MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by duped | 2025-08-18 12:43:10+00:00
This is illegal where I live in the United States. You can't "just build things" here.

Now you could probably do this really far out in the boonies where it could be illegal, but also unenforced. My uncle lives in a log cabin built this way. But it's also extremely far away from civilization (aka: jobs with income, and luxuries like groceries and clean water).
by spopejoy | 2025-08-18 12:43:16+00:00
A lot of this sounds like Claude is making up for bad tooling?

Machine refactoring has been a thing for decades now but only for mainstream strongly-typed languages in major IDEs. You can do massive refactorings in seconds that always compile perfectly.

LLMs are picking up the slack for js/ts, which is great, but pretty sad that we need this much compute to do something that took seconds 20 years ago in other languages.
by tossandthrow | 2025-08-18 12:43:34+00:00
This is the current sentiment. But it is short sighted.

The best recommendation is to _know_ the fundamentals of house prices. To know when buying is cheap and expensive.

Eg. in relative terms: buying a house at 30 Price/Rent makes it more affordable to rent - in such an environment, just rent. If the P/R falls to 15-20, then buy.

Housing can also be unaffordable in absolute terms such as wanting to live in down town San Fransisco. In this case people should strongly consider if they want to pay a premium for that locality.

We don't have to go longer back than 2013 to when it made sense to buy over renting - and that will return at some point.
Show HN: Scoring dev work by how hard it is for AI to copy it
by valdrox | 2025-08-18 12:43:49+00:00
Started this weekend project because I was thinking about whether software engineers’ performance should be tied to business impact like other engineers (as opposed to having PMs focus on that and devs executing) and then started thinking about Dev KPIs.

Developer work is unusually public. Aside from git diffs, you can see PR comments, Linear threads, and get a sense of both the complexity of the work and how people collaborate.

I tried a little adversarial experiment: - Take recent commits and have an LLM guess the "spec" (simulating a ticket on Linear, without building this step) - Ask Claude Code to implement the same thing - Use another LLM to compare the two solutions blindly - If the LLM version is worse than the human version, keep giving it hints until it matches or exceeds the human contribution - More elaborate hints = higher complexity score - Evaluating comments is even simpler. I didn’t try an adversarial approach, but there’s no reason it wouldn’t work.

This turned into a small library I hacked together. You can score devs on repos for fun.

I wonder if managers use numbers simply because they can’t hold all the context of a person’s contributions, and so lose out on nuance. What if LLMs could hold all of the context of your work and give a fairer evaluation? Could we move away from PMs deciding the “what” and engineers deciding the “how”, to Engineers deciding both?

PRs welcome!
by dakial1 | 2025-08-18 12:44:28+00:00
Internal in my opinion. Post 30 y/o specially, the dating scene for men becomes increasingly better (by market dynamics of offer/demand). But of course you need a minimum of soft skills to get more hits than misses in the dating game.

My take here is that people like the guy in the article lack the soft skills part but as he has grown up being self-aware of his height, probably blames all short-comings on that.

It would probably be simpler and more effective to do proper gym (better looks and more confidence) than this extreme and painful process.

I would like to hear someone who did the same procedure to hear if things actually got better now that they are taller.
by mft_ | 2025-08-18 12:44:37+00:00
I suspect it's a tech bubble thing.

Similar to how lots of people online (Reddit, HN, etc.) made a lot of noise about wanting a smaller smart phone. Apple released the iphone 12 mini, it didn't do well commercially, and was fairly quickly discontinued.

Most non-tech-bubble-normies cope with crappy in-car systems probably because conceptualising something different is far away from their area of interest and expertise; indeed, many folks actively want/prioritise superficially-impressive tech in their new car. (Lots of people --probably the vast majority-- don't focus on pure usability, privacy, or cybersecurity, when making such decisions.)

I'd expect Slate to appeal to people who need a pickup for work (because it's the most similar EV to an old low-spec Toyota/Ford/etc pickup) and for whom range is not an issue, some who want an EV but are price sensitive, and a handful of others who like the underlying concept.
HN: Solo founder building "GTM agent swarm" – anyone else?
by johnathan_p | 2025-08-18 12:45:02+00:00
Hey HN

Solo founder here, working on fosic.ai - my project for orchestrating go-to-market (GTM) with a “swarm” of super-specialized AI agents (think: automating sales, research, content, GEO, etc.), without hiring a team.

Right now, I’m fully in vibe coding mode—building everything on Replit and getting a ton of help from Perplexity Pro as my “sidekick.” I'm not a developer. I do have 22 yrs of B2B go-to-market experience though so I know the jobs-to-be-done quite well and have worked in tech and as a consultant for 8 years. Still constantly wondering if I’m making things too complicated with all these agents, instead of just keeping it simple. My hope is to see if a solo founder can really punch above their weight class by working this way, but I’m still pre-launch.

Anyone else experimenting with stacking AI agents for GTM (or ops/marketing/founder tasks in general), or just thinking about it? What are your hopes, doubts, or “aha” moments? If you’ve got stories—from “that’ll never work” to “it finally clicked” would love to hear them.

Would also be grateful for any advice from people a bit further ahead (especially other solos), hit any major roadblocks, or did anything surprise you about working this way?

Happy to share more on what I’m building (or not, if that’s too pitchy). Just excited to see if others are thinking down these lines too!

PS: if you are a developer and would like to give your 2 cents of how I should go about it, I am all ears. Cheers.
by swiftcoder | 2025-08-18 12:45:25+00:00
No, specifically not. I don't want to store your username and passwords in a database (and then deal with account recovery, password rotation, etc) - I want identity.

The browser should be able to vend me an (opaque, anonymous) token that identifies you as an individual. If your mobile and desktop browser vend the same token, then the website sees you as having the same identity on both platforms.
by mothballed | 2025-08-18 12:45:33+00:00
It's illegal in most the US but by selecting my county intentionally from the start I found a place within 20 minutes of a ton of jobs, grocery store, etc. I did it legally with permits, but my permit basically said "ok to build house and no codes/inspections" and that was pretty much the bulk of it.

You have to pick one of the places in the US with little to no codes / paperwork from the beginning. There are still quite a few of them left, but probably not places you have heard of.
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-18 12:46:09+00:00
Not just in the US. NIMBY looks almost exactly the same in the US, in New Zealand, in Israel, in Italy, in Czechia or in the UK.

Basically, as long as you allow other people to veto new construction, it is almost guaranteed that a few bitter fighters will devote their lives to stopping anything to be ever built again. Roads, trams, housing, anything at all. A veritable vetocracy, not too dissimilar from the legendary Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where every noble could veto anything agreed upon by the Sejm by simply standing up and saying "I disagree".

The "community participation" ideal which looked very positive once turned out to empower the worst reactionaries.

The few countries that got this problem under control did so mostly by limiting the legal abilities of such people to throw wrenches into everything.
by cjpearson | 2025-08-18 12:46:14+00:00
There's a common view that home-ownership is important because a home is the most expensive asset most people will ever own and its increasing value is key to their comfortable retirement. But this view of a home as an appreciating asset is incompatible with increasing housing affordability.

There are definitely downsides to renting such as landlord issues or missing out on mortgage subsidies, but maybe a higher proportion of renters could lead to improvements in affordability. And if the well-off are renting as well, there's also more hope for better legal protections for renters.
by puredanger | 2025-08-18 12:46:24+00:00
Note that newer things are always downloaded less because they have been around less time (lots of people continue using old versions).

Maven stats are available to artifact deployers, but they are useless for estimating users or community size as downloads are largely from CI servers constantly downloading artifacts for testing. Download numbers are large and seesaw erratically. Unique IP counts are a little more stable but also inflated beyond relevance by CI.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-18 12:46:24+00:00
The meta problem is the present-immaterial nature of risk and possible future consequences. Dollars and time saved are concrete present quantities.

Ergo, any decision which saves dollars and time in the present but increases future risk looks good... in the present.

It's always surprised me that businesses don't attempt to quantify risk in an effort to produce a more balanced decision function.
by lsaferite | 2025-08-18 12:47:16+00:00
MCP being the initialism for "Model Context Protocol", the specification released by Anthropic, generally dictates you shouldn't say "an MCP" but simply "MCP" or "the MCP". If you are referring to a concrete implementation of a part of MCP, then you likely meant to say "an MCP Server" or "an MCP Client".
by threemux | 2025-08-18 12:47:18+00:00
While I highly doubt you'd ever get in trouble, data transmissions on GMRS are severely restricted by the FCC. You obviously need the license (though it's just a fee and covers your whole family).

In any case, I'm pretty sure this device is illegal to use for short text messages. It doesn't appear to comply with several of the restrictions on digital emissions in 47 CFR 95.1787(a), namely it appears to have a removable antenna. Removable antennas are fine for regular GMRS use, but not when the device can send digital emissions.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/part-95/subpart-E#p-95...

Also I'd be shocked if it enforced the time limits for digital transmissions in software. This leads me to believe it's not actually type-certified for use which then calls into question anything else it does. Caveat emptor.
by alphydan | 2025-08-18 12:47:56+00:00
> People with ADHD are clearly able focus when the subject is interesting enough to them

"interesting enough" is not a sufficient condition. You may be super interested, very motivated, and yet completely unable to start. That is one of the most frustrating parts of ADHD to me. When and how hyperfocus kicks in seems to be mostly outside of your control.
by detourdog | 2025-08-18 12:48:05+00:00
I think it's that the mentality has invaded the medium of the web. Capturing users/audience is a way to demonstrate "value". Services we pay for want to show wall street how loyal their customer are.

Each auto company want's to have an app store rather than having users just directly connecting and using their phones as the car's infotainment system.

It's all misguided.
by presentation | 2025-08-18 12:48:12+00:00
Ideally NIMBYs wouldn’t have an incentive to block housing construction because while the total number of houses goes up making the average house cheaper, the land itself gets more valuable due to the increased density/development/amenities; so those same homeowners can sell their lots for bug bucks. I guess this misalignment of incentives is a problem of zoning, permitting, and taxation distorting things?
by roscas | 2025-08-18 12:49:28+00:00
Always good to remember people of this.

But not just AI bots or interfaces. Everything is saved and never deleted.

Remember Facebook? "We will never delete anything" that is their business.

So anything that you put on those "services" is gone out of your hands. But we still have an option, is to stop using these ads company and let them die.

Back to AI, there are loads of offline models we can use. Many like Ollama that will even download it. Install Ollama, on the ollama site find a model name and "ollama run model-name" and you can use it.

Ok, it is not as chatgpt5 but it can help you so much, that you might not even need chatgpt.
by spopejoy | 2025-08-18 12:49:43+00:00
It's more that if there isn't 10 stack overflows on your exact problem then you're out of luck.

LLMs are 100% useless for:

- non-mainstream languages

- langs without massive corpuses of online tutorials and SOs

I was going to add "langs without large online open-source codebases" but if they don't have extensive, reliable SOs (haskell, Solidity, even rust) then LLMs struggle to the point of uselessness, because LLMs don't actually trawl through random codebases and magically turn it into cookbooks and tutorials.

Indeed, an emergent problem with LLMs is they are going to recreate the 90s/2000s PL dark ages where "never write a new language" was mantra. Now it will be because a new lang can never hope to get sufficient LLM training data.

EDIT to your problem, it isn't the lang but the domain. If experts aren't dumping huge volumes of explanatory text online, an LLM can't help you even in a mainstream lang.
by mannykannot | 2025-08-18 12:50:01+00:00
You got me interested in the question, and one of the first things I found out is that there is Zipf’s Law, and then there is Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation.

Monkeys-randomly-typing is one of many processes which will indeed generate sequences conforming to the former, and it is perhaps the exceptions which are most interesting.

The latter law observes that the former generally applies to sequences generated for communication, having semantics and usually a grammar. While this may be the expected finding, there is value in having this expectation empirically verified.
by jandrese | 2025-08-18 12:50:02+00:00
2br 1bath doesn’t make sense in single family homes. That’s a condo/apartment size residence. Maybe townhome if you live in a low density area.

Condos should be a lot more popular, especially for the young and old, but the fees are pretty much always ridiculous. The whole point is to spread out the maintence costs among many residents so they are trivial, instead condo fees are usually in the hundreds or thousands per month per unit for no apparent reason other than the landlord wants a big payday. It doesn’t cost millions per year to maintain some parking spots, a small unstaffed pool, a front desk, and building maintenance. It’s like paying rent on top of your mortgage.
by pastorhudson | 2025-08-18 12:50:45+00:00
To use GMRS you need a license to be compliant with fcc. It’s not expensive I think $60 for 10 years and it covers your family.

You can then use GMRS. GMRS is all the same FRS channels plus several more. GMRS can also transmit at up to 50mw on some of the non-FRS channels.

To be using GMRS in compliance you have to use an FCC Part 95E certified device. These Baofeng / Btech devices are usually not GMRS certified. So you need a HAM license to use them. . . But HAM licenses doesn’t cover GMRS frequencies. So there is no technically compliant way to use these devices and check all the boxes. Even if you have both HAM and GMRS you are using a non Part 95E certified device. You’re likely fine as long as you’re not harassing people or causing interference. Generally the FCC is pretty reasonable. They send a letter saying knock it off before they knock on your door. But if you continue to harass people or use high power that causes interference then you will get a hefty fine.

At the very least get your GMRS license. But I encourage you to get your HAM license. I have found that often HAM nerds are into a lot of other stuff I like and my local club has been a welcome place to make friends and build fun stuff.
by djfobbz | 2025-08-18 12:51:13+00:00
I agree, I’ve been on CH since v20 and I thought I was the only one who noticed that they’ve been working very hard to bridge the gap between OLAP and OLTP. Sure, they’ll always be first class OLAP DB…but if you know how to get dangerous with its strengths, making it the goto datalake for your existing OLTP is pretty freaking awesome. Thanks for those shares
by RugnirViking | 2025-08-18 12:51:27+00:00
People don't say home ownership is important because it's an asset for retirement; if you sold it, you wouldn't have a home in retirement!

They say that because owning a home allows you to reduce your bills, but also more crucially and viscerally because owning a home allows you to be free and have a place that is truly yours to do with what you will. You can paint the walls, have a pet, host a party, knock down a wall and build an extension, do whatever you like to make your mark on it and the world. It's yours and if you will it, it always will be. It's a level of peace and security that's almost incomparible. There's a reason in most of history there was a distinction drawn between bonded peasants and freeholders.
by scosman | 2025-08-18 12:51:34+00:00
I made a MCP server that tries to address some of these (undocumented, security, discoverability, platform specific). You write a yaml describing your tools (lint/format/test/build), and it exposes them to agents MCP. Kinda like package.json scripts but for agents. Speeds things up too, fewer incorrect commands, no human approval needed, and parallel execution.

https://github.com/scosman/hooks_mcp

The interactive lldb session here is super cool for deeper debugging. For security, containers seem like the solution - sketch.dev is my fav take on containerizing agents at the moment.
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-18 12:51:37+00:00
A side effect that is vastly underestimated in its impact is: the housing racket makes virtually all Western economies vastly more uncompetitive with Asian countries.

With urban areas routinely approaching or, even worse, outright exceeding 50% of net income going away for housing, that's setting a pretty high floor on wages and salaries, and that in turn drives up the price for domestic Things and Services.

And no, building housing will not solve the problem. At all. People keep whacking their cucumber over urbanisation because they deem it to be "cheaper" to provide essential utilities due to effects of scale/density - the problem is, space is still finite and denser housing costs more money to construct, especially once you build higher than the maximum usable height of a fire truck's ladder because now you need to invest into independent rescue/evacuation paths, and once you build above 10-ish (or less, depending on soil type and geological risks like earthquakes) stories you need to dig deep into the ground to build a foundation strong enough to keep the building from damaging during settling. Can't compromise on the fire safety regulations (otherwise all you get is a new Grenfell Tower style disaster), and you can't compromise with physics eithr.

Western countries need to build out essential infrastructure like broadband Internet, mobile phone service and public transit in rural and suburban areas. That's the only path that doesn't rely on utterly insane investments.
by gambiting | 2025-08-18 12:52:18+00:00
As in, you have this without any eye surgery? My dad had LASIK and that gave him 20/20 vision but also what he described as horrible halos around all lights at night, to a point where he really found it difficult to drive in the dark. He had it done about 15 years ago so I wonder if the state of the art has improved in that area.
by BlackFly | 2025-08-18 12:52:39+00:00
Proportional to income is "the same" under the equivalence of time and money. A fine is some % of your income which is some % of your working time. The fine as a penalty should roughly be equivalent to time spent in prison, so that is some fixed amount of time which automatically translates to some lost amount of salary. Going to prison being an alternative to paying a fine when you aren't solvent.

Otherwise it isn't a penalty and is just the price of being permitted to do a thing which might be out of reach for the poor. That's just fundamentally unfair to permit the rich to do things we consider immoral if they are just able to afford it.
by IAmBroom | 2025-08-18 12:52:43+00:00
OK, first: food is rich in C4. Food is made from carbohydrates, which as the name suggests is made from Carbon, and the amount of C4 in the carbon is homogenous across compounds.

So the answer to your question is: insignificant amounts of smoke occur in fire-cooked foods, and the C4 composition wouldn't be affected anyway.
by uncompressed | 2025-08-18 12:52:46+00:00
I’ve been looking for something like this, but closer to the Claude Code philosophy of a strong, terminal-first workflow. What I really want is a "Claude Code Manager" that can spin up new git worktrees, manage multiple instances, and let me jump between them - no heavy UI abstraction.

I’ve noticed these UIs tend to strip away native features (plan mode, sub-agents etc.). A thin layer that preserves Claude Code’s built-ins while orchestrating instances, worktrees, and branches from the shell would be ideal for me.
by mc32 | 2025-08-18 12:53:18+00:00
History, like archeology and paleontology, often take a set of facts or evidentiary items and weave a plausible narrative around it. The narrative can be neutral but also can be stereotyped (in archelogy unknowns are assigned religious significance) or they can be influenced by contemporaneous thought --that is, the narrative is allowed to be influenced by the currents of the day. It may take a century or so for those narratives to be dispelled through the passage of time when such influence wanes.
by joules77 | 2025-08-18 12:54:16+00:00
Message may be simple, but reception is not just about fear, because the hardware we have to receive the message is quite a mess. And it has upper limits on how frequently it's beliefs can be updated.

Philosophers (and of late Psychologists a much younger field) have been telling us right from the time of Plato(mind = appetite vs spirit vs reason) to Hobbes (reason vs passions) to Freud (id vs ego vs superego) to Kahneman (System 1 vs System 2) to Haidt (Elephant-Rider metaphor) etc that our minds are imperfect machines.

So the simplicity of the message doesn't guarantee reception. The assumption is such unreliable machinery can receive messages perfectly. And that assumption constantly breaks down.

So from Baldwin you get to philosophers like Charles Taylor who tell us - the Church, one of the worlds oldest surviving institutions (not by accident), had to deal head on with this problem, since different minds interpret their messages very differently. Some minds we know in the "name of almighty god" will happily do whatever they feel like. Power has many ways of exploiting Love. So what do you do?

Judge them, label them, name and shame them? That was the first reaction and it was done in public as a large spectacle. But the system then evolves to private spaces where the act confession happens to a trained priest. If well trained, such people don't just put the focus not on shame and guilt but on growth. So until the person feels safe and encouraged to Recognize and talk about harm caused, which is what is supposed to happen in the intentionally architected safe space of a confessional (very similar to therapy), then there is a possibility for growth.

But if you notice the architecture today has totally flipped, the chimps are running around naming and shaming each other full time. So we have lots to learn from what has been tried out in the past. Charles Taylor is a good starting points for people interested in this stuff and how to create such possibilities in the real world.