MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by advael | 2025-08-29 11:43:20+00:00
This places a lot of faith in the following assumptions:

1. Efficiency measures as written to benchmark this coupling with economic productivity overall

2. Monetary assessments of value in the context of businesses spending money corresponding with social value

3. The gains of economic productivity being distributed across society to any degree, or the effect of this disparity itself being negligible

4. The negative externalities of these processes scaling less quickly than whatever we're measuring in our productivity metric

5. Aforementioned externalities being able to scale to even a lesser degree in lockstep with productivity without crashing all of the above, if not causing even more catastrophic outcomes

I have very little faith in any of these assumptions
by vbezhenar | 2025-08-29 11:44:04+00:00
Which competitor has alternative to ChatGPT Pro? I have Claude subscription and Opus 4.1 is not on the same level. ChatGPT Pro thinks for 5-10 minutes, while Opus either doesn't think at all or thinks very briefly. And response quality is absolutely different. ChatGPT Pro solves problems, Opus does not. Is there any competitor with "Pro" product which spends significant amount of computing for a single query?
by Stranger_X | 2025-08-29 11:44:27+00:00
When Omegle shut down, a lot of us lost those random, late-night conversations with strangers that felt strangely human. Social media doesn’t give you that anymore—it’s feeds, ads, and followers.

So we made StrangerMeet . It’s simple:

Tap once, get matched instantly with someone new.

Text, voice, or video—your choice.

If you both click, you can “continue” the chat later.

We wanted to bring back the fun without the mess. It’s lightweight, real-time, and we’re learning from every conversation.

Curious how HN thinks about this: is there still a space for pure, serendipitous conversations online?
by LadyCailin | 2025-08-29 11:44:46+00:00
I wonder if we’re reaching a point of diminishing returns with training, at least, just by scaling the data set. I mean, there’s a finite amount of information (that can be obtained reasonably) to be trained on. I think we’re already at a sizable chunk of that, not to mention the cost of naively scaling up. My guess is that the ultimate winner will be the one that figures out how to improve without massive training costs, through better algorithms, or maybe even just better hardware (i.e. neuristors). I mean, we know that at worst case, we should be able to build something with human level intelligence that takes about 20 watts to run, and is about the size of a human head, and you only need to ingest a small slice of all available information to do that. And training should only use about 3.5 MWh, total, and can be done with the same hardware that runs the model.
by jbstack | 2025-08-29 11:44:51+00:00
I think the point isn't what the author knows or does not know but rather a question for the rest of us - what does this tool offer that bash history doesn't?

The list of features on the Github page doesn't provide an answer:

- Starts and stops on demand: Only logs commands when you explicitly turn it on.

- Saves to a custom file: You can specify the log file name.

- Cross-platform: Works on both Linux and macOS using bash or zsh.

- Minimal overhead: Runs in the background and has no noticeable impact on shell performance.

Bash largely covers all of those too.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-29 11:44:56+00:00
> You don’t implement calls to static member functions by putting them into a vtable

Yes, you claimed it is like a static member function, I don't think it can be.

> The proper way to implement static functions is through static dispatch

Yes, but we are talking about dynamic dispatch here.

To quote your earlier comment:

> which is most unlike a vtable since static member functions are never in vtables

You conclude it isn't a vtable, I conclude, it's not a static member function, because it uses dynamic dispatch.

I don't think we actually disagree on how and when to use static and dynamic dispatch.
by rco8786 | 2025-08-29 11:44:59+00:00
This seems really interesting but I can't quite figure out if this is like a SaaS product or an OSS library? The code sample seems to indicate that it uses some sort of "client" to send the document somewhere and then wait to retrieve it later.

But the home page doesn't indicate any sort of sign up or pricing.

So I'm a little confused.

edit Ok I found a sign up flow, but the verification email never came :(
by robocat | 2025-08-29 11:45:18+00:00
Great article on this: https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/every-industry-is-an-ov...

I hand the cashier my credit card. She looks at me like I’ve just asked her to barter goats for spices. “Can I have your name?” she asks. “No,” I reply. “You can have my money.” Then comes the phone number. Then the email. [] Finally, after this interrogation, I’ve spent $300 and she asks if I’d like a bag. Of course I want a fucking bag: “That’s 25 cents,” she says. Why can’t stores just build the damn bag into the price instead of insulting me at checkout? I’m not asking to be hand-fed grapes like Julius Caesar. And God forbid I need to call anyone about anything. Changing an airline ticket? Calling my credit card company? Forget it. Every road leads to an automated voice system with the warmth of a Soviet switchboard.
by bugattiguy527 | 2025-08-29 11:45:50+00:00
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/LukeGus/Termix Discord (join to vote on whats next to a be added to Termix): https://discord.gg/daFQ9hHM7R

For the past couple of months, I have been working on my free self-hosted passion project, Termix.

Termix is an open-source, forever-free, self-hosted all-in-one server management platform. It provides a web-based solution for managing your servers and infrastructure through a single, intuitive interface. Termix offers SSH terminal access, SSH tunneling capabilities, and remote file editing, with many more tools to come.

Complete Feature List: - SSH Terminal Access - Full-featured terminal with split-screen support (up to 4 panels) and tab system - SSH Tunnel Management - Create and manage SSH tunnels with automatic reconnection and health monitoring - Remote File Editor - Edit files directly on remote servers with syntax highlighting, file management features (uploading, removing, renaming, deleting files) - SSH Host Manager - Save, organize, and manage your SSH connections with tags and folders - Server Stats - View CPU, memory, and HDD usage on any SSH server - User Authentication - Secure user management with admin controls and OIDC support with more auth types planned - Modern UI - Clean interface built with React, Tailwind CSS, and Shadcn
by rafaelmn | 2025-08-29 11:46:03+00:00
Yes this is the agency model here in Croatia. You would get one senior developer covering 2-3 projects and a few junior/mid developers working full time.

I have a feeling it's not working that well anymore because the people covering those juniors just earn more going to work straight for the client and they have less burden on them. Used to be harder so the agencies had leverage, nowadays even big companies will hire individual B2B contractor.
Show HN: Pocket – run coding agents locally or in the cloud, from your phone
by yayasoumah | 2025-08-29 11:47:58+00:00
I quietly launched Pocket this week — a mobile interface to run and manage coding agents directly on your machine or in the cloud. Think Claude, Cursor, Codex, or Gemini, but accessible from your phone.

Why I built this: I often had ideas while away from my computer, and wanted a way to trigger agents, review results, and manage workflows remotely. Pocket bridges that gap by pairing with your own Pocket Server (open source).

In the first 48 hours after launch: - ~150 GitHub stars - ~2k unique visitors - ~400 app installs on TestFlight

Would love feedback from the HN community on: 1. Which use cases resonate most (remote coding, debugging, deployments, etc.) 2. Where this should go next (cloud agent marketplace? deeper local workflows?)

Website: https://www.pocket-agent.xyz/ GitHub: https://github.com/yayasoumah/pocket-server
by sillyfluke | 2025-08-29 11:48:01+00:00
>I dislike the term “stochastic parrot”, because there’s plenty of evidence that LLMs do have an understanding of at least some things that they are saying.

It's bold to use the term "understanding" in this context. You ask it something about a topic, it gives an answer like someone who understands the topic. You change the prompt slightly, where a human who understands the topic would still give the right response trivially, the LLM outputs an answer that is both wrong/irrelevant and unpredicably and non-humanly wrong in a way that no human who exhibited understanding with the first answer could be predicted to answer the second question in the same bizarrw manner as the LLM.

The fact that the LLM can be shown to have some sort of internal representation does not necessarily mean that we should call this "understanding" in any practical sense when discussing these matters. I think it's counterproductive in getting to the heart of the matter.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-29 11:48:25+00:00
`ssh://pi@raspberrypi.local:raspberry` with "while true; do ls /dev/ | grep ^sd | xargs mount; done" in rc.local, running outdated 10 years old Linux Kernel booting from ROM with write enable pin tied to ground, is all that's needed. There's probably sshfs for everything so protocol support for dozen things isn't a must.

I mean, I have one for handling an HDD with busted power circuit that cause system resets at regular intervals(likely brush sparks from a power steering motor went back up through USB and killed it). It's almost wrong that there isn't a pre-made solution for this.
Show HN: Startup Ideas Vault – 1500 app/site ideas from Google Autocompletions
by Patt_ | 2025-08-29 11:48:40+00:00
I built a tool that systematically pulls Google autocomplete suggestions for "an app to/for/that" across the entire alphabet and surfaces 500+ real app ideas that people are actually searching for.

Unlike brainstormed lists or AI-generated ideas, these come directly from Google's autocomplete data – meaning real people typed these phrases when looking for solutions. Stuff like "an app to find parking spots," "an app for tracking plant watering," "an app that translates dog barks" (yes, really).

Built this in about 7 hours using the existing Google Autocomplete A-Z API I built. The data updates daily and I flag anything that appeared in the last 7 days as "new" to catch trending ideas.

What I'm still working on: Right now it's just a clean list of keywords, which feels a bit dry. I'm still looking for ways to surface the most interesting/viable ideas and trying to add context. If anyone has creative ideas for presenting this kind of data, I'm all ears.

Also curious: What other categories would be interesting to explore with this? I focused on app and website ideas first, but the same technique works for any seed phrases. What would be most valuable to the HN community? And for those building tools or doing research – this runs on the Google Autocomplete API if you want to experiment with your own keyword categories (free with rate limits).
by hackrmn | 2025-08-29 11:49:17+00:00
I've not heard of Jane Street, but looking at the site, it seems they're quite the tech-savvy group for an _asset trading_ company. And reading the article, they apparently "trade" (pun intended) in quite a few different things from CSS to OCaml, which is really nice to see for a place that doesn't directly deal with software as their [business] product (or did I misunderstand their market?).
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-08-29 11:50:12+00:00
> suffering isn't reduced and may increase if proper care isn't administered

Of course this is true. And if care isn't administered because of a choice by the person, then that's the end of the discussion. But, if its a lack of resources by the gov, then 100% these should be increased and I've already said I fully support that.

Is MAID replacing proper care? This could be a harder question to answer because what would your control group be. It would have to be one for which health care resources were available to them, AND, they also had a MAID-like option that normalized (i.e. not scandalous or considered morally 'wrong'). And then compare current uptake in Canada to see if there is a difference that could be attributed solely to a lack of health care resources being a driver, rather than just the existence of MAID as an alternative.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-08-29 11:50:20+00:00
I is certainly true for me that I didn't take the time to learn the intricacies of CSS behavior and I still think the cascading properties are the worst feature, namely concepts like specificity. It is hard to keep a mental model of styling rules and at some point it is just degrades to trial and error.

Nobody came up with a better alternative though (apart from the many dialects that transpile to CSS again).
by privatelypublic | 2025-08-29 11:51:50+00:00
Depending on features:

Starters: Fractal define - mid tower- 8 official 3.5" bays. With plenty of open space for more.

Jonsbo cases are the most NAS-like.

OS: Easy button: FreeNAS. Maybe the newer TrueNAS Core rework. As long as you don't need the latest and greatest in features, and at this point probably a bunch of unfixed security.

Otherwise it's Truenas Scale- just avoid the docker/VM system. Its a complete cluster.

I dearly wish Cockpit Project was up to par for this.
by movpasd | 2025-08-29 11:52:53+00:00
At the risk of sounding woo, I find some parallels in how LLMs work to my experiences with meditation and writing. My subjective experience of it is that there is some unconscious part of my brain that supplies a scattered stream of words as the sentence forms --- without knowing the neuroscience of it, I could speculate it is a "neurological transformer", some statistical model that has memorised a combination of the grammar and contextual semantic meaning of language.

The difference is that the LLM is _only that part_. In producing language as a human, I filter these words, I go back and think of new phrasings, I iterate --- in writing consciously, in speech unconsciously. So rather than a sequence it is a scattered tree filled with rhetorical dead ends, pruned through interaction with my world-model and other intellectual faculties. You can pull on one thread of words as though it were fully-formed already as a kind of Surrealist exercise (like a one-person cadavre exquis), and the result feels similar to an LLM with the temperature turned up too high.

But if nothing else, this highlights to me how easily the process of word generation may be decoupled from meaning. And it serves to explain another kind of common human experience, which feels terribly similar to the phenomenon of LLM hallucination: the "word vomit" of social anxiety. In this process it suddenly becomes less important that the words you produce are anchored to truth, and instead the language-system becomes tuned to produce any socially plausible output at all. That seems to me to be the most apt analogy.
by _heimdall | 2025-08-29 11:54:03+00:00
> We can trace which neurons activate for a face recognition model and see that a certain neuron does light up when it sees a face.

Seeing which parts of a model (they aren't neurons) light up when shown a face doesn't necessarily indicate understanding.

The model is a complex web of numbers representing a massively compressed data space. It could easily be that what you see light up when shown a face only indicates what specific part of the model is housing the compresses data related to recognizing specific facial features.
by diggan | 2025-08-29 11:54:25+00:00
> For your second example: treat interactions with LLMs as an ongoing conversation, don't expect them to give you exactly what you want first time. Here the thing to do next is a follow-up prompt where you say "number eight looked like zero, fix that".

Personally, I treat those sort of mistakes as "misunderstandings" where I wasn't clear enough with my first prompt, so instead of adding another message (and increasing context further, making the responses worse by each message), I rewrite my first one to be clearer about that thing, and regenerate the assistant message.

Basically, if the LLM cannot one-shot it, you weren't clear enough, and if you go beyond the total of two messages, be prepared for the quality of responses to really sink fast. Even by the second assistant message, you can tell it's having an harder time keeping up with everything. Many models brag about their long contexts, but I still feel like the quality of responses to be a lot worse even once you reach 10% of the "maximum context".
by daly | 2025-08-29 11:54:27+00:00
I spent my 53 years in robotics and AI. I started at Unimation doing robot research, joined IBM doing robot research, worked at CMU doing robot research. I worked at IBM doing AI research (using neural nets from PDP Rumelhart), did graduate work in machine vision, etc.

It turns out that it was all a waste of time (but great fun).

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262680530/parallel-distributed-...
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-29 11:55:31+00:00
Credit card payments on the web are older than JavaScript, and I don’t think that anything even today actually requires JavaScript—all the fancy security things I know of could be done easily enough with additional form submissions and/or meta redirects (alas for multipart/x-mixed-replace, it was never reliable and its removal is almost complete). Unfortunately, PCI DSS makes it expensive now to direct things via your own server, so a typical business will be at the mercy of what their payment gateway provides: and I don’t know if any popular ones will support JavaScript-free operation any more, even though it’s theoretically pretty easy.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-29 11:56:18+00:00
If you want to learn about Jane Street:

1. Watch Stand-Up Maths and Numberphile videos on YouTube and do not skip the sponsor advertisement readings, e.g. https://youtube.com/watch?v=eqyuQZHfNPQ .

1. Read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44480916 .
by styanax | 2025-08-29 11:56:35+00:00
Trivia: CIS Guidelines (security tasks applied to a server to pass an enhanced security audit to be compliant with a standard, in a soundbite) has an item requiring /var/tmp to be a bind mount to /tmp (as well as setting specific security options on /tmp). A server attempting to pass CIS audits (very common in my work-related experience w/Enterprises) may well not have a unique /var/tmp.
by notahacker | 2025-08-29 11:56:51+00:00
Yeah, you'll find plenty of parts of of Spain (including purpose built tourist towns and suburbs with malls as well as traditional towns) where there aren't any McDonalds and the tourists if they exist are mainly Spanish (hell, you'll find purpose built tourist towns in Spain where there aren't any McDonalds and the tourists are all British or all German too!). Most of Europe doesn't know what a Taco Bell or a Wendys is, and Dominos Italy went bust because it's actually not miraculous that Italians have figured out how to sell pizza without US branding!

And sure, you'll find plenty of McDonalds outlets in Madrid or Bangkok but you'll find them all over Shanghai and Beijing and one in the tiny tourist trap of Yangshuo too...
by Evanmo666 | 2025-08-29 11:57:41+00:00
Hey HN,

Just wanted to share a little weekend project I built: Yes Or No Tarot.

I had a simple goal: create a web app that was extremely fast, minimalist, and had absolutely zero friction.

That means:

No sign-ups or logins

No ads, trackers, or cookies

No bloated frameworks (it's super lightweight)

It does one simple thing: you ask a yes/no question, and it gives you a straightforward answer.

The tarot theme is mostly for fun – you can think of it as a creatively skinned coin-flipper for those small, daily moments of indecision, like "should I get coffee now or later?".

I'm not a tarot expert, just a developer who enjoys building simple, useful things. I had a lot of fun making this and would love to hear any feedback you have on the UI, performance, or the general idea.

Thanks for checking it out!
by jbstack | 2025-08-29 11:58:04+00:00
How do you find the hardware compatibility to be? I've been keen to switch away from Ubuntu for years now and Debian would be my first choice but I'm wary of having problems e.g. with Nvidia GPUs, random peripheral devices such as printers and scanners, all of which mostly "just work" with Ubuntu. For this reason I'm leaning more towards Linux Mint but I'd like to be persuaded on Debian.

I don't consider outdated packages to be a problem on any distro because I just use Nix (which doesn't interfere with other package managers) whenever I want a more recent package.
by xtiansimon | 2025-08-29 11:58:43+00:00
> “…side seems like a cop out.”

I’d rather describe blaming “the Democrats“ as adopting the framing of this administration. They blame all “Democrats”, name a wide range of strawmen using the former president’s name like an adjective.

It’s quite destructive running around screaming rape, murder, fire. The president is willing to do it, the current congressional majority is all in, and the Supreme Court is YOLO. All branches are captured by the propaganda of this corrupt administration. This boat don’t turn around on the drop of a dime.
by foolserrandboy | 2025-08-29 11:59:16+00:00
Yeah, I don't understand this comparison. I've programmed for years in higher level languages professionally and never learned assembly and never got stuck because the higher level language was limited or doing something wrong.

Whenever I use an LLM I always need to review its output because usually there is something not quite right. For context I'm using VS copilot, mostly ask and agent mode, in a large brownfield project.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-29 11:59:20+00:00
RLVR can also encourage hallucinations quite easily. Think of SAT: giving a random answer is right 20% of the time, giving "I don't know" is right 0% of the time. If you only reward for test score, you encourage guesswork. So good RL reward design is as important as ever.

That being said, there are methods to train LLMs against hallucinations, and they do improve hallucination-avoidance. But anti-hallucination capabilities are fragile and do not fully generalize. There's no (known) way to train full awareness of its own capabilities into an LLM.
Show HN: Str-Plus – 80 Type-Safe JavaScript/TS String Utilities
by shahidkhandev | 2025-08-29 11:59:48+00:00
Hi HN!

I built Str-Plus, a lightweight and type-safe string utility library for JavaScript and TypeScript. It includes 80+ functions for common string tasks like capitalization, trimming, reversing, case conversion, validation, and more. Everything is fully typed, so it works seamlessly in TypeScript projects.

GitHub: https://github.com/ShahidKhanDev/str-plus

Would love to hear your thoughts or feature requests!
by laurentiurad | 2025-08-29 11:59:56+00:00
could be technical in the sense that modern software doesn't handle pretty well unknown values. There's rarely a system that can produce certain output, it's always more like a probability of getting a certain output.

Take GPS for example, it only gives you an approximation of where you are, not the exact location. And this example can be extrapolated to basically almost any new tech.