MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by captainregex | 2025-08-05 22:02:47+00:00
I’m still trying to understand what is the biggest group of people that uses local AI (or will)? Students who don’t want to pay but somehow have the hardware? Devs who are price conscious and want free agentic coding?

Local, in my experience, can’t even pull data from an image without hallucinating (Qwen 2.5 VI in that example). Hopefully local/small models keep getting better and devices get better at running bigger ones

It feels like we do it because we can more than because it makes sense- which I am all for! I just wonder if i’m missing some kind of major use case all around me that justifies chaining together a bunch of mac studios or buying a really great graphics card. Tools like exo are cool and the idea of distributed compute is neat but what edge cases truly need it so badly that it’s worth all the effort?
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-08-05 22:02:49+00:00
I'm going to take you seriously. You are advocating for a world where statistically you would not be alive, and without a doubt you would not be able to read or write. I'm going to pay you the respect of honoring your preference. I didn't read what you wrote here, and I'm going to do my best to not remember that you exist.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-08-05 22:02:52+00:00
That is fundamentally a big O question.

I have this theory that we simply got over a hump by utilizing a massive processing boost from gpus as opposed to CPUs. That might have been two to three orders of magnitude more processing power.

But that's a one-time success. I don't hardware has any large scale improvements coming, because 3D gaming mostly plumb most of that vector processing hardware development in the last 30 years.

So will software and better training models produce another couple orders of magnitude?

Fundamentally we're talking about nines of of accuracy. What is the processing power required for each line of accuracy? Is it linear? Is it polynomial? Is it exponential?

It just seems strange to me with all the AI knowledge slushing through academia, I haven't seen any basic analysis at that level, which is something that's absolutely going to be necessary for AI applications like self-driving, once you get those insurance companies involved
by ultimatefan1 | 2025-08-05 22:03:20+00:00
video game companies definitely have to deal with these same kinds of questions.

from https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/accounting-for-saas-a... :

Accounting for potions: This is fairly easy. If you sell someone a potion, revenue is recognized when they drink the potion. Or use their speed boost. Or skip the progress gate to get to the next dungeon. The fiction doesn’t matter. Reality matters, and the economic reality of the situation is that performance has happened after the temporary thing you’ve promised is delivered. (Technically speaking you do have to recognize the revenue over time if your potions last long enough to be close to monthly SaaS contracts, but practically speaking most are over with in a day and most accounting systems lose precision below that.)

Accounting for swords: If you trade gems for swords then you can ratably recognize the purchase price of the gems when you satisfy your obligation by giving the player a new sword.

Hah, just kidding. That would be way too easy.

You actually need to recognize the prorated cost of the gems exchanged for the sword over the economically useful life of the imaginary sword. “Economically useful life” is a concept with a lot of prior art on it in accounting. You are obligated to, and accountants can point to substantial work on, estimating the economically useful life of factories, cruise ships, CNC machines, bunk beds, Bitcoin miners, dairy cattle, and almost everything else that depreciates.

But there is not a huge amount of prior art on imaginary swords. So you get to pick one of two methods..

The first, by far less commonly used, is to put your head together with very expensive accounting professionals and rigorously answer the question “What events in reality, in the universe we actually live in, would cause the owner of this imaginary sword to believe it had no or de minimis future value to them?” And perhaps that conversation would involve questions like power creep, game balance changes, declining player preference for swords now that you’re offering a sale on imaginary nuclear weapons, etc.

Nobody has time for that conversation or the truly gargantuan amount of implementation engineering required to enforce the decision it comes up with, so they largely use door #2: the economically useful life of a virtual good is by nature upper bounded by the economically useful life of a player’s relationship with our game, so use that instead.

You are required to use your existing data to make a reasonable estimate of how long either the particular player or, failing that, the hypothetical spherical frictionless average player will continue to play the game after the purchase. Then you recognize the price of the sword ratably over that time period.

This causes many virtual goods companies to have bookings (player purchases) diverge sharply from revenue. That depresses the value of their companies, in the real world, and those companies then spend substantial amounts of professional labor taking their frustration out on imaginary swords.
by kccqzy | 2025-08-05 22:04:06+00:00
I agree with you regarding how Apple can do the bare minimum and barely get called out. But the fact is, I don't know of anything who's using declarativeNetRequest on Safari. The ecosystem of Safari blocking is centered around the legacy technology of content blockers from 2015. And the legacy technology works well enough that there's no pressure for either Apple or adblocker developers to adopt the new thing.
by RadiozRadioz | 2025-08-05 22:04:19+00:00
Two things immediately wrong: Stallman had nothing to do with Open Source; his movement is Free Software, which is at most a precursor to the separate, but sometimes overlapping, ideas of Open Source. Stallman also did not start Free Software so that people could make their creations available as evidence in résumés. He started the movement to empower software users after he felt powerless when confronted by a proprietary printer driver.
by leidenfrost | 2025-08-05 22:05:55+00:00
Insulin control is about managing hunger more than a direct cause for weight.

You don't even need to do keto or wacky "just meat" diets to handle insulin. Protein consumption prevents insulin spikes for around 1-2 hours after eating. Also, proteins and fats slow down digestion.

Turns out, the good old Mediterranean diet is spot-on for a healthy lifestyle.
by orbital-decay | 2025-08-05 22:05:57+00:00
Then most music is not art, because I struggle to find non-generic music, at least for the genres I like. In 2020s, 4/5 artists are bent on trying to create a blend of aesthetics of the past, instead of even attempting doing something that sounds fresh and authentic. And very few of these who do succeed. This has been going on for a while.
by tw04 | 2025-08-05 22:06:23+00:00
> It has nothing to do with stupidity. Stop painting people as idiots because they exist in one of the most information hostile environments in human history.

No. Someone refusing to spend 30 seconds understanding how a tariff works is the result of an idiot. My 10 year old figured out how they work in under 5 minutes. There’s literally no excuse for a grown ass adult to refuse to educate themselves on the subject.

“This media environment” doesn’t prevent them from typing “how do tariffs work?” in their search engine of choice and reading the first result.
by abainbridge | 2025-08-05 22:06:47+00:00
While we're nit-picking the title, what does the "real-time" part mean? How would it be different if it wasn't real-time?

Dictionary.com defines "real-time" like as, "the actual time during which a process or event occurs", eg "along with much of the country, he watched events unfolding in real time on TV". Or in the domain of Computing, "relating to a system in which input data is processed within milliseconds so that it is available virtually immediately as feedback to the process from which it is coming, e.g. a missile guidance system might have "real-time signal processing".

Neither definition work here. It seems like they took a sequence of pictures very quickly, and then, some time later, played them back at an enormously slowed-down rate.
by nr378 | 2025-08-05 22:08:16+00:00
Interest rates set the exchange rate between future cashflows (i.e. assets) and cash today. Lower interest rates mean higher asset values, higher interest rates mean lower asset values. Higher asset values generally disproportionately benefit those that own assets (wealthy people) over those that don't (average people).

Of course, this is just one way that interest rates affect the economy, and it's important to bear in mind that lower interest rates can also stimulate investment which help to create jobs for average people as well.
by agent_turtle | 2025-08-05 22:08:18+00:00
Some of the variables that made the Great Depression what it was included very high tariff rates and lack of quality federal oversight.

Today, we have the highest tariffs since right before the Great Depression, with the added bonus of economic uncertainty because our current tariff rates change on a near daily basis.

Add in meme stocks, AI bubble, crypto, attacks on the Federal Reserve’s independence, and a decreasing trust in federal economic data, and you can make the case that things could get pretty ugly.
by EasyMark | 2025-08-05 22:08:19+00:00
I get the best of all worlds by using Orion, I can use uBlock Origin (the Firefox version) and also get WebKit which Safari uses. Orion seemed unstable for me, but I gave it another shot a couple of months ago, and it has been as stable as Safari for me. Glad to hear someone gave Safari another AdBlock alternative though, the more, the merrier.
by toastercat | 2025-08-05 22:08:45+00:00
> GitHub in essence is still pretty much the same, there's products that have feature creep but I wouldn't say GitHub does that.

I think we're using two different products. Off the top of my head, I can think of Github Projects (the Trello-like feature), Github Marketplace, Github Discussions, the complete revamp of the file-viewer/editor, and all the new AI/LLM-based stuff baked into yet another feature known as Codespaces.

> I can't say that I'm having issues with the performance either. I work with large PRs too

Good for you. I suffered for maybe 4 years from this, and so have many others: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/39341
by mattbillenstein | 2025-08-05 22:09:25+00:00
In a way it kinda does though - like definitely the information ecosystem distorts things, but some people do not have (or do not exercise) the critical reasoning skills to decipher what's true from what's not. Or what issues are actually important from those that are meant to just distract - not everyone can tell the difference and see how the incentives actually point to what's going on. reply
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-05 22:09:51+00:00
It's difficult to discuss a whole book as a HN post. Or are we discussing it an ad? The idea is interesting, but it would take some effort digging into the details to say more.

... actually i see some scary issues with the idea on the surface. I would want to decline if i was chosen, as it may pose a risk to my life and destroy my relationships if people knew. Suddenly every person within 30 mile radius wants to talk to me and convince me of something.
by canvascritic | 2025-08-05 22:10:36+00:00
Healthcare organizations that can't (easily) send data over the wire while remaining in compliance

Organizations operating in high stakes environments

Organizations with restrictive IT policies

To name just a few -- well, the first two are special cases of the last one

RE your hallucination concerns: the issue is overly broad ambitions. Local LLMs are not general purpose -- if what you want is local ChatGPT, you will have a bad time. You should have a highly focused use case, like "classify this free text as A or B" or "clean this up to conform to this standard": this is the sweet spot for a local model
by gspencley | 2025-08-05 22:10:41+00:00
Oh don't get me wrong. I'm sure that an LLM can write a decent test that doesn't have the problems I described. The problem is that LLMs are making a preexisting problem much, MUCH worse.

That problem statement is:

- Not all tests add value

- Some tests can even create dis-value (ex: slow to run, thus increasing CI bills for the business without actually testing anything important)

- Few developers understand what good automated testing looks like

- Developers are incentivized to write tests just to satisfy code coverage metrics

- Therefore writing tests is a chore and an afterthought

- So they reach for an LLM because it solves what they perceive as a problem

- The tests run and pass, and they are completely oblivious to the anti-patterns just introduced and the problems those will create over time

- The LLMs are generating hundreds, if not thousands, of these problems

So yeah, the problem is 100% the developers who don't understand how to evaluate the output of a tool that they are using.

But unlike functional code, these tests are - in many cases - arguably creating disvalue for the business. At least the functional code is a) more likely to be reviewed and code quality problems addressed and b) even if not, it's still providing features for the end user and thus adding some value.
by radiofreeeuropa | 2025-08-05 22:11:14+00:00
Run a study of your approach and show good results over a cohort for 2+ years and you'll make an entire sub-field of medical scientists very happy.

[EDIT] It's not that your approach can't work, it's that if (for example) people had as hard a time following the directions for condoms as they do following diet & workout plans, we'd never allow condoms to be sold as contraceptives, they'd not even be close to being OK to promote as useful for that purpose. It wouldn't matter if a few people could follow the directions and it worked 100% of the time for them.
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-08-05 22:11:21+00:00
In my other comment in this tree I mentioned that with TypeScript you can do even better. You don't need codegen if you can import types from the back-end. OpenAPI is fine, but I really hate having an intermediary like that.

Just define your API interface as a collection of types that pull from your API route function definitions. Have the API functions pull types from your model layer. Transform those types into their post-JSON deserialization form and now you're trickling up schema from the database right into the client. No client to compile. No watcher to run. It's always in sync and fast to evaluate.
by bluecoconut | 2025-08-05 22:11:27+00:00
I was able to get gpt-oss:20b wired up to claude code locally via a thin proxy and ollama.

It's fun that it works, but the prefill time makes it feel unusable. (2-3 minutes per tool-use / completion). Means a ~10-20 tool-use interaction could take 30-60 minutes.

(This editing a single server.py file that was ~1000 lines, the tool definitions + claude context was around 30k tokens input, and then after the file read, input was around ~50k tokens. Definitely could be optimized. Also I'm not sure if ollama supports a kv-cache between invocations of /v1/completions, which could help)
by btown | 2025-08-05 22:11:54+00:00
The release notes mentioning this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...

Not too many sources I could find other than https://matisyahu.blog/2025/07/31/and-it-is-raining-again/ - but apparently the bug was so bad that any adblocker attempting to use declarativeNetRequest could break all Cloudflare websites for the user.

In the wake of Google finally sounding the death knells of Manifest V2, it's good to see Apple's at least making progress towards... parity with Google's MV3 feature set? Not the privacy leadership that Apple's known for, but progress is progress.
by uri3000 | 2025-08-05 22:12:20+00:00
We’re CashAdvanceApps.com, a live site entirely researched, written, and updated by AI — no human writers involved. We rank on Google, generate traffic, and improve automatically. It’s not a content site; it’s an experiment in AI-native businesses.

We’re looking for a hands-on AI researcher to push the limits of LLM-based workflows for content, research, and structured reasoning. You’ll help us:

- Build and optimize agent chains that convert raw data into human-grade content.

- Extract insights from reviews, regulations, APIs, and SERPs using LLMs.

- Develop new techniques to keep pages fresh and competitive with minimal human intervention.

Stack: OpenAI, Claude, Pinecone, Node.js, TypeScript, Playwright, custom tooling.

We're an early-stage startup — profitable and growing — building the kind of product SEO tools will try to catch up to in 2 years.

You should be:

- Excited about LLMs, RAG, autonomous agents, and prompt engineering.

- Strong at thinking from first principles — and deploying fast experiments.

- Not afraid of the weird intersection of growth hacking, scraping, and fine-tuning.

+ (Bonus) Have shipped something yourself in the AI content/SEO space.

We're fully remote, async-first, and care more about output than hours. If you want to do ambitious work in AI + content, email contact@datasonic.io with your favorite AI-powered project and why it matters.
by keeda | 2025-08-05 22:12:35+00:00
That study gets mentioned all the time, somehow this one and many of the others it cites don't get much airtime: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/sep/rapid-ado...

>This implies that each hour spent using genAI increases the worker’s productivity for that hour by 33%. This is similar in magnitude to the average productivity gain of 27% from several randomized experiments of genAI usage (Cui et al., 2024; Dell’Acqua et al., 2023; Noy and Zhang, 2023; Peng et al., 2023)

Our estimated aggregate productivity gain from genAI (1.1%) exceeds the 0.7% estimate by Acemoglu (2024) based on a similar framework.

To be clear, they are surmising that GenAI is already having a productivity gain.
Ask HN: Setup for Local LLM Backups?
by andy99 | 2025-08-05 22:12:36+00:00
As a backup in case future access changes, I'd like to have sota LLM weights and a machine that can run queries with them in reserve. OpenAI releasing weights is as good a time as any to actually do it. My question is what hardware setup would you buy, that is reasonable accessible (say under 5k, ideally well under) and can do a good job running the models for local queries. And, if it matters, could be suitable for archiving, say until either there is a substantial advance rendering today's LLMs obsolete or until needed because good, open weights aren't available anymore.
by acheong08 | 2025-08-05 22:13:12+00:00
(minor correction, Obsidian broke the 3rd party sync, not insomnia) Point still stands.

I agree it's an annoying problem, but it's hard to see a way around it. The developers was that they need some way to fund development. Sync tends to be the up sell target since it's more for power users willing to pay.

There are quite a few open source Insomnia and Postman clones. Since most of them operate on config and workspaces, I think syncthing is good enough for this use case at least.
by cfontes | 2025-08-05 22:13:19+00:00
Not directly correlated but I know a old guy that can decrypt EBCDIC and credit card positional data format on the fly. And sometimes it was a "feeling" he couldn't explain it properlly but knew exactly the value, name and other data.

It was amazing to see him decode VISA and MASTER transactions on the fly in logs and other places.
by teitoklien | 2025-08-05 22:13:36+00:00
for now, i wouldnt rank any model from openai in coding benchmarks, despite all the false messaging they are giving, almost every single model openai has launched even the high end o3 expensive models are absolutely monumentally horrible at coding tasks. So this is expected.

If its decent in other tasks, which i do find openai often being better than others at, then i think its a win, especially a win for the open source community that even AI labs that pionered the hype of Gen AI who didnt want to ever launch open models are now being forced to launch them. That is definitely a win, and not something that was certain before.
by selfhoster11 | 2025-08-05 22:13:37+00:00
I see what you mean, but this knife cuts both ways. It makes proprietary software easier to write by extracting knowledge from open codebases, but it also makes open source software easier to write by extracting knowledge from those same open codebases.

That's just the main idea, but also:

1. LLMs make existing software (even obscure stuff, so long it fits in the context window) more intelligible:

- how do you compile this (when you are inexperienced and the ecosystem of that language is a baroque mess, it might seem impossible)?

- what does this error message mean?

- what parameters do I need to use in my invocation to get it to do XYZ?

- what does this function do? why does it use this algorithm?

2. They also make new software easier to write, and existing software easier to modify:

- ask about anything concerning the part of source code that fits in a context window, and you'll get a (probably correct) explanation of what it does, faster than a half-dead IRC channel or StackOverflow would respond

- the above, but also: the LLM has infinite patience and can drill down as deep as you want. You can ask "OK, but why?" for as long as you want, as about anything you want. You might get a hallucinated answer sometimes, but a frustrated human who would be asked the same way, could also just make something up to shut you up.

- for anything in the context window, ask about how to go about making a functionality change to add or modify a feature

- the above, but if it's small enough, just get the LLM to write the change for you. It might be buggy and messy, but you'll be one step ahead if you lack the skill to make the change yourself

- how do I set up the build chain? Why is my compiler not picking up the path properly? Is the project directory structure wrong? This used to be a huge problem before LLMs, and relied on undocumented knowledge.

---

For me, the whole point of open source is ready-made, (hopefully) not too buggy components that I can use and customise as an end user, or plug into the thing I am building as a developer. LLMs make the freedom of FOSS become much more practical, particularly to those sympathetic to the movement but technically less experienced.
by riazrizvi | 2025-08-05 22:13:43+00:00
People, professionals, aren’t so stationary. You’re saying that this line on the asymptote is the threshold where incentives die. But the old axes need to be adjusted for new broader possibility. As long as professionals stay ahead of non-professionals by riding the same tools, to keep their position on the boundary of expertise, they will be in demand.

Better to do that by not sharing how as much (source code), but rather what (interactive demos).