MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yodon | 2025-08-07 13:56:05+00:00
Your writeup was excellent. There's no more ubiquitous or lower signal comment here these days than "I think this was written by AI." There is no piece of English writing one can link to on HN without someone spamming us with a sentence or that form.

Well written? AI. Poorly written? AI. Has a non-sequitor? AI. No non-sequitors? AI. Includes an em-dash (added automatically by Word for almost two decades)? AI. No em-dashes? AI.

Eventually, hopefully, dang will declare "I think this was written by AI" to not be a productive topic for comments, just like commenters are already encouraged to engage with the strongest and best form of the ideas presented instead of attacking the most easily taken down strawman interpretation of them, but until then we all have to scroll through it on every post, no matter how well written it is, as yours is.
by dougbright | 2025-08-07 13:57:09+00:00
My bad. I shouldn’t have mentioned LangChain here because it’s a little besides my point. What I mean is, MCP seems designed for a world where users talk to an LLM, and the LLM calls software tools.

For the foreseeable future, especially in a business context, isn’t it more likely that users will still interact with structured software applications, and the applications will call the LLM? In that case, where does MCP fit into that flow?
by crowcroft | 2025-08-07 13:57:35+00:00
I think we're probably over using MCPs.

If you're a large org with an API that an ecosystem of other partners use then you should host a remote MCP and then people should connect LLMs to it.

The current model of someone bundling tools into an MCP and then you download and run that MCP locally feels a bit like the wrong path. Tool definitions for LLMs are already pretty standardized if things are just running locally why am I not just importing a package of tools, I'm not sure what the MCP server is adding.
by alchemist1e9 | 2025-08-07 13:57:36+00:00
This is about security cameras at work sites and businesses. What does this have to do with WFH?

However while we are on the topic I don’t see why governments should impose any restrictions on businesses using monitoring systems on their WFH technology systems as long as it is disclosed to the employees they may be monitored.

When you are paid by an employer your job is to do exactly what they want and try to do it well. Your relationship is voluntary (at will) between both parties and if you don’t like it then don’t work for them.
by Sharlin | 2025-08-07 13:57:43+00:00
If you think Asimov proposed the three laws as anything like a workable constraint framework of some sort, you're hilariously mistaken and probably haven't read a single Robot book in your life. Asimov came up with them BECAUSE they were a) simple, b) vague, and c) broken. BECAUSE he wanted to write stories about all the specific ways they were broken.
by pocketsmart | 2025-08-07 13:57:47+00:00
Tether has invested 30 million euros in Spanish crypto exchange Bit2Me, acquiring a minority stake in it and joining major investors including Telefónica, BBVA, and Unicaja with stakes in the firm. The investment will help Bit2Me expand its presence in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, where it has a Virtual Asset Service Provider license.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-08-07 13:58:31+00:00
In that case, I suck at POSIX—I could’ve sworn clz() was a standard or at least a conventional function, but no, that’s fls(), which is furthermore not universal across Unices. Either way, if you don’t feel your knowledge of the x86 instruction set is adequate, there’s always an option of taking an instruction listing and looking up anything that seems unfamilliar. It’s surprisingly effective. (You can either use an old listing[1] or skip all the vector stuff in a new one[2].)

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000819070651/http://www.quanta...

[2] https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/
by bravetraveler | 2025-08-07 13:58:34+00:00
They mention rate of adoption, compared to the internet. Consider the barriers to entry. Before we all got sick of receiving AOL CDs, the prospect of 'going online' was incredibly expensive and sometimes laborious.

More people subscribe to/play with a $20/m service than own/admin state-of-the-art machines?! Say it ain't so /s
by 9rx | 2025-08-07 13:58:44+00:00
> I never said anything about Republicans using chemicals to create younger adults.

You don't say? Try reading it again.

> I was saying they are arguing for a lower age to be ok.

We likely touched on that when we talked about people starting to reject what I called the "Teen Mom" movement. Yes, people are waking up to the fact that not having children until their geriatric years, if at all, is... not great. They are sick of being shamed for wanting to have children and are pushing back.

But my question was about your claims related to pedophilia. That's another subject entirely.

> I can say Republicans support pedophiles.

So you keep saying, but all you've come up with is some groups of people who have no doubt broken the law, but haven't exhibited any signs of pedophilia.

At this point the only logical expiation here is that you've made up a random definition for the word on the spot and are trying to use it as some kind of boogieman in hopes on preying on those who assume you are using the term in good faith. And if that is the case, I have to question why you find your bad faith participation acceptable?
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-07 13:59:29+00:00
To add, services account for that failure by introducing something worse: a customer service backdoor where you can get into an account with very weak or nonexistent authentication.

With Amazon's live chat, someone was able to get into my account by providing an address in the same city as the destination of my latest Amazon order.

You see this with 2FA since "sorry lol you've lost your account forever" isn't an option, and it's trivial for users to lose their 2FA key unlike, say, access to their email.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-08-07 13:59:31+00:00
Re predicting inflation in particular: we are in a global system with tons of factors which are themselves unpredictable. That doesn't mean that key factors like money supply don't have an impact! We don't know what global policymakers will decide and we don't know whether a pandemic is about to break. The global powers spent a fuck-ton and inflation followed, that's about as predictable as it gets. What isn't predictable is how and when that subsides.

Milei's policies curbed hyper-inflation in Argentina. Is that because he's a wizard? Is that because it's impossible to predict that drastically reducing deficit spending would reel in inflation? And if it's so fucking obvious that it would, what's the significance of denying those data points be scientific? They're either valid or not.

The theories that last e.g. supply-and-demand have lasted because they work. Guess what 20th century experiments didn't work?
by criley2 | 2025-08-07 13:59:54+00:00
I have a well documented copilot-instructions.md (and have used githubs new agentic self-documentation prompt) and the reality is that it takes about 15-20 minutes to build and start multiple react, reactnative and expressjs projects.

Github now appears to support defining setup tasks in a Github Action that runs prior to the agent, so that's the next avenue of research.

Regardless, the website agent will always be slower. My local is already running and fully ready to go so the ide agent can hit the ground running on any task. The website agent has to spin up a machine and install and build. It will take time.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-08-07 14:00:16+00:00
True. I built a web site for a local newspaper back in the late 90s. Their main concern was finding a way to charge for the content (difficult at that time) while making sure they didn't give anything away for free, so they did nothing useful with it for a long time.

That paper still survives, barely, ironically having cut back on home delivery and trying to push customers toward digital, while losing a lot of the content that made it worth getting in the first place.
by rrosen326 | 2025-08-07 14:00:20+00:00
What a great way to put it in perspective, and shocking how low per query.

I expanded your comparison list (with Chat GPT). Pretty interesting.

Activity | Watts Used (1 hr) ---------------------------------------|------------------- Laptop | 50 Wh Desktop + large monitor | 200 Wh Large screen TV | 200–300 Wh Video game + large TV | 300–500 Wh Washing machine run (avg) | 500–1,200 Wh Dishwasher run (avg) | 1,200 Wh Dryer run (electric) | 2,000–5,000 Wh Tesla city driving (Model 3 est.) | 14,000 Wh Tesla highway driving (Model 3 est.) | 18,000 Wh
by dsign | 2025-08-07 14:00:45+00:00
This is true.

But I've seen some harnesses (i.e., whatever Gemini Pro uses) do impressive things. The way I model it is like this: an LLM, like a person, has a chance to produce wrong output. A quorum of people and some experiments/study usually arrives to a "less wrong" answer. The same can be done with an LLM, and to an extent, is being done by things like Gemini Pro and o3 and their agentic "eyes" and "arms". As the price of hardware and compute goes down (if it does, which is a big "if"), harnesses will become better by being able to deploy more computation, even if the LLM models themselves remain at their current level.

Here's an example: there is a certain kind of work we haven't quite yet figured how to have LLMs do: creating frameworks and sticking to them, e.g. creating and structuring a codebase in a consistent way. But, in theory, if one could have 10 instances of an LLM "discuss" if a function in code conforms to an agreed convention, well, that would solve that problem.

There are also avenues of improvement that open with more computation. Namely, today we use "one-shot" models... you train them, then you use them many times. But the structure, the weights of the model aren't being retrained on the output of their actions. Doing that in a per-model-instance basis is also a matter of having sufficient computation at some affordable price. Doing that in a per-model basis is practical already today, the only limitation are legal terms, NDAs, and regulation.

I say all of this objectively. I don't like where this is going; I think this is going to take us to a wild world where most things are gonna be way tougher for us humans. But I don't want to (be forced to) enter that world wearing rosy lenses.
by abeppu | 2025-08-07 14:00:47+00:00
I want someone to try building a variant that just gives you timely cues about generally good mental health practices. Suggestions could be contextually based on a local-only app that listens to you and your environment, and delivered to a wireless earbud. When you're in a situation that might cause you stress, it reminds you to take some deep breaths. When you're in a situation where you might be tempted to react with hostility, it suggests that you pause for a few seconds. When you've been sitting in front of your computer too long it suggests that maybe you'd like to go for a short walk.

If the moral of the story is that having access to magically good advice is dangerous because it shifts us to habitual obedience ... can a similar device shift us to mental habits that are actually good for us?
by Hackbraten | 2025-08-07 14:00:51+00:00
Vendor lock-in and lack of alternatives.

1Password used to work decently well before 2020. Now I have ~ 2k items in 1Password, distributed among two accounts (work and personal). Additionally, my spouse and I have a shared 1Password vault via the Family plan.

There’s no way I’m going to migrate 2k items and two dozen devices to another vendor. If there were one that met my requirements to begin with.
by nailer | 2025-08-07 14:00:52+00:00
when I first read your comment, I agreed, but it’s actually a little bit deeper than that.

You have access to the private key of the public key in a certificate. The certificate is making an attestation that the signer has verified that this canonical name belongs to this public key.

You as the holder of the private key that matches the public key in the certificate should not allow you to change what the signer has attested about you.
by pocketsmart | 2025-08-07 14:01:00+00:00
GCP detects crypto mining in VMs by monitoring unusual resource usage like high CPU or network activity. It analyzes logs for known mining software and suspicious process behavior. Machine learning and threat intelligence help flag abnormal VM activity. Tools like Security Command Center and VPC Flow Logs assist in detection. If mining is detected, GCP alerts the user and may recommend or take action.
by Bender | 2025-08-07 14:01:23+00:00
I do not know the answer specifically as it pertains to GCP but I know that a couple other VPS providers just look for specific programs using a lot of CPU via their command-line and program name from the hypervisor. No scanning, just a process list and CPU usage in those cases. But I have no idea what GCP is specifically doing in your case. Simple monitoring tools can flag this.
by pjc50 | 2025-08-07 14:01:29+00:00
> to list every current violation and abuse of humans in every single country without exception

Couldn't you just ask the model that?

Joking of course, but this is in and of itself an intractable problem. Do you mean "restate the principles of human rights", which is a pretty small subset of law which is in turn a small subset of ethics, or do you mean actually get out there and enumerate and name every single person having their human rights violated? Not only is that an absurd amount of work it's politically impossible.
by gnatman | 2025-08-07 14:01:35+00:00
It’s mentioned in the article, but there’s been a product on the market already for almost 5 years that does the same thing, with the same mechanism of action. That product, Vuity, has not been popular. The article makes it seem like the reason for Vuity’s lackluster performance is the incidence of side effects but I think it’s just not something people want to pay money for long term.
by GoblinSlayer | 2025-08-07 14:01:47+00:00
Performance is a deciding factor, it's the reason I use paint and don't use Krita/Gimp/Photoshop. I use Ctrl+Z for non-destructive editing in paint. Also paint has a more reliable and predictable UI, you never know what those overly smart editors will do. Will they add too much antialiasing? Randomly switch to subpixel precision? Insert transparent background (antialiased)?
by artdigital | 2025-08-07 14:02:58+00:00
Alright, I wanted to give Jules another fair try to see if it improved, but it's still terrible.

- It proposed a plan. I gave it some feedback on the plan, then clicked approve. I came back a few minutes later to "jules is waiting for input from you", but there was nothing to approve or click, it just asked "let me know if you're happy with the plan and I'll get started". I told Jules "I already approved the plan, get started" and it finally started

- I have `bun` installed through the environment config. The "validate config" button successfully printed the bun version, so it's installed. When Jules tries to use bun, I get `-bash: bun: command not found` and it wastes a ton of time trying to install bun. Then bun was available until it asked me for feedback. When I replied, bun went missing again. Now for whatever reason it prefixes every command with "chmod +x install_bun.sh && ./install_bun.sh", so each step it does is installing bun again

- It did what I asked, then saw that the tests break (none were breaking beforehand, our main branch is stable), and instead of fixing them it told me "they're unrelated to our changes". I told it to fix everything, it was unable to. I'm using the exact same setup instructions as with Copilot Agent, Codex and Claude Code. Only Jules is failing

- I thought I'll take over and see what it did, but because it didn't "finish", it didn't publish a branch. I asked it to push a branch, it started doing something and is now in "Thinking" for a while. Seems to be running tests and lint again which are failing. But eventually it published the branch.

At this point I gave up. I don't have time to debug why bun is missing when in the env configuration it is available, or why it vanished in between steps, or figure out why only jules isn't able to properly run our testsuite. It took forever for a relatively small change, and each feedback iteration is taking forever.

I'm sure it'll be great one day, and I'll continue to re-visit it, but for now I'll stick with the other 3 when I need an async agent
Show HN: I spent 40 hours vibe coding after 40 years of traditional programming
by maxbene | 2025-08-07 14:03:17+00:00
After 40 years of coding (starting with 8-bit assembly in the 80s), I decided to test the "vibe coding" paradigm everyone's talking about. I spent 2 weeks developing a Python project entirely through conversation with AI assistants - no direct code writing, just English instructions to Claude, GPT-4, and Gemini.

Yes, the 10x productivity claims have some truth - but with serious caveats. The AI assistants made both brilliant architectural decisions and bizarre errors. They proved theorems for me in 30 seconds that would've taken me hours, yet also confused left with right in a simple data structure.

Still: this isn't the death of programming, nor the advent of English-as-a-6th-generation-programming-language, but IMO a shift in how we handle uncertainty and ambiguity in software development. Instead of a rigid human-to-machine dialogue, it's now a probabilistic collaboration where the fuzziness moves from your head into the conversation itself.

I documented everything - all 300+ exchanges, the errors, the wins, and what this means for developers with different experience levels. Including from a psychological and emotional point of view.

So if you're curious about what "English as a programming language" actually looks like in practice, here is my full article (10k words):

https://marcobenedetti.substack.com/p/vibe-coding-as-a-codin...

Code repository: https://github.com/mabene/vibe

Happy to answer questions about the experience. For context, I hold a (pre-LLM) PhD in AI and currently work as a research advisor for the AI team of a large organization, so I've been watching this evolution from both practical and theoretical angles.
by nlawalker | 2025-08-07 14:04:01+00:00
> writing bash commands into my terminal

This is what the author means by "knowing how to use the tool". The LLM alone is effectively a function that outputs text, it has no other capabilities, it cannot "connect to" or "use" anything by itself. The closest it can come is outputting an unambiguous, structured text request that can be interpreted by the application code that wraps it and does something on its behalf.

The author's point hinges on the architectural distinction between the LLM itself and that application code, which is increasingly irrelevant and invisible to most people (even developers) because the application code that knows how to do things like call MCP servers is already baked in to most LLM-driven products and services. No one is "talking directly to" an LLM, it's all mediated by multiple layers, including layers that perform tool calling.
CuWise – AI-Powered CUDA Optimization Assistant
by raghu_dev | 2025-08-07 14:04:02+00:00
I built cuWise, a CLI tool that uses local LLMs to analyze CUDA profiling logs and suggest kernel optimizations. It works fully offline (no cloud or API keys), and it's focused on developer privacy and usability.

GitHub: https://github.com/Raghu-dev-pixel/cuWise

Would love feedback, ideas, or feature suggestions!
by probably_wrong | 2025-08-07 14:04:06+00:00
In theory: they can ask for ID, sworn affidavit, or whatever other means their local laws determine to be valid. At the end of the day, proving that someone owns something is not a new problem. I've also seen "here's some evidence that I know what the contents of the account are, my legal name matches the account and my legal address matches some emails there".

In practice: in my case, anecdotally, they just did it. For some reason owning the backup email account was not enough for the automated workflow to unlock my account, but sending a letter threatening to sue under the GDPR somehow changed their minds.
by stasher-dev | 2025-08-07 14:04:32+00:00
It means the releases are cryptographically signed using GitHub OIDC, with SLSA v1 provenance and entries in the Rekor transparency log.

That means:You can verify every artifact against its source code i.e I have not tampered with the code post deployment. for example part of the build is a dry-run on the worker build, this is stored as part of the build so you can see / confirm the exact code that was uploaded and this code is signed.
by biophysboy | 2025-08-07 14:04:48+00:00
>“The top 100 AI companies on Stripe achieved annualized revenues of $1 million in a median period of just 11.5 months—four months ahead of the fastest-growing SaaS companies.”

This chart is extremely sparse and very confusing. Why not just plot a random sample of firms from both industries?

I'd be curious to see the shape of the annualized revenue distribution after a fixed time duration for SaaS and AI firms. Then I could judge whether its fair to filter by the top 100. Maybe AI has a rapid decay rate at low annualized revenue values but a slower decay rate at higher values, when compared to SaaS. Considering that AI has higher marginal costs and thus a larger price of entry, this seems plausible to me. If this is the case, this chart is cherry picking.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-08-07 14:04:51+00:00
I think the right thing to do in that case is report the failure and the customer service experience you had in dealing with it. I've had companies that I recommend despite an initial failure because the customer service experience in correcting it was excellent, and companies I don't recommend whose product worked relatively well but when the inevitable happened their customer support was sorely lacking.

As a consumer I don't get to buy a unit that the company hand picked and inspected with extra fervor to ensure that it's perfect, I get to buy one off of the shelf. So when I'm reading a review I want to know what the off the shelf experience is. If I read a review that gave the company "a fair shot" by ignoring the broken unit and reviewing the replacement I'd feel lied to.
by krunck | 2025-08-07 14:05:17+00:00
"United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby earned $33.9 million in 2024, compared to $18.6 million in 2023, and $9.8 million in 2022"

https://onemileatatime.com/insights/highest-paid-airline-ceo...

He must know something, right? And it seems he knows more and more as the years go by.
by laimewhisps | 2025-08-07 14:05:23+00:00
Israel faces a "threat" from the people it's been ethnically cleansing for 80 years. Also, this is in the West Bank, so has nothing to do with Hamas (not that it would be ok to do this in Gaza). That the U.S. and EU also violate human rights at scale, doesn't make it ok for Israel to do the same. Only they go one step further and actually murder people based on the information they've spied.
by lawik | 2025-08-07 14:05:28+00:00
No. It is not necessary. I don't think I said it was.

You can absolutely simulate more IoT-devices. But in this case I don't have to simulate receiving OTA updates, rebooting, keeping state. It has some upside but it isn't the reason I've done it.

I think I mentioned that in both this and the previous piece that I started out doing the VMs for fun and that's still kind of the central point. "What can I do with 192 cores?" We'll have a good use of the artifacts of this work for testing the framework itself in ways where devices are useful.

As you say, if I wanted to stress-test the OTA service for real I could definitely just set up some libraries to make multiple connections instead of starting the whole machinery. You can make a lot more connections, throw a lot more work at the system. And depending on how fancy you want to get you can simulate a lot of device behavior.

Given that I happened to have a couple of thousand full-fidelity devices in my pocket we got some incidental testing of the service.