MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sebstefan | 2025-08-21 14:44:30+00:00
I agree with this, but how will these companies make money? Short of a breakthrough, the consumer isn't ready to pay for it, and even if they were, open source models just catch up.

My feelings are that most of the "huge advancements" are not going to benefit the people selling AI.

I'd put my money on those who sell the pickaxes, and the companies who have a way to use this new tech to deliver more value.
by juanviera23 | 2025-08-21 14:44:35+00:00
Hi HN,

UTCP Contributor here.

I understand your frustrations of people adding abstractions on existing infrastructure for no reason, but UTCP is actually trying to avoid exactly that.

Picture the following scenario. You create an agent that your users should use in their daily life. Now you want your users to be able to do more than generate text. A.k.a. call tools.

How do you do this?

Option 1: you implement your own infrastructure allowing them to call whatever tools you custom infra supports. -> less flexibility on the user side of what tools they can use

Option 2: you use an MCP client. Now your users can add any tool they want as long as it has MCP support. This however adds an extra layer of infra. Agent -> MCP Server -> Original Tool (maybe a REST API, or a CLI command, etc.)

Option 3: you use the UTCP client. Now your users can add any tool that uses any communication protocol. Agent -> Original tool (maybe a REST API, CLI command, MCP server, etc.)

TLDR, UTCP is about security and not rebuilding existing infrastructure. There are plenty of communication protocols to get anything you can imagine done on the internet. We should use those and write interfaces and wrappers using those, not MCP. That is what UTCP does. It allows agents to use existing infra, communication protocols and security.

We're fully community-driven OSS, and just aiming to make a protocol that is useful for people

Hope this makes sense and happy building <3
by jdmichal | 2025-08-21 14:45:58+00:00
I was part of an ACM programming team in college. We would review classes of problems based on the type of solution necessary, and learn those techniques for solving them. We were permitted a notebook, and ours was full of the general outline of each of these classes and techniques. Along with specific examples of the more common algorithms we might encounter.

As a concrete example, there is a class of problems that are well served by dynamic programming. So we would review specific examples like Dijkstra's algorithm for shortest path. Or Wagner–Fischer algorithm for Levenshtein-style string editing. But we would also learn, often via these concrete examples, of how to classify and structure a problem into a dynamic programming solution.

I have no idea if this is what is meant by "l33t code solutions", but I thought it would be a helpful response anyway. But the bottom line is that these are not common in industry, because hard computer science is not necessary for typical business problems. The same way you don't require material sciences advancements to build a typical house. Instead it flows the other way, where advancements in materials sciences will trickle down to changing what the typical house build looks like.
by PhantomHour | 2025-08-21 14:46:08+00:00
One thing I'm missing in the full report is what a 'median prompt' actually looks like. How many tokens? What's the distribution of prompt sizes like? Is it even the same 'median prompt' between 2024 and 2025?

The numbers are cute but we can't actually do anything with them without those details. At least an average could be multiplied by the # of queries to get the total usage.
by biowaffeln | 2025-08-21 14:46:11+00:00
recently i've been having a lot of success with working with d3 + solid.js. I use d3 as the data processing layer, and solid for actually rendering svgs from the data. the combination is lovely, you get all the power of d3, while the parts that usually end up verbose are written succinctly in jsx. and it's a lot less pain than doing it in react, because the mental models of solid/d3 feel much more aligned
by Closi | 2025-08-21 14:46:12+00:00
Exactly this - people that understood the field well enough to add new knowledge to it has to be a pretty decent signal for a research-level engineer.

At the research level it’s not just about being smart enough, or being a good programmer, or even completely understanding the field - it’s also about having an intuitive understanding of the field where you can self pursue research directions that are novel enough and yield results. Hard to prove that without having done it before.
by flerchin | 2025-08-21 14:46:41+00:00
The ones I know personally ruined their lives with drugs, and ended up on the street. It's an intertwined issue, but the direction of causality is pretty clear when, eg, one brother is poor, but employed and in a shitty apartment, and the other is a human pit of misery and the primary fork was a proclivity for illicit drugs in his teens.
by jasoncartwright | 2025-08-21 14:46:43+00:00
I recently, for pretty much the first time ever in 30 years of running websites, had to blanket ban crawlers. I now whitelist a few, but the rest (and all other non-UK visitors) have to pass a Cloudflare challenge [1].

AI crawlers were downloading whole pages and executing all the javascript tens of millions of times a day - hurting performance, filling logs, skewing analytics and costing too much money in Google Maps loads.

Really disappointing.

[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-challenges/
by anankaie | 2025-08-21 14:46:55+00:00
The framing is a bit off - every one of those URLs was created by the user having that conversation. They had to opt in to making it publicly visible.

What’s more curious is how Google got ahold of the URL list itself. Was the individual URLs indexed from somewhere else? Did a clever engineer notice a pattern and add some additional directives for the crawler? Did xAI put them in a sitemap they sent to Google? Something else?
by nissims | 2025-08-21 14:46:55+00:00
I created an interactive map featuring 100 of the most promising AI startups to watch this year, spanning industries like healthcare, cybersecurity, gaming, aerospace, and more. The map is based on data from CB Insights and Crunchbase and offers a visual way to explore where AI innovation is happening.

Would love to hear what categories or companies catch your eye!

https://www.scaapr.com/68a6fa1f56a34ecbd39b212b
Show HN: WinDisplay – BetterDisplay for Windows
by zpix1 | 2025-08-21 14:47:19+00:00
I had a problem with changing resolution on Windows being too slow, so I built a small tray app to make it fast. It can also change scale, refresh rate, orientation, and enable/disable HDR. It’s lightweight (<4 MB) and built with Tauri (Rust).

Code and download: GitHub - https://github.com/zpix1/windisplay
by somenameforme | 2025-08-21 14:47:20+00:00
Morality is relative. But from my worldview the perpetuation of a culture, and a society, is the first and foremost requirement of any successful culture or society, and arguably the single most primal responsibility of the people within that culture and society. This overlaps well with religion, but not so much with what I assume you might consider moral or amoral given your comment.
by throw101010 | 2025-08-21 14:47:35+00:00
The moment you try to look into the fines governments impose on banks caught money laundering and the rare cases in which bankers actually see a prison cell, your last option is the most likely one, with a sprinkle of the two others.

My main issue is that all the AML/KYC/KYB barriers we have to deal with never seem to be subject to efficiency tests, all the studies I read and the few audits of these system seem content with it's likely better than doing nothing... but never measure the lost opportunities in trade/business they cause.

In a way it's the same hopless fight against so-called piracy for movies/games. The motivated actors who want to break the law find ways to do it at a large scale, mostly without consequences... and the honest people are just hindered when they want to use their content (even lose access to it when DRMs rely on the existence of the developer/publisher and their goodwill to maintain it way past the time when that media was able to generate revenues).
by text0404 | 2025-08-21 14:47:35+00:00
Note: the example is a misconception and not what's meant by "binding to data." In D3, binding to data refers to using the `.data()` method to supply an object (typically an array) which you can then use in a function callback in the accessors, so like `.attr('x1', d => /* access individual array item here */)`. This allows you to easily bind a dataset to a graphical representation and use its attributes to inform the properties of the visualization.

I'd also argue that D3 is no more verbose than vanilla JS (at least for this example). What's the alternative for creating a line in SVG?

const line = document.createElementNS('http://www.w3.org/2000/svg', 'line') line.setAttribute('x1', ...) line.setAttribute('y1', ...) line.setAttribute('x2', ...) line.setAttribute('y2', ...) // etc document.querySelector('svg').appendChild(line)
by gcr | 2025-08-21 14:48:05+00:00
In 2011, Google claimed that each search query takes about 0.3Wh [1]. Earlier this year, Sam Altman also claimed about 0.3Wh avg use per query for OpenAI.

I'm honestly surprised that they're so similar. I've thought of LLM queries as being far more energy-intense than "just" a Google search, but maybe the takeaway is that ordinary Google searching is also quite energy-intense.

If I as a user just wanted an answer to a dumb question like, say, the meaning of some genZ slang, it seems about an order of magnitude to ask a small LLM running on my phone than to make a google search.

(Check my math: assuming the A16 CPU draws 5 watts peak for 20sec running Gemma or whatever on my iPhone, that’s 0.03Wh to answer a simple query, which is 10x cheaper)

Are training costs (esp. from failed runs) amortized in these estimates?

1: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-sear...
How are you making money online – outside of your job?
by samuelorozco | 2025-08-21 14:48:08+00:00
A question. I am a software engineer with 10+ years of experience. I work primarily in the backend but have worked a with many angular frontends.I have a few certs for AWS and terraform.

What is the easiest and fastest way to make online with our skillset. I make great money at my job but I could use a little extra right now.

ANY suggestions would be helpful.
by zvr | 2025-08-21 14:48:26+00:00
In a computer lab in a university in Greece in the '80s... we had a Star NL-10 connected to a Vax 11/750 running BSD Unix.

We were using nroff(1) to typeset and print documents, using the printer built-in fonts.

And then at some point we wrote the driver so that troff(1) (which was actually ditroff, for "device-independent" troff), could generate output that set the printer in high-resolution mode and essentially printed pre-rendered bitmaps of lines.

Oh, the memories!
by hodgesrm | 2025-08-21 14:48:48+00:00
> Now as a hiring manager I’ll say I regularly find that those who’ve had humanities experience are way more capable and the hard parts of analysis and understanding.

The humanities, especially the classic texts, cover human interaction and communication in a very compact form. My favorite sources are the Bible, Cicero, and Machiavelli. For example Machiavelli says if you do bad things to people do them at once, while good things you should spread out over time. This is common sense. Once you catch the flavor of his thinking it's pretty easy to work other situations out for yourself, in the same why that good engineering classes teach you how to decompose and solve technical problems.
by lesuorac | 2025-08-21 14:49:42+00:00
I always wonder if they somewhat right. Using the chart from the article we have large spikes in margin debt at a bunch of years that initially were followed by a crash but now are possibly followed by money printing preventing the crash. So although Burry has the right idea the rules/market has changed and his analysis no longer holds.

That said, I think 2025 is too early for the AI bubble to pop. Even Burry was buying CDS in 2005 [1] so if you're seeing something your convinced is a crack right now it's going to take a few years to actually fracture.

- 2000 -- Followed by a crash

- 2007 -- Followed by a crash

- 2011 -- (ish) USG added a bunch of money into the system

- 2015 -- Counter example?

- 2018 -- Counter example?

- 2021 -- Large crash, USG added a bunch of money into the system

- 2025q1 -- Tariff crash

- 2025q3 -- Too early to tell

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scion_Asset_Management
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-21 14:49:51+00:00
I just “wrote” 2000 lines of code for a project between Node for the AWS CDK and Python using the AWS SDK (Boto3). Between both, ChatGPT needed to “know” the correct API for 12 services, SQL and HTML (for a static report). The only thing it got wrong with a one shot approach was a specific Bedrock message payload for a specific LLM model. That was even just a matter of saying “verify the payload on the web using the official docs”.

Yes it was just as well structured as I - someone who has been coding as a hobby or professionally for four decades - would have done.
by electrograv | 2025-08-21 14:50:29+00:00
Yes, but with the “revolving door” between private financial institutions and government financial policy/regulation, there’s little real distinction anymore between the two.

Those private banks can print that money out of thin air because government allows them to. And the government officials (many formerly financial executives) allow them to because they “have to” to prevent “disastrous” private banking/financial collapse.

But if you or I wanted to play the same games to print our own money they way they do? No, that would be wrong and dangerous and illegal!

So it’s pretty clear that both government and private financial institutions are tightly coupled partners in a mostly corrupt, intentionally obfuscated shell game that primarily serves to keep money and power steadily flowing into the hands of the already wealthy and powerful.

Just look at who is actually held accountable for financial crimes. Some individual trader that finds and exploits some glitch that allows them to profit from the wealthy? Straight to jail. High ranking institutional powers (government and private) that implement often illegal schemes that continuously siphon wealth from common people into their hands? Slap on the wrist at most.
by respondo2134 | 2025-08-21 14:51:02+00:00
My observations (Canada, bigger city): The LP people you see (ie in "uniform") are often visible minorities, often women. They're positioned to remind you "we're watching!" not pursue any action. At best they'll call emergency services (a health event as common as theft). The covert LP people seem to be big, white, young males - the same type you see at popular gyms. They're still easy to spot because you see a young dude putting the oddest selection of products in their basket (always a basket) as the follow a "suspicious" person around. Their game seems to typically be stop the known thieves, recover stuff and kick them out of the store. Physical confrontations are limited because of liability and only rarely do they call the cops. I'd expect the experience is different in the US or other environments.
by slipperydippery | 2025-08-21 14:51:08+00:00
They do indeed often have zero ordinary cashiers.

... except at the "PRO" checkouts. Which are actually just ordinary check-out lanes. Anybody can go through them. The signs mean nothing whatsoever.

I never go through their self-checkouts unless I've only got one or two pre-packaged items. I usually park on the "PRO" side, enter through those doors, check out on that side, and leave through those doors.
by NickC25 | 2025-08-21 14:51:28+00:00
As I've said in other comments - expecting honesty and ethical behavior from Mark Zuckerberg is a fool's errand at best. He has unchecked power and cannot be voted out by shareholders.

He will say whatever he wants and because the returns have been pretty decent so far, people will just take his word for it. There's not enough class A shares to actually force his hand to do anything he doesn't want to do.
by Aachen | 2025-08-21 14:51:34+00:00
I think the complaint is rather that you don't know when it will rear its face on third-party websites that you are visiting as part of work. Forking wouldn't help with not seeing it on other sites

(Even if I agree that the boss or customers should just get over it. It's not like they're drawing genitalia on screen and it's also easily explainable if they don't already know it themselves.)
by IAmBroom | 2025-08-21 14:51:35+00:00
Well, the fuel - typically coal - heats a big container of water to the boiling point. The vapor is collected, and used as a force (because steam expands) to move the pistons, just like the ones moved by gas explosions in your car.

Then the conductor pulls the chain, and the train makes that whistle sound and spouts a lot of white smoke, which means you are nearing an old-timey town.
by naikrovek | 2025-08-21 14:52:01+00:00
no. it's someone wanting attention and feeling ok creating an interstitial page to capture your attention which does not prove you're a human while saying that the page proves you're human.

the entire thing is ridiculous. and only those who see no problem shoving anime catgirls into the face of others will deploy it. maybe that's a lot of people; maybe only I object to this. The reality is that there's no technical reason to deploy it, as called out in the linked blog article, so the only reason to do this is a "look at meee" reason, or to announce that one is a fan of this kind of thing, which is another "look at meee"-style reason.

Why do I object to things like this? Because once you start doing things like this, doing things for attention, you must continually escalate in order to keep capturing that attention. Ad companies do this, and they don't see a problem in escalation, and they know they have to do it. People quickly learn to ignore ads, so in order to make your page loads count as an advertiser, you must employ means which draw attention to your ads. It's the same with people who no longer draw attention to themselves because they like anime catgirls. Now they must put an interstitial page up to force you to see that they like anime catgirls. We've already established that the interstitial page accomplishes nothing other than showing you the image, so showing the image must be the intent. That is what I object to.
by Refreeze5224 | 2025-08-21 14:52:09+00:00
A couple things.

1. The early Church, including some Apostles, thought "the end times" were imminent. People have not stopped thinking this for 2000 years. I think the conclusion here is obvious.

2. Anti-abortion laws, especially the extra draconian ones in Texas, have nothing to do with "protecting babies". They are about continuing the regime of oppression and subjugation of women that they lost control of beginning in the 60s. That's it. They do not care about "babies", they care about control.

3. Even if they cared about "babies", there's that whole "Congress shall make no law respecting religion" bit. Christianity is not entitled to define what life is, when it starts, and who or what violates their ideas. You call it murder. Some people call meat murder. Notice how it's left up to individuals to decide about eating animals?
by pydry | 2025-08-21 14:52:18+00:00
The US exports very little to China, most of which is easily substitutable (e.g. soybeans, corn, oil) and imports a lot, most of which isnt substitutable (e.g. electronics).

The substituability story was different ~5-10 years ago and a lot of Americans havent noticed yet that China is now just as good at building wide body airplanes and chips.

No prizes for guessing who has the upper hand in negotiations.
by PhantomHour | 2025-08-21 14:52:19+00:00
The way around that is that is for LLM-based tools to run a regular search engine query in the background and feed the results of that in alongside the prompt. (Usually a two-step process of the LLM formulating the query, then another pass on the results)

The used results can then have their link either added to the end result separately, guaranteeing it is correct, or added to the prompt and "telling the LLM to include it", which retains a risk of hallucination, yes.

Common to both of these is the failure mode that the LLM can still hallucinate whilst "summarizing" the results, meaning you still have no guarantee that the claims made actually show up in the results.
by throwawa5 | 2025-08-21 14:52:37+00:00
I didn't vote because I live in a deep blue district in a deep blue state, Harris was a joke of a candidate, and I couldn't be bothered to update my voter registration after a recent move. Given my participation would have had zero impact on the outcome, I decided to spend my time on other things.

From what I hear, many people in blue states made the same calculation.
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-08-21 14:53:00+00:00
I was a huge fan of Podman, but I eventually gave up and use Docker Compose for local development. It's not worth fighting the system.

However, for single server deployments, where I don't need Kubernetes, I now exclusively use Quadlets to run apps and I couldn't be happier. It's a much nicer experience that using typical Docker/Podman setup. It feels integrated into the system.
by jFriedensreich | 2025-08-21 14:53:47+00:00
Its pretty clear to a growing number of devs what a review tool should look like. It is more a matter of what needs to happen so this becomes a usable and sustainable reality and what shape of organisation/ players can make this happen in the right way.

- git itself wont go much further than the change-id which is already a huge win (thanks to jj, git butler, gerrit and other teams)

- graphite and github clearly showed they are not interested in solving this for anyone but their userslaves and have obviously opposing incentives.

- there are dozens of semi abandoned cli tools trying this without any traction, a cli can be a part of a solution but is just a small part

What we need:

- usable fully local

- core team support for vscode not just a broken afterthought by someone from the broader community

- web UI for usecases where vscode does not fit (possibly via vscode web or other ways to reuse as much of the interface work that went into the vscode integration)

- the core needs to be usable from a cli or library with clear boundaries so other editor teams can build as great integrations as the reference but fitting their native ui concepts

- it needs to work for commits, branches, stacked commits and any snapshot an agent creates as well as reviewing a devs own work before pushing

- it needs to incorporate CI/CD signals natively, meta did great UI work on this and its crucial to not ignore all that progress but build on top of it

- it needs to be as fine grained as the situation requires and with editability at every step. Why can i just accept one line in cursor but there is nothing like that when reviewing a humans code? Why can i fix a typo without any effort when reviewing in cursor when i have to go through at least 5 clicks to do the same when fixing a typo of a human.

- It needs to by fully incremental, when a pr is fixed there needs to be a simple way to review just the fix and not re-review the whole pr or the full file
by paulgerhardt | 2025-08-21 14:54:08+00:00
> Most crypto coins (not Monero) are pseudonymous.

It's worth reading the OSPEAD report from the Monero Community: https://www.getmonero.org/2025/04/05/ospead-optimal-ring-sig...

> Monero users with extreme threat models should be aware that anti-privacy adversaries can leverage timing information to increase the probability of guessing the real spend in a ring signature to approximately 1-in-4.2 instead of 1-in-16.

So slightly worse odds than Russian Roulette. Cool. Cool.