MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bsenftner | 2025-08-28 10:49:18+00:00
I'm curious what percentage of the "tech industry" is in fact the classic dumb money, and what they have their developers doing is basically fantasy nonsense for the owner(s). I know of several very good sized tech companies, purchased by Saudi Princes, for nothing other than their bragging rights and their staff are an odd mix of their friends, the original tech team, and then an odd series of fantasy vanity projects. Remember 15 years ago when mounting cameras on a person's face for "face captures" during gameplay was a thing? Several of those companies are now Saudi playpens, with over worked developers making demos on deadlines that are just for bragging rights and not products at all.
by chongli | 2025-08-28 10:49:29+00:00
Does anyone have a solution for full-text search of a folder of bookmarks? Specifically I want to search the sites themselves, not merely the text of the home pages (which is where the URLs point).

The specific problem I’m trying to solve is searching for seeds. I have about 20 different seed vendors bookmarked I want to search across all of their seed catalogues at once (without having to visit each site to search one at a time).

More broadly though I would love the ability to do custom / curated search. A search engine designed for searching collections of sites instead of the entire internet would be ideal.
Show HN: Startup Solve – AI toolkit for startup clarity
by Maulik_hacker | 2025-08-28 10:52:14+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m 14 and I’ve been obsessed with startups for a while. I noticed one big problem: most of us (especially first-time founders) waste months building something that nobody wants. So I built Startup Solve — an AI-powered platform that helps you stress-test your startup ideas before you write a single line of code.

It includes six tools:

~ AI Co-Founder → brainstorms with you like a smart partner.

~ Startup Oracle → pressure-tests your idea and asks the brutal questions VCs would.

~ Funding Predictor → gives an estimate of whether your idea could raise funding.

~ Idea Incubator → helps refine and niche down broad ideas.

~ Viability Scanner → scores viability, market size, and competition.

Growth Engine → generates potential go-to-market strategies.

The goal isn’t to replace founders — it’s to save time, sharpen clarity, and help you focus on the right problems instead of chasing noise.

I built this without a coding background, learning step by step along the way. It’s still early, but a few people who’ve tried it said it feels like having a “reality-check partner” for their startup.

I’d love feedback from HN — both brutally honest criticism and ideas on how to make this more valuable for serious founders.

https://startup-solve.lovable.app

Thanks for reading.
by pakapica | 2025-08-28 10:53:50+00:00
I'm a software engineer with a background in AI/ML, and this has been a side project of mine for a while. I was always fascinated by options trading but frustrated with the "get rich quick" noise online. I wanted to see if a systematic, data-driven approach using Reinforcement Learning could actually work. I chose 0DTE SPX options because they create a perfect, self-contained "episode" for an RL agent to learn in—no overnight risk, cash-settled, and a clean slate every day. This is the first post in a series about the project. It covers the setup, the strategy (Iron Condors), the model (Recurrent PPO with LSTM), and the surprisingly positive results from my initial simulation on OHLC data. The key takeaway, however, is that this initial success is just one part of the story. The next posts will dive into the harsh reality of bid-ask spreads and why the model's performance cratered when faced with more realistic data. Would love to get feedback or hear from anyone who's tackled similar problems.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-28 10:53:52+00:00
This is doing the rounds on YouTube, too. But with pretty much the same information as everywhere else that tracks back to the same original sources.

* https://youtube.com/watch?v=mlY2QjP_-9s (JayzTwoCents)

* https://youtube.com/watch?v=sU_WepeHUd8 (ThioJoe)

* https://youtube.com/watch?v=7xS-CE-hy6Q (Dave's Attic)

* https://youtube.com/watch?v=zoHGSz-f6os (Pureinfotech)
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-08-28 10:54:34+00:00
I don't think the study is flawed. It just seems rather narrow:

"We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how AI tools at the February-June 2025 frontier affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers. 16 developers with moderate AI experience complete 246 tasks in mature projects on which they have an average of 5 years of prior experience."

So the question is what other kinds of software development tasks this result applies to. Moderate AI experience is fine. This applies to many other situations. But 5 years of experience with a single code base is an outlier.

That said, they used relatively large repositories (1.1 million LOC) and the tasks were randomly assigned. So developers couldn't pick and choose tasks in areas of the codebase they already knew extremely well.

I think the study does generalise to some degree, but I've seen conclusions drawn from this study that the methodology doesn't support. In my view, it doesn't generalise over all or even most software development taks.

Personally, I'm a bit sceptical (but not hostile) about LLMs for coding (and some other thinking tasks), because the difference in quality between requests for which there are many examples and tasks for which there are only few examples is so extreme.

Reasoning capabilities of LLMs still seem minimal.
by hotheadhacker | 2025-08-28 10:54:59+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Seedbox-Lite, a minimal self-hosted torrent streaming app. The idea was simple: I wanted something lighter than a full seedbox, but with a clean UI that feels like Netflix. You drop it on a server, point it at torrents, and stream instantly in the browser.

A few things it does: • Streams video directly from torrents without waiting for the full download • Works in any browser, mobile included • Simple Docker setup (one command and you’re running) • Password protection so you don’t expose everything by accident • Lightweight — no heavy dependencies or complex configs

Repo: https://github.com/hotheadhacker/seedbox-lite

I’d love feedback on what’s rough, what’s missing, or what would make it useful for more people.
by matja | 2025-08-28 10:55:14+00:00
How are you defining "bricked"? The SSD device can no longer be enumerated on the PCIe/SATA bus, or it doesn't respond to ATA/NVMe commands, or it doesn't respond as expected, or it does but the data is always wrong? Does the same SSD work in another machine?

edit: The author of the comment I replied to has changed their comment to remove all details of their testing.
by yurifury | 2025-08-28 10:56:02+00:00
Thanks for posting the detailed instructions. I'll be trying this myself. I discovered a technique that lets you use orthostatic pressure combined with breath to seriously alter my mental and physical state within seconds, and this was after years of casually trying other breathwork. In the field of self-development, the only empiricism is actually trying stuff. And it's usually a field of great personal invention.
by jibal | 2025-08-28 10:56:05+00:00
You notably don't say which subreddit. [edit: the point being that some Reddit subs are favored by "lefties" while some are favored by people with other ideological outlooks. I would add another point: the mods may well have looked at your other comments to help guide their decision. Finally, we don't know the actual language of your comment ... the sort of comment you have described is often stated in a way violates norms]

> Thou shalt not post anything that might cause a lefty to question their opinions.

This is hyperbole at best. [edit: to be extremely charitable]

Edit: BTW, your worldview of who the good guys and bad guys are seems to be the opposite of the OP's, who is saying that the mods are ok with footage of IDF winning battles but not ok with footage of them losing battles, which does not sound characteristic of "leftys", nor does the name of the sub: /r/CombatFootage doesn't exactly sound like a "leftys" hangout. Further, the OP makes a point of stating that he wasn't mocking the IDF for losing the battle and yet was banned, which seems to clearly indicate that he thinks the mods are fans of the IDF ... again, that doesn't sound like "leftys". So by your own lights it seems that it's not leftys who reject anything that might cause their opinions to be questioned, at least not in this instance.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-28 10:56:57+00:00
I've heard good things about work done by this guy Linus. I'm pretty sure that I've used his work.

I think he comes from a country that borders Russia, so should we be worried?

I've done OSS for decades; mostly by myself, but sometimes, in teams of volunteers.

If anyone has any experience, working in teams of volunteers, it can be ... challenging.

It can definitely work, but not as often as you'd think. If it works, there's usually some "BDFL," or a common goal that has everyone on the same beam. In my case, it was usually the latter.
by bell-cot | 2025-08-28 10:58:12+00:00
> The moderation seems less about “combat footage” and more about which side is shown losing.

Yes? Pretty much every human society ever has been indifferent about enforcing rules against the powerful and well-connected. But zealous about enforcing rules against the weak and expendable. While pretending that it's "equal justice for all".

Next problem: Trying to figure out what the actual (enforced) rules are, for yourself, in any given time and place.
by de6u99er | 2025-08-28 10:58:27+00:00
At my last gig I avoided Bitnami container images and Helm charts wherever possible. We (me plus an AWS consultant) used Karpenter Autoscaler, Envoy Gateway API, Gatekeeper OPA, Loki/Prometheus/Grafana Stack, EDB Postgres Operator, ... and deployed all through a single comprehensive terraform script to an EKS cluster. I tried to keep reliance on one single company as low ad possible. I even had a Plan B to replace S3 with MinIO in case the company decided to move to another cloud provider or an On Prem Kubernetes cluster.

My recommendation to everyone is to avoid Cloud Vendor Lock-In from the start, and even if it's more initial work, to try to have as much as possible running on Kubernetes.
by IshKebab | 2025-08-28 10:59:31+00:00
True. Well usually. In some cases the property you're writing is so simple you wouldn't need any tests, for example in a compression library you just check decompress(compress(x)) == x. If that is proven there's no need for tests.

But yeah usually it's a good idea to have a few tests anyway. You just need fewer tests the more properties you can prove formally.
by jim_lawless | 2025-08-28 10:59:42+00:00
I have a handful of sites that I visit frequently. I wrote a script called "to" that has an embedded list of these sites' URL's along with some metadata that includes the preferred browser client and a short mnemonic name for the site. When I issue a command like:

to hn

The script will open the site https://news.ycombinator.com with Chrome. I also have a help screen that lists the URL's and their mnemonics. Again, note that this is a very short list.

I like working at a command-line so it's often faster for me to run something like this instead of typing the first few characters of a site name into a browser and waiting for the URL autocomplete to finish the URL for me.
by tomaskafka | 2025-08-28 10:59:56+00:00
I think it’s a question of time until the mobile OS do this natively as a part of responding to user request. Like those Siri app snippets (scores, maps, stocks …), but with whatever adhoc UI that’s needed to best present the result (or allow the user to further interact).

“What to do in Zagreb with a family?” will build a personalized map & content app tailored to everything the AI knows about your preferences.

AI services will want to own this, but the current OS makers have all the incentives to not let them, so I expected OpenAI hardware to be this - a smartphone with launcher basically replaced by a prompt.

Until then, you might sell Bitrig to them as a way to wrestle this approach onto competing platforms, wrapped inside their app?

As an indie app maker (Weathergraph - a beautiful hourly forecast visualization), I should probably include the Ralph “I’m in danger” gif :)
by ndiddy | 2025-08-28 11:00:22+00:00
You may have missed the part in the article that says that they only switched to offset mounting after their first Ryzen 9950X died when the cooler was mounted centered.

> But note that the 1st failure happened with a more centred heat sink. We only made the off-centre mounting for the 2nd system as to minimise the risk of a repeated system failure.
by throw0101c | 2025-08-28 11:00:35+00:00
> Does external cert validation for onion domains even make sense? […] What additional security benefit would CA-signed certs bring?

Yes, and the page/documents explain some use cases:

> The two ACME-defined methods allowed by CA/BF described in Sections 3.1.2 and 3.1.3 (http-01 and tls-alpn-01) do not allow issuance of wildcard certificates. A ".onion" Special-Use Domain Name can have subdomains (just like any other domain in the DNS), and a site operator may find it useful to have one certificate for all virtual hosts on their site. This new validation method incorporates the specially signed Certificate Signing Request (CSR) (as defined by Appendix B.2.b of [cabf-br]) into ACME to allow for the issuance of wildcard certificates.

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9799#name-new-onion...

> Some Hidden Services do not wish to be accessible to the entire Tor network, and so they encrypt their Hidden Service Descriptor with the keys of clients authorized to connect. Without a way for the CA to signal what key it will use to connect, these services will not be able to obtain a certificate using http-01 or tls-alpn-01, nor enforce CAA with any validation method.

> To this end, an additional field in the challenge object is defined to allow the ACME server to advertise the Ed25519 public key it will use (as per the "Authentication during the introduction phase" section of [tor-spec]) to authenticate itself when retrieving the Hidden Service Descriptor.

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9799#name-new-onion...
Show HN: An auction platform for failed and active startups
by sOwl_ | 2025-08-28 11:01:11+00:00
My co-founder and I have spent years building and launching side projects, most of which have failed. We've accumulated a graveyard of abandoned codebases, and one day we had the idea to sell one of them. The process sparked an idea: what if there was a marketplace specifically for digital projects at every stage of their life, from a simple idea to a profitable business?

Today, we're launching just that—an online auction platform where founders can sell their projects. We're talking about everything from:

Startup ideas (just a concept or landing page)

MVPs and unfinished projects

Failed startups

Active projects

Profitable businesses

We're a two-person team just starting out, and we're currently trying to get our first 100 listings. We're facing the classic chicken-and-egg problem, and it's a grind.

This isn't a polished, corporate product. We know it has a long way to go, but we wanted to get it out there to the HN community and get your honest feedback.

We're not here to just sell something; we're here to solve a problem we've personally experienced. We'd appreciate any thoughts on the platform itself, or any ideas on how we can reach more founders who might be interested in listing their project.

Thank you for your time.
by kokada | 2025-08-28 11:02:14+00:00
This is more how I think too: using a cooler that supports your CPU TDP is generally fine because most people will not run a CPU 100% for an extended amount of time. But in this case they seem to be running the CPU 100% for an extended amount of time AND are using an under-spec'ed cooler (even if it is just by 5W).

You don't even need to change the actual cooler since for AMD CPUs you can pretty much customize the TDP whatever way you want, and by default they run well above their efficiency curve. For example, my 7600X has a default TDP of 105W but I run it in Eco Mode (65W) with undervolt and I barely lose any performance. Even if I did no undervolt, running the CPU in Eco Mode is generally preferable since the performance loss is still negligible (~5%).
by e1ghtSpace | 2025-08-28 11:02:22+00:00
Theres this one song I like - Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qPZl7M2REM

If you change the speed to custom 1.05x and listen, you'll notice it sounds different to normal. Then if you switch to normal and listen again you can get your brain to recognise the different pitch from the 1.05x speed version and one time I got into an altered state of consciousness.
by legobmw99 | 2025-08-28 11:02:23+00:00
Besides the logistical problems (shared ownership of MLB and minor league teams, the fact that almost all [good] players in the minors are really ultimately contracted with a major league team, etc), I truly believe that even the worst major league team would absolutely destroy AAA, and the best AAA team would probably set the single season loss record with ease in the bigs
by jajko | 2025-08-28 11:02:41+00:00
> Contrast with the usual software engineering types I know that work insanely hard solving difficult problems day-in and day-out.

Well you just know some... not effective or smart folks then, unless they literally enjoy living such life. There is time for some hard work, but if that's one's default modus operandi long term, rest of their lives suck pretty badly, no realistic way to avoid that.

That's failure to manage one of most critical aspects of life. Especially bad fail if employed at some heartless mega corporation, or just usual often amoral FAANGs of these days (unless the goal is to earn enough money in few years and move to saner place in life, but few achieve that even if they plan for it, ie mortgages and kids happen).

Some of us live to work, and the rest work to get some good actual life.
by xg15 | 2025-08-28 11:03:03+00:00
This seems like a general problem of using search on onion. I don't really understand how this is supposed to work at all, honestly.

Either you already know the domain you want to visit or you don't.

If you do, you don't need search.

If you don't, how could you be sure that any search results are for the real site and not an MITM proxy?
by rsanek | 2025-08-28 11:03:08+00:00
The first figure alone is insane, for me it helps explain why some friends feel like the market has fallen out from under them (early career) while others aren't having such a tough time. It seems like so far, for folks 30+ AI hasn't really changed things radically (yet).

The series in figure 6, though, I think suggests that we may just be seeing a time-delayed effect and eventually everyone's going to be impacted.
by touisteur | 2025-08-28 11:05:20+00:00
L40/L40S didn't have it either, which was announced late and felt like a gut-punch for the rare actual non-AI use-case at the time.

A40 nvlink was limited though, one-to-one (bridge), never saw it daisy-chained or nvswitched (might have just not seen them myself, they may have existed).
by ahartmetz | 2025-08-28 11:06:32+00:00
Install "Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2021 LTSC" if you don't mind buying grey market keys. Less crapware, more mature and less enshittified than 11, and security fixes until 2032.

I don't want to endorse Windows at all (use Linux if you can!). But maybe you need it to occasionally test something or whatever.
by aragilar | 2025-08-28 11:08:14+00:00
How? bubblewrap isn't something someone has randomly uploaded to npm, it has well known maintainers and a well organised release process (including package signing). Which is easier to do: upload a package to npm and get people to use it, or spend 2+ years trying to become a maintainer of bubblewrap or one of its dependencies to compromise it.
by vintagedave | 2025-08-28 11:08:31+00:00
> if we are to properly understand LLMs, we need to accept that linguistic creativity can be completely distinct from intelligence, and that text doesn’t have to refer to the physical world – just to other words. What these machines demonstrate is that language works as a system of signs that mostly refer just to other signs.

But does that preclude intelligence? Arguably all interaction with the world is through, or understood through, signs.
Ask HN: Best foundation model for CLM fine-tuning?
by philomath868 | 2025-08-28 11:08:40+00:00
Hi,

I have a largish (2 GB) corpus of curated, high-quality text in some low-resource language, and I want to build a model that would provide an advanced "auto complete" service for writers.

I'm thinking of taking a decoder-only model such as Llama, Mistral or Gemma, slice off the embedding layers (which are based on unneeded languages), create new ones (perhaps initialized based on a FastText model trained on the corpus), paired with a tokenizer newly created from my corpus, then train the model on my corpus until convergence.

Additional potential details include: a custom loss function for synonym-aware training (based on a custom high-quality thesaurus), where synonyms of the "correct" word are somewhat rewarded; POS-tagging the corpus with a Language-specific POS-tagger, and add a POS-tagging head to the model as a Multi-task Learning, to force grammatical generation.

In order to be able to use a good model as the base, I will probably be forced to use PEFT (LoRA). My current setup is whatever is available on Colab Pro+, so I can probably use the 7b-12b range of models?

My main question is, which base model would be best for this task? (Again, for completion of general writing of all kinds, not programming or advanced reasoning).

Also, will the synonym and POS additions help or hurt?

Anything else I might be missing?

Thanks!
by Ygg2 | 2025-08-28 11:08:59+00:00
> On top of that, Scala provides several widely used ...

With Scala is less what you miss, and more what you have.

- Custom operators. Those are great for DSLs and rendering your code to look like utter gibberish, and confuse IDEs.

- SBT. Shudder.

- Scala 2 codebases.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-28 11:09:16+00:00
I advise you to update your language knowledge to Java 24, C# 13, Scala 3.

From another comment of mine,

type Exp = UnMinus of Exp | Plus of Exp * Exp | Minus of Exp * Exp | Times of Exp * Exp | Divides of Exp * Exp | Power of Exp * Exp | Real of float | Var of string | FunCall of string * Exp | Fix of string * Exp ;;

Into the Java ADTs that you say Java doesn't have for sure,

public sealed interface Exp permits UnMinus, Plus, Minus, Times, Divides, Power, Real, Var, FunCall, Fix {} public record UnMinus(Exp exp) implements Exp {} public record Plus(Exp left, Exp right) implements Exp {} public record Minus(Exp left, Exp right) implements Exp {} public record Times(Exp left, Exp right) implements Exp {} public record Divides(Exp left, Exp right) implements Exp {} public record Power(Exp base, Exp exponent) implements Exp {} public record Real(double value) implements Exp {} public record Var(String name) implements Exp {} public record FunCall(String functionName, Exp argument) implements Exp {} public record Fix(String name, Exp argument) implements Exp {}

And a typical ML style evaluator, just for the kicks,

public class Evaluator { public double eval(Exp exp) { return switch (exp) { case UnMinus u -> -eval(u.exp()); case Plus p -> eval(p.left()) + eval(p.right()); case Minus m -> eval(m.left()) - eval(m.right()); case Times t -> eval(t.left()) * eval(t.right()); case Divides d -> eval(d.left()) / eval(d.right()); case Power p -> Math.pow(eval(p.base()), eval(p.exponent())); case Real r -> r.value(); case Var v -> context.valueOf(v.name); case FunCall f -> eval(funcTable.get(f.functionName), f.argument); case Fix fx -> eval(context.valueOf(v.name), f.argument); }; } }