MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-21 16:36:54+00:00
Amazon still does lockers and other collection points.

There is a whole business model built around being a package receiver for folks who don't want deliveries left on their doorstep. Most private PO box companies will receive packages for you, and there are apps that allow any business with a physical location to act as a package receiver for a fee per delivery. Often it is more convenient than residential delivery since you won't get delivery drivers falsely claiming they attempted delivery. When I used to travel a lot, I had a service that would receive mail and packages, and hold them until I was back in town. I think it was ~$10 month and well worth it.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-21 16:37:04+00:00
> Memorization of, like, multiplication tables gives us a poor view of the more interesting type of memorization.

Memorizing multiplication tables is the first place many children encounter this strategy: The teacher shows you that you could try to memorize all of the combinations, or you could start learning some of the patterns and techniques. When multiplying by 5 the answer will end in 0 or 5. When multiplying by 2 the answer will be an even number, and so on.
by bnug | 2025-08-21 16:37:21+00:00
That could be the case, but I work in a mechanical engineering group as the only person on the team who can write code or automate things with it. We're in a large corporation with a sizeable IT support group that builds a decent chunk of the software in-house, and our team views much of it as terrible. So, I've rewritten applications or supplemented the "terrible" but irreplaceable software with tools to make our jobs much easier. I don't think that I'm better than our in-house IT folks at software development but that my perspective as an actual end-user gives me a much better idea of how to meet our own needs. I'm also highly motivated to make it effective, since I'll be using it. So, the title initially resonated with me and didn't see this comment coming. That said, I'm sure your point is valid in many cases as I'm not familiar with formal software development / project management.
by black_puppydog | 2025-08-21 16:37:29+00:00
I've seen the John Oliver videos and all, so I know this comes as a surprise to no-one but... the US needs to get its act together and build some actual infrastructure. I've heard lots of encouraging stories on the Volts podcast about it, too. Not enough, not fast enough, from what I understand.

I'm 38 and I've had power go out in my house for lots of reasons, but all of them came down to me blowing a fuse somehow. I can't remember ever having had an actual, you know, power outage. So I guess I just here to tell you over there in the US that another way is possible. :)
by nosignono | 2025-08-21 16:37:49+00:00
That's needlessly complex. It's means testing for CO2. Means testing is a huge waste of effort, imo.

If the US, Europe, Russia, India, and China stop burning fossil fuels, we'll be well on our way. I'm not really worried about whether Ecuador is burning fossil fuels right now, it cannot be a meaningful amount of output compared to those 5.
by belter | 2025-08-21 16:38:04+00:00
The US mix of government and enterprise. You want Capital you need to be MAGA

"Donald Trump and Silicon Valley's Billionaire Elegy" - https://www.wired.com/story/donald-trump-and-silicon-valleys...

"Secret White House spreadsheet ranks US companies based on loyalty to Trump" - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/15/secret-white...
by mvieira38 | 2025-08-21 16:38:48+00:00
This is a good point. If we are marching towards some sort of LLM-driven world, where every company wants to have automated AI agents for customer service, internal development, marketing and prospecting, the energy usage will compound. A simple RAG system can be expected to make 5 or more prompts per query, and multi-agent systems like Roo Code power through tens of prompts for any given task.
by no_wizard | 2025-08-21 16:38:48+00:00
Gemini keeps being rather impressive though, even their iterative updates have improvements, though I'm seeing a significant slowdown in the improvements (both quantity and in how much they improve) suggestion a wall may be approaching.

That said, technologies like this can also go through a rollercoaster pattern itself. Lots of innovation and improvement, followed by very little improvement but lots of research, which then explodes more improvements.

I think LLMs have a better chance at following that pattern than computer vision did when that hype cycle was all the rage
by tqi | 2025-08-21 16:39:17+00:00
The link to the report pdf redirects to a landing page[1] that makes me think this "study" is run-of-the-mill content marketing. The CTA at the bottom of the page says "Join the Revolution / Be at the forefront of creating the agentic web. Get exposure and faster adoption for your AI products and tools," which certainly doesn't give the impression that this is an objective report. Either way I can't speak to the quality of the study directly because it is walled off behind a contact information form, which is another bad sign.

From the article though:

> But researchers found most use cases were limited to boosting individual productivity rather than improving a company’s overall profits.

What does that even mean?

[1] Website: https://nanda.media.mit.edu/, FAQ: https://projnanda.github.io/projnanda/#/faq_nanda
by kingstnap | 2025-08-21 16:39:24+00:00
I mean of course they aren't. So many people are offering so much stuff for free or at a pittance.

I honestly don't think it matters though. Feel free to disagree with me but I think the money is irrelevant.

The only thing that actually matters is the long run is the attention, time, and brain space of other people. After all that's where fiat currency actually derives it's value. These Gen AI companies have captured a lot of that extremely quickly.

OpenAI might have "burned" billions but they way they have wrung themselves into seemingly every university student's computer, every CEOs mind, the policy decisions of world leaders, ever other hackernews post, is nothing short of miraculous...
by qualeed | 2025-08-21 16:39:30+00:00
From the top of the linked page:

>"$450.00/mo per seat"

>"$4,950.00/yr per seat"

And under the question "What happens if I am distributing the runtime for commercial purposes?":

>"Industry Customers requires explicit authorization from Unity and is subject to a fee ("Distribution License') which is generally equivalent to 4.0% of the revenue generated by the software product that incorporates the Unity runtime (discounts may apply)"
by the_snooze | 2025-08-21 16:39:33+00:00
I wouldn't mind it if it were presented as yet another tool in the box. Maybe have a one-time popup saying "Hey, there's this thing, here's a cool use case, go check it out on your own terms."

In reality, AI sparkles and logos and autocompletes are everywhere. It's distracting. It makes itself the star of the show instead of being a backup dancer to my work. It could very well have some useful applications, but that's for users to decide and adapt to their particular needs. The ham-fisted approach of shoving it into every UI front-and-center signals a gross sense of desperation, neediness, and entitlement. These companies need to learn how to STFU sometimes.
by realityfactchex | 2025-08-21 16:39:34+00:00
Dropbox is dropping (as in discounting -- not as in releasing) their password manager product *called* Passwords [0].

I had expected from the link/article title ("Dropbox Passwords Discontinuation") that Dropbox was going passwordless in general, e.g. for their main data sync product. This does *not* appear to be the case.

At least this news restores the normal order to things.

[0] https://www.dropbox.com/features/security/passwords
by nosignono | 2025-08-21 16:39:40+00:00
Would reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reverse current problems? On it's own, it would start to, yes. It would reduce global temperatures, reduce weather irregularities, begin to cool the globe back down.

But we'd then have to move on to other things like deforestation, overfishing, water conflicts, plastics, etc. It's not a panacea, but it would reverse course on a pretty significant root cause.
by taormina | 2025-08-21 16:40:18+00:00
There aren’t enough GPUs for average gamers to buy anything vaguely recent and they would love to be able to. Making the best GPUs on the planet is still huge and the market is quite large. Scalping might finally die at this rate, but NVDA wasn’t making any of the scalping money anyway so who cares? Data centers and gamers still need every GPU NVDA can make.
by twic | 2025-08-21 16:40:18+00:00
Teh Guardian used to (?) publish puzzles by Chris Maslanka which were like this, and, as i recall, pretty good. There are a couple of books collecting them:

https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/products/the-pyrgic-puzzl...

https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/products/pyrgic-puzzles-b...

This should be more of the same:

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/university-of-the-mind-fiend...

The GCHQ Christmas Challenges might be worth a look too.
by me551ah | 2025-08-21 16:40:44+00:00
Or maybe not. Scaling AI will require an exponential increase in compute and processing power, and even the current LLM models take up a lot of resources. We are already at the limit of how small we can scale chips and Moore’s law is already dead.

So newer chips will not be exponentially better but will be more of incremental improvements, so unless the price of electricity comes down exponentially we might never see AGI at a price point that’s cheaper than hiring a human.

Most companies are already running AI models at a loss, scaling the models to be bigger(like GPT 4.5) only makes them more expensive to run.

The reason why internet, smartphones and computers have seen exponential growth from the 90s is due to underlying increase in computing power. I personally used a 50Mhz 486 in the 90s and now use a 8c/16t 5Ghz CPU. I highly doubt if we will see the same form of increase in the next 40 years
by spogbiper | 2025-08-21 16:40:49+00:00
I am working on a project that uses LLM to pull certain pieces of information from semi-structured documents and then categorize/file them under the correct account. it's about 95% accurate and we haven't even begun to fine tune it. i expect it will require human in the loop checks for the foreseeable future, but even with a human approval of each item, its going to save the clerical staff hundreds of hours per year. There are a lot of opportunities in automating/semi-automating processes like this, basically just information extraction and categorization tasks.
by m463 | 2025-08-21 16:41:13+00:00
All the negative responses.

I have been at countless places where the engineers are out of sync with the product.

And it might be something silly like their coworker added something they didn't know about and the UI is now confusing. Could even be the website started proclaiming something that didn't align well with the product.

Another factor is that the [product -> PM -> bug system -> engineer -> fix -> QA -> product] loop is heavy. It takes a long time and major things get fixed but minor friction doesn't.

having [product <-> engineer] can be amazing.

Engineers might have never encountered the full experience, or may merely be out of sync with how it works today vs last year.
Show HN: crapboard – useless social media, no algo, login, or ads
by streetmeat | 2025-08-21 16:41:22+00:00
crapboard = omegle + pastebin

I created this out of a frustration with the current state of social media. Simple and useless, you can contribute to or browse the dumpster of random pastes. It's purely random, no accounts, no tracking, no revenue :P

Let me know what you think.
by echelon | 2025-08-21 16:41:34+00:00
You're looking at individual generations. These tools aren't for casual users expecting to 1-shot things.

The value is in having a director, editor, VFX compositor pick and choose from amongst the outputs. Each generation is a single take or simulation, and you're going to do hundreds or thousands. You sift through that and explore the latent space, and that's where you find your 5-person Pixar.

Human curated AI is an exoskeleton that enables small teams to replace huge studios.
by codingdave | 2025-08-21 16:41:51+00:00
Progress is not as fast as some people believe. Shortly after the ChatGPT launch, I quickly heard discussions about what it would really take to make LLMs work in real products and processes. The agentic solutions that are now coming to fruition match the visions I heard expressed at that time.

From my perspective, we spent 3 years to move from ideation to reality. That isn't terribly fast. But having gotten there, exponential growth is now possible... but it will not be universal. It will be the same as any other new product that finds a market: specific solutions will be built and some will take off like a rocket, when the PMF is there. But the idea that any AI-based product will do so is a myth.
by hobs | 2025-08-21 16:42:04+00:00
That is a good thing, but that's also just a training gap - I worked with tech support agents for years in gigantic settings and taking notes while you take an action is difficult to train but yields tangible results, clarity from the agent on what they are doing step by step, and builds a shared method of documenting things that importantly focuses on the important details and doesn't miss a piece which may be considered trivial by an outsider but (for instance) defines SOP for call escalation and the like.
by lenkite | 2025-08-21 16:42:08+00:00
Kindly educate yourself on the latest developments. US President Donald Trump approved ~$450 million for Pakistan to sustain its F-16 fighter jets after Pakistan's Army Chief cozied up. US-Pakistan strategic military ties have also now re-opened and further deals are on the table.

US wants airbase capability in Pakistan to bomb Iran - at-least that is what American military analysts are saying. Another compelling reason is exploitable rare earths and oil in Balochistan.

Do note that China is not sanctimoniously ordering India to stop buying oil from Russia, Iran and Venezuela.
by xpe | 2025-08-21 16:42:19+00:00
> It is not intelligent.

Which of the following would you agree to... ?

1. There is no single bar for intelligence.

2. Intelligence is better measured on a scale than with 1 bit (yes/no).

3. Intelligence is better considered as having many components instead of just one. When people talk about intelligence, they often mean different things across domains, such as emotional, social, conceptual, spatial, kinetic, sensory, etc.

4. Many researchers have looked for -- and found -- in humans, at least, some notions of generalized intellectual capability that tends to help across a wide variety of cognitive tasks.

If some of these make sense, I suggest it would be wise to conclude:

5. Reasonable people accentuate different aspects and even definitions of intelligence.

6. Expecting a yes/no answer for "is X intelligent?" without considerable explanation is approximately useless. (Unless it is a genuinely curious opener for an in-depth conversation.)

7. Asking "is X intelligent?" tends to be a poorly framed question.
by jgalt212 | 2025-08-21 16:42:20+00:00
about 18 months ago, our non-Google / Bing bot traffic went from single digits per cent to over 99.9% bot traffic. We tried some home-spun solutions at first, but eventually threw in the towel and put Cloudflare in front of all our publicly accessible pages. On a long term basis, this was probably the right move for us, but we felt forced into this. And the Cloudflare Managed Ruleset definitely blocks some legit traffic such that it requires a fair amount of manual tuning.
by dirkc | 2025-08-21 16:42:29+00:00
Might be true, idk? For all we know that professor now gives a 2.5-day take home assignments where they are allowed to use LLMs, and then assess them in an 1 hour oral exam where they need to explain approach, results and how they ensure that their results are accurate?

I don't think the 3-day take home is the key. It's supporting educators to have the intention, agency and capacity to improvise assessment.
by watwut | 2025-08-21 16:42:39+00:00
I never memorized multiplication tables and was always one of those "good in math" kids. An attempt to memorize that stuff ended with me confusing results and being unable to guess when I did something wrong. Knowing "tricks" and understanding how multiplication works makes life easier.

> "Just memorize it, it'll make your life so much easier."

That is because you evaluate cost of memorization to 0, because someone else is paying it. And you evaluate the cost of making mistakes due to constantly forgetting and being unable to correct to 0, because simply the kid gets blamed for not having perfect memory.

> or translate a language when they haven't memorized the vocabulary words in the lesson so they have to look up each one

Teaching language by having people translate a lot is an outdated pedagogy - it simply did not produced people capable to understand and produce the language. If the kids are translating sentences word by word, there was something going on wrongly before.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-21 16:42:47+00:00
I think its down to language and domain more than tools.

No model ive tried can write, usefully debug or even explain cmake. (It invents new syntax if it gets stuck, i often have to prompt multiple AI to know if even the first response in the context was made-up)

My luck with embedded c has been atrocious for existing codebase (burning millions of tolkens), but passable for small scripts. (Arduino projects)

My experience with python is much better. Suggesting relevant libraries and functions, debugging odd errors, or even making small script on its own. Even the original github copilot which i got access to early was excellent on python.

Alot of people that seem to have fully embraced agentic vibe-coding seem to be in the web or node.js domain. Which I've not done myself since pre-AI.

I've tried most (free or trial) major models or schemes in hope that i find any of them useful, but not found much use yet.
by WillAdams | 2025-08-21 16:43:25+00:00
One notable standout here was 10.6 which was simply 10.5 recompiled for native Intel and dropping PowerPC support --- that said, for early 10.x each version consistently became more performant up through 10.5, it's just that 10.6 was the version where that was the _raison d'être_.
by tux3 | 2025-08-21 16:43:39+00:00
> it's a huge, measurable efficiency gain.

> It's not going to replace anyone's job

Mechanically, more efficiency means less people required for the same output.

I understand there is no evidence that any other sentence can be written about jobs. Still, you should put more text in between those two sentences. Reading them so close together creates audible dissonance.
by pedrocr | 2025-08-21 16:43:59+00:00
> agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls

Why were they doing this at all? It may not be what is happening in this specific case but a lot of the AI business cases I've seen are good automations of useless things. Which makes sense because if you're automating a report that no one reads the quality of the output is not a problem and it doesn't matter if the AI gets things wrong.

In operations optimization there's a saying to not go about automating waste, cut it out instead. A lot of AI I suspect is being used to paper over wasteful organization of labor. Which is fine if it turns out we just aren't able to do those optimizations anyway.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-21 16:44:01+00:00
> And what was happening in the 80s? Inflation.

Gold was high in 1980 specifically and dropped after 1980 even when inflation was still high.

Gold also had a peak in 2012: was there inflation then?

> And what’s happening now?

Nothing. Inflation peaked in February 2023 and has been dropping ever since:

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CORESTICKM159SFRBATL

Gold didn't start going up until September 2023 and has been rising. Gold and inflation are currently inversely related.
by nosignono | 2025-08-21 16:44:07+00:00
China is expected to have hit peak coal consumption this year, and within 25 years it might not be burned as a base generation fuel any more. The trend line there is clearly renewable energy (particularly solar) taking over. The US is moving much slower.

I expect that countries that invest heavily in solar or nuclear like China will have a huge advantage in 20 years, when energy availability enables industries like steel production, datacenters, ammonia production, transportation, and water desalinization to essentially become cheaper and cheaper as more and more solar gets built.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-08-21 16:44:19+00:00
Having a human read a summary is way faster than getting them to write it. If they want to edit it, they can.

AI today is terrible at replacing humans, but OK at enhancing them.

Everyone who gets that is going to find gains - real gains, and fast - and everyone who doesn't, is going to end up spending a lot of money getting into an almost irreversible mistake.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-21 16:44:36+00:00
Equality among races was wildly unpopular across the entire western hemisphere for a while there.

Forcing business owners to allow people of all races into your business was both unpopular and cited as an example of authoritarianism.

An American example: MLK never had popular support during his life. His approval rating around the time of his assassination was in the 30s or so. It would not be unfair to say that in the places that mattered most, he was wildly unpopular.

Doing the right thing is frequently unpopular at the time that you do it. There is a balance, but if you give everyone agency, you have to figure out how to keep the assholes from using their agency to infringe on another's agency.
by dingnuts | 2025-08-21 16:44:39+00:00
Sam Altman and company have been promising full on AGI. THAT'S the price shock.

Agents may be good (I haven't seen it yet, maybe it's a skill issue but I'm not spending hundreds of dollars to find out and my company seems reluctant to spend thousands to find out) but they are definitely, definitely not general superintelligence like SamA has been promising

at all

really is sinking in

these might be useful tools, yes, but the market was sold science fiction. We have a useful supercharged autocomplete sold as goddamn positronic brains. The commentariat here perhaps understood that (definitely not everyone) but it's no surprise that there's a correction now that GPT-5 isn't literally smarter than 95% of the population when that's how it was being marketed
by notatoad | 2025-08-21 16:44:41+00:00
we've done this before, either with sales or support calls for the product. customer interaction is good, and can lead to good things. but it also leads to things that are heavily focused on the needs of one customer or one point in time.

most of the stuff i've built as a direct result of customer interaction has been later deleted, as it becomes a maintenance burden with limited utility even for the customers who initially needed it. software should actually be planned, not written in response to somebody's gripes.
by kingkawn | 2025-08-21 16:44:47+00:00
#5 is an enormous use case that when well implemented will permanently replace prescribed character arcs

It is uniquely susceptible because the gaming market is well acclimated to mediocre writing and one dimensional character development that’s tacked on to a software product, so the improvements of making “thinking” improvisational characters can be immense.

Another revenue potential you’ve missed is visual effects, where AI tools allow what were previously labor intensive and expensive projects to be completed in much less time and with less, but not no, human input per frame