21:16:56+00:00
The film and music industries really shot themselves in the foot when they got a tax on recordable media introduced in Canada.

OK, CD-R's and flash memory cost a bunch more now. Streaming is legal, because customers already paid the record companies for their music they downloaded and put on that media.

At least, someone explained this was the current state of Canadian law ~10 years back when I first visited.
by shoelessone | 2025-08-14 21:17:28+00:00
I relate to this. Also, I am not the best person in the world, but recently this hit the point where I decided because of these very same thoughts + nudging from my much better partner to donate to NPR, to cancel Netflix and move that money to NPR. Now no more Netflix, which is sort of a relief in ways, and I have to be more intentional about what I download / consume.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-08-14 21:17:31+00:00
I feel like the math is weird too.

Fermi estimate - doubling my work hours will also halve my waking free time. Doubling my work hours as an individual contributor will not make the company twice as productive. It will not make my stocks worth twice as much.

Does anyone else see the math this way? Employee stock ownership does not give you linear returns with hours worked.
by yencabulator | 2025-08-14 21:17:51+00:00
You seem to be confusing the ability to measure time passing with the knowledge of what absolute time it is.

Electronics these days measure time passing by counting oscillations of e.g. a quartz crystal. They know e.g. 16000000 oscillations is 1 second +- 0.001%. They don't know when 4pm is.
by prmph | 2025-08-14 21:19:11+00:00
Its interesting. When I first encountered complex numbers when starting high school it was very difficult to wrap my head around how they could be actual numbers.

I no longer have that problem, ever since I truly understood how all numbers are simply abstract tools for reasoning. In a way, it's interesting that complex numbers seem more "real" than the real numbers themselves.

I remember listening to a radio show where a physicist discussed the link between quantum mechanics and complex numbers, and thus how they were fundamental to reality [1], whereas we don't know whether real numbers actually describe physical reality.

[1] If I remember correctly, one argument was that although a common use of complex numbers is an alternative number system for making trigonometric/polar calculations simpler, they underpin quantum mechanics in a way that cannot be alternatively formulated in terms of real number numbers
by DiabloD3 | 2025-08-14 21:19:25+00:00
I suggest you don't brand this "Ollama for X". They've become a commercial operation that is trying to FOSS-wash their actions through using llama.cpp's code and then throwing their users under the bus when they can't support them.

I see that you are also using llama.cpp's code? That's cool, but make sure you become a member of that community, not an abuser.