MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: NFactorial AI – Video calls with world's best minds as personal tutors
by armansu | 2025-08-11 12:03:58+00:00
Hi Hacker News,

I’m Arman. After dozens of experiments in the past 12 months (Top 3 in SWE-Bench Verified being one of them), we finally found an idea we are now pursuing in the high-speed beast mode.

Excited to launch nFactorial AI - MasterClass from any legend for any topic aka video calls with the world’s greatest minds as your personal tutors.

We set out to build the world’s biggest catalog of 100,000+ world-class masters (from Bruce Lee to Naval Ravikant) from every industry and every geography/language as your personal video-first AI tutors.

At the moment, in many fields AI is worse than the top 1% of humans. Terence Tao is better than AI in math, Warren Buffett is better in investing, Scott Aaronson is better in computational complexity. The Lee Sedol moment did not yet happen in these fields. By embedding the thoughts of the top 1% of humans into its context, AI generates higher-quality output.

We’re launching with 7 personal heroes of mine: Paul Graham teaching startups, Elon Musk teaching physics and first-principle thinking, Terence Tao teaching math, Andrej Karpathy teaching AI, Morgan Housel teaching personal money management, Bill Ackman teaching investing, Marc Andreessen teaching venture capital and personal productivity.

How to use the app? 1) Start a Zoom call with a legend. 2) Listen to their 5-min lecture with slides. 3) Ask them questions. 4) Ask to create a new lecture on any topic of your choice.

What’s new about what we built? - Live video call: screenshares by legends, see them “teach” with slides. - Create a video lecture on any topic. Preferably within the teacher’s domain expertise for better lecture quality. - Persona-grounded tutoring: each AI mentor is grounded in their public writing, talks, and known viewpoints, so PG sounds like PG, Karpathy reasons like Karpathy, etc. - We mimic not just the legends’ voice, mannerisms, facial expressions and vocabulary, but also their way of thinking. Reasoning based on their public writings: 3800+ posts, essays, books, interviews and blogs.

A lot of my friends make fun of me for being overly fascinated with learning from the GOATs. In 2004, I built the biggest Bruce Lee website on the Russian Internet. In 2010-2014 as well as 2023-2024, I recorded 150+ 3-hour long podcasts with world-class founders, scientists and engineers. In 2013, I published 966 posters on Instagram with my favorite quotes from the world’s top performers. In 2014, we built an iOS habit tracking app where users could follow daily rituals of the world’s most effective people. In 2016, 1 year before Cameo, we launched a mobile marketplace for fans to get video greetings from their favorite celebrities.

It’s time to turn this lifelong fascination into a product useful for a billion people.

We’re #1 on Product Hunt at the moment: https://www.producthunt.com/products/nfactorial-ai-6

If you try it, tell us what felt magical and what felt wrong. We're here to answer any questions.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-11 12:04:45+00:00
I know. It was a pity comment born out of my frustration with certain classes of offenders being labelled as "illegals" while others are granted human-first language like "unlawful citizens."

It wasn't a comment in keeping with the site guidelines but that was rooted in my continuing frustration with the community here denying the dehumanising nature of language like "illegals."

I'm aware of the definition of unlawful but thank you for your effort and apologies for the wasted time.
by jynelson | 2025-08-11 12:04:49+00:00
tech salaries in the US are high enough that this is approximately 1-3 years of income as a lump sum. more than that, if you got this amount as a bonus you already have stupid money.

of course $140k would be life changing for most people. but OP, and i suspect most of the other commenters, are not in that situation.
by rafaelmn | 2025-08-11 12:05:32+00:00
Others in this thread already pointed out Apple is price competitive at mac mini, and Apple is extremely price competitive since they switched to their own chips.

I would love it if PC was in a better state, but ever since Intel started flopping everyone in the PC land is praising AMD while ignoring the fact that both of them are just underdelivering compared to Apple. You cannot even get a consumer grade CPU on PC with >128 bit memory bus other than this strix halo chip - and it happened by accident. There is nothing on roadmap in the mainstream that will bump it - industry is years away from adding it. Meanwhile Apple is benefiting from this since M1, and the AI workloads just made it an even larger win.
Show HN: Playground for AI email triage with a dynamic interface and chatbot
by balibou | 2025-08-11 12:06:01+00:00
After a week off, I came back to hundreds of unread emails. I wanted a way to figure out what actually mattered without spending hours.

So I built a small AI prototype that: - Finds urgent and important messages - Summarizes long threads - Lets you interact with your inbox in a more visual way

Right now, it’s just a playground using a realistic sample inbox (hardcoded data). You can try it here: https://catchupinbox.com/playground

It has: - A dynamic email/thread interface - An AI chatbot that works directly within that interface

Stack: Next.js, hexagonal architecture, OpenAI (LLM-agnostic). Privacy-first — no real emails are used in this demo.

I’m curious: - Does this approach make sense to you? - What would make this genuinely useful? - Any edge cases or workflows I should consider before adding Gmail/Outlook support?
by harimau777 | 2025-08-11 12:06:02+00:00
Not an expert so take this with a HUGE grain of salt.

I think that the answer might depend on whether the difficulty is something with your speaking itself (e.g. you have a speech impediment, accent, stutter, etc.) versus if the difficulty is with the social side of things (e.g. mumbling due to nervousness, etc.).

For the former, maybe a speech therapist could help? For the later, I've heard people say that improv classes/clubs can do a lot for helping people be more confortable in unpredictable social situations.
by UncleMeat | 2025-08-11 12:06:05+00:00
Why would it affect ad revenue?

An exploit like this would be abused by somebody who sets up a malicious website to try to take control over somebody's device or otherwise steal secrets from them like keys for cryptocurrencies. These attacks tend to be targeted. Nobody is using an exploit like this to create an ad blocker or even to do ad fraud.

The only risk to revenue here is reputational, and I think that it is likely that the existence of this bug would be less widely known if the bounty program didn't exist and the bug was sold on the black market.
by Carstairs | 2025-08-11 12:06:20+00:00
Prompt processing speeds are pretty poor too imo. I was interested in one to be able to run some of the 100b moe's but since they only give 50-150 tk/s (depending on model) it will take 5ish mins to process a 32k context which wouldn't be unbarebly slow for me. I've just looked at the results in that link and it's even worse for the 70b's. It will be nearly 20 mins to process a 32k context.
by llimllib | 2025-08-11 12:07:03+00:00
Kind of! This script is assuming that you're dealing with a byte slice, which means you've already encoded your unicode data.

If you just encoded your string to bytes naïvely, it will probably-mostly still work, but it will get some combining characters wrong if they're represented differently in the two sources you're comparing. (eg, e-with-an-accent-character vs. accent-combining-character+e)

If you want to be correct-er you'll normalize your UTF string[1], but note that there are four different defined ways to do this, so you'll need to choose the one that is the best tradeoff for your particular application and data sources.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Normalizat...
by IshKebab | 2025-08-11 12:07:46+00:00
I disagree. I know when I get questions right, or can't do them. In my experience, either I screwed up a question and legit didn't get the job, or I was fine and the interview process is just a bit random. Sometimes it's the interviewer's fault for asking bad questions. Most commonly it's: "how do you light a fire?" "with a match" "but you don't have any matches" "a lighter" "no lighter either" "flint" "no flint" "stick and bow" "all the wood around you is wet" "I give up" "you use a magnifying glass of course!"

You can actually ask for feedback and usually they'll give it. In the EU they have to tell you what they wrote about you in their internal system under GDPR (or at least my company's lawyers believed that)!

The one time I got really great feedback unprompted from a hiring guy it was basically "they were disappointed you didn't know X" and I was like "weird, I do know X!". Very interesting to see it from the other side but I don't think it was very actionable.
by raesene9 | 2025-08-11 12:08:00+00:00
Indeed I don't. However it we examine the pace of new features of the last several years (I can't think of a single way this site has changed over that time period), it's reasonable to surmise that there isn't a lot of development of the user accessible/visible portions of the site, and that leads me to guess that they don't have much in the way of dev. resources.
by evgpbfhnr | 2025-08-11 12:08:03+00:00
One thing I don't get is that arm64 doesn't have fentry support.. does it? At least I just checked CONFIG_HAVE_FENTRY is not set on arm64, and e.g. (not checked recently) bpftrace --info used to print `fentry: no`, so how does this trampoline talk on arm64 apply without this part?
by jqpabc123 | 2025-08-11 12:09:01+00:00
I honestly don't see how the Cybertruck ever leaned into that.

It didn't --- and sales never really took off either.

But a big factor is the cartoonish, post-apocalyptic design that simply isn't very practical on a daily basis. Just maneuvering it into a parking spot or getting your tool box out of the bed is a pain.

The Cybertruck was designed by a committee of one --- Elon Musk. It is his baby, apparently created without any significant input from market research. For a consumer facing product, this was a huge blunder --- but not the only one --- and the results speak for themselves.

It takes a special form of arrogance to ignore the long history of progressive marketplace refinement and cater to the opinion of a person who has no real history or experience with the product.

...found something that was slightly more exclusive.

The only thing really "exclusive" about a Tesla is the fact that it is electric and costs more than it should --- along with some quirky, dysfunctional design thrown in for good measure (a Tesla trademark --- touch screen controls/dash, electric door locks that fail in an accident, FSD that isn't).

Down where the rubber meets the road, this tends to wear a little thin over time --- at least on this side of the pond.
Show HN: An open-source email archiver with full-text search capabilities
by wayneshng | 2025-08-11 12:09:55+00:00
Hey HN,

I’d like to share an open-source project I’ve created. It is an email archiving tool that can back up your whole email system with full-text search capabilities.

The project is called Open Archiver, and it is able to archive and index emails from cloud-based email inboxes, including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and any IMAP-enabled email inbox. You can connect it to your email provider, and it copies every single incoming and outgoing email into a secure archive that you control (Your local storage or S3-compatible storage).

Some features:

- Archive and index all emails and attachments

- Import and sync the whole organization's emails: For Google Workspace and MS 365, Open Archiver can ingest all individual inboxes' emails

- PST and .eml files import

- Role-based access

- Full-text search: All archived emails and attachments are indexed, so you can search the content of all emails and attachments

- You can choose to store your files either on your local machine or on any S3-compatible storage provider

- API access

It's AGPL-3.0 licensed and free to use for personal and business purposes. I'd be happy if you could give it a try and give me some feedback.

You can find the project on GitHub (with Demo site): https://github.com/LogicLabs-OU/OpenArchiver
Ask HN: How do you automatically detect if your signup/login is down?
by devilzhong | 2025-08-11 12:10:09+00:00
My SaaS product’s auth was broken for 3 days and I only noticed today. I’d like to set up an automated way to test signup and login flows continuously, and alert me if something fails.

What’s the simplest and most reliable way to do this? Tools, scripts, or best practices welcome.
by whobre | 2025-08-11 12:10:22+00:00
> The cool thing about OS/2 2.1 was that you could easily boot off of a single 1.44 Mb floppy disk, and run multitasking operations, without the need for the GUI.

It was cool, but don’t forget that you could do the same thing with MP/M on an 8-bit machine in late 1979.

Even Microsoft developed a similar operating system a year later, but never released it. The code name was M-DOS, or MIDAS, depending who you ask.
by tyfon | 2025-08-11 12:11:13+00:00
I'm not really timing it as I just use these models via open webui, nvim and a few things I've made like a discord bot, everything going via ollama.

But for comparison, it is generating tokens about 1.5 times as fast as gemma 3 27B qat or mistral-small 2506 q4. Prompt processing/context however seems to be happening at about 1/4 of those models.

A bit more concrete of the "excellent", I can't really notice any difference between the speed of oss-120b once the context is processed and claude opus-4 via api.
by AIPedant | 2025-08-11 12:11:47+00:00
Not quite true, they got in trouble recently for running a Nintendo ad without properly labelling it (until it was pointed out, the video is fixed now): https://youtube.com/watch?v=V10wHzV5zp0

Screenshot of original video: https://www.resetera.com/threads/digital-foundry-posts-an-ad...

It is a bit shameful that games journalists didn't cover this at all - seems almost like an omertà. Even assuming the mislabelling was an honest mistake, running the ad in the first place makes me trust them less. Worse, I used their videos when deciding to buy a Switch 2! I would have been much more skeptical (likely ignored them entirely) if I had known they were taking money from Nintendo.
by throw0101c | 2025-08-11 12:15:06+00:00
> Most of scientific and industrial advances were made by people who have no survival struggles and who were greedy for money or reputation. A lot of it was not needed for human adaptation and evolution.

I'm not sure what the motivations of the people who developed penicillin were, but I'm happy they did what they did.

Also vaccines (smallpox, polio, MMR), indoor plumbing and chlorination, sewage treatment, electrical lighting (so we didn't have to burn candles, whale oil, or gas piping/lighting to every room of the house), etc.
by stockresearcher | 2025-08-11 12:16:07+00:00
It’s not believable that going from a base M4 SoC to the A18, and reducing the screen size by 6-8% is going to reduce the overall BOM by 40%.

So either the “as low as” is not going to be met and the market will respond with a giant yawn (or anger), or they’re going to be doing a lot more to get that cost down.

It might be interesting, but this is a really risky move. If you’ve got kids with Chromebooks you’ve surely noticed that the apps and webpages they’re forced to use are all designed with the assumption that the users have stronger processors and more vertical screen real estate than they actually have (it’s the classic “my time is too valuable to slow down and think” developer mindset). So Apple could end up making a great little machine that absolutely sucks to use.
by qrios | 2025-08-11 12:16:17+00:00
Some numbers are posted in the comments:

> … you can expect the speed to half when going from 4k to 16k long prompt …

> … it did slow down somewhat (from 25T/s to 18T/s) for very long context …

Depends on the hardware configuration (size of VRAM, speed of CPU and system RAM) and llama.cpp parameter settings, a bigger context prompt slows the T/s number significantly but not order of magnitudes.

Facit: gpt-oss 120B on a small GPU is not the proper setup for chat use cases.
by beariish | 2025-08-11 12:16:36+00:00
I appreciate the followup here. The brainfuck interpreter isn't meant to be a benchmark notably, it's a naive implementation for the sake of the example.

I did spot some poor code in the Bolt version of nbody that can be changed (the usage of `.each()` in the hot loop is creating loads of temporary iterators, that's the memory difference.)

luajit -joff does perform better even with this change, but I observe closer to 15% than a 2x difference
by skyzouwdev | 2025-08-11 12:16:40+00:00
Just gave it a spin — the direct RDAP lookup from the browser is such a nice touch. I’ve always found domain search tools frustrating when they filter or push certain TLDs, so the “no server” part is refreshing.

The “Quirky” tab is surprisingly fun — got a few name ideas I wasn’t expecting. One small suggestion: maybe add a bulk check option for multiple keywords at once? Would make brainstorming sessions even faster.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-08-11 12:18:21+00:00
It is not impossible. It is going to happen and it is unavoidable. Even with a constant population this will happen if people live long.

We need to embrace this and use existing and new technologies to cope. We have AI, automation, robots progressing fast, this is exactly what we need in addition to investing in education.

The alternative is to keep pushing for an ever growing population and to end up in Soylent Green / Blade Runner.
by mapt | 2025-08-11 12:18:29+00:00
I get the feeling that judges & juries are less and less likely to give the benefit of the doubt if charges/lawsuits are ever actually filed against the officer, year by year.

You also get just rank intimidation. My friend got out of jail and the next day tried to file a complaint about an officer stealing his pocket money during an arrest. He was placed in a room with the arresting officer, who explained that any complaint which was filed would incur retribution from the DA with regards to the thing that got him arrested. This is happening in a large urbanized precinct, in a blue state.

To ever regain control of the police force, the various civilian & political oversight bodies would need to prosecute thousands of felony exortion, kidnapping, and assault cases a year.
by zuhaib-rasheed | 2025-08-11 12:19:25+00:00
I’m the cofounder of a platform called Magicnode that lets people visually build and launch AI micro apps.

We’re debating whether to keep it closed-source (with a hosted SaaS model) or open source it (possibly keeping a hosted version for revenue).

Potential benefits we see in open sourcing: faster adoption, community contributions, more trust from devs. Potential drawbacks: competitors copying the code, harder to monetize, more support overhead.

For those who have been in similar situations — what factors did you consider? Are there hybrid models that work well? Any examples of companies that made the right/wrong call here?
by jibal | 2025-08-11 12:19:25+00:00
And not a word of the response is correct ... it simply repeats errors in logic and fact and a complete failure to understand the salient features of a No True Scotsman fallacy (which is a denial that someone who is by definition a Scotsman is not a TRUE Scotsman ... a distinction that is purely pejorative with no actual semantic content; saying that a "certain sort" of Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge indicates disdain for such Scotsmen but is not any sort of fallacy), and throws in some snarky projection ... but my comments are devoid of irony.
by sundarurfriend | 2025-08-11 12:20:20+00:00
Talking about the variety of facilities the region has, about traffic, new constructions - anything development related is guaranteed to get the conversation going. There's a lot of rapid urbanization and change going on, and people always have something they want to get off their chest about it.

If you don't mind a bit of griping, politics is not a bad shout either. People aren't hardline attached to one side or the other as much here, and even when they are, they're much more willing to admit corruption at a local city level even if their favourite party is in charge. Complaining about corruption is a common pastime.

Movies and music are also pretty good generic options, as are motorbikes or electric scooters with younger guys in their early-mid twenties.
by ourmandave | 2025-08-11 12:20:21+00:00
I know brand loyalty can be iffy, but if you become known for your trans blowing up after 70K miles you're repeat buyers run away and fill the car reviews with 1-star warnings.

That's the rep Nissan has with their CVT transmissions.

You could also face a recall if enough of them do it.

https://www.jalopnik.com/1805274/worst-transmission-recalls-...
by codethief | 2025-08-11 12:20:23+00:00
> If you just encoded your string to bytes naïvely

By "naïvely" I assume you mean you would just plug in UTF-8 bytestrings for haystack & needle, without adjusting the implementation?

Wouldn't the code still need to take into account where characters (code points) begin and end, though, in order to prevent incorrect matches?
by Thorrez | 2025-08-11 12:20:43+00:00
From what I understand, they generally require complete reliable exploits. I don't think they generally buy proofs of concept, or exploits that only work some percent of the time. This specific exploit worked 80% of the time, which I'm not sure is good enough for them.

Yes, maybe the exploit could likely be modified to be more reliable. That's more work though.
by dataflow | 2025-08-11 12:22:05+00:00
Hang on. Isn't "try and" just completely different from "try to"?

"Can I leave work early?" "Try and see."

This is at worst a threat, and at best telling the other person to just do it and ask for forgiveness later afterward than for permission beforehand.

"Can I leave work early?" "Try to see."

This is telling the person to go research the answer to figure it out properly. And it feels less natural to say it too.

How can these be interchangeable in meaning? If anything they feel closer to being opposite in meaning here.
by camgunz | 2025-08-11 12:22:06+00:00
Tech has to believe this. We're all victims of the Upton Sinclair "it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it" thing.

A lot of tech is just straight up bad. The machine gun was bad. The nuclear bomb was bad. Social media was bad. TV was bad. Cars were bad. C++ was bad.

> If you are innovating with pencil and paper after the development of the computer, you're making a grave error.

This is a great example. Study after study shows that writing on paper helps retention and analysis vs. typing. Study after study shows reading on paper helps retention and comprehension vs. a screen.

> There was no virtue in still sending faxes in 2010.

You can send a document with an authentic signature. This might not seem like a big deal, but "wet ink" clauses prevent many pro-democracy agendas (voter registration, etc), and the good faith reason for them (the typical reason is voter suppression) is that documents are too easy to forge without signatures.

But also, were fax machines bad? Did they enable an even-more-sprawling bureaucracy? We're well past the point where "new tech = good" is even close to default true.