MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iamkd | 2025-09-03 22:26:52+00:00
My hunch is that the amount of shovelware (or really, any software) is mostly proportional to the number of engineers wishing to work on that.

Even if AI made them more productive, it's on a person to decide what to build and how to ship, so the number (and desire) of humans is a bottleneck. Maybe at some point AI will start buying up domains and spinning up hundreds of random indiehacker micro-SaaS, but we're not there. Yet.
by Ukv | 2025-09-03 22:26:53+00:00
> but whereas the Prolog solver will backtrack there is no backtracking in the Markov chain and you have to re-run the chain multiple times to find all the solutions

If you want it to give all possible solutions at once, you can just expand the state space to the power-set of sudoku boards, such that the input board transitions to the state representing the set of valid solved boards.
by mdp2021 | 2025-09-03 22:28:23+00:00
Update: Nigel Farage exploits the situation and gives strong speech in the USA.

# Watch: Nigel Farage warns Congress about UK speech laws

https://thespectator.com/topic/watch-nigel-farage-warns-cong...

All of this was expectable.

--

And other accusations of totalitarian climate in articles just spawned:

# Father Ted and Havel’s Greengrocer

https://thespectator.com/topic/father-ted-havel-greengrocer-...
by stevage | 2025-09-03 22:28:39+00:00
I use Osmand a lot. It work well, but I dearly wish they'd improve some UX issues.

I always seem to have the map telling me how far it is to some temporary marker I placed months ago that I can't easily work out how to remove.

Also any time I do navigation, the Trip Recording plugin pops up as a sticky system notification even when I haven't enabled trip recording.

But the offline navigation is a killer feature, and following custom GPX's.
Show HN: Listgitfiles.sh – Fetch Raw GitHub File URLs with One Command
by rmtbb | 2025-09-03 22:28:40+00:00
I wrote this script to quickly retrieve raw file URLs from public GitHub repos. Added to my ~/.zshrc, it’s now a fast, reliable tool in my caveman workflow. Maybe you'll find use for it too! Have a great rest of your day, everyone!
by balder1991 | 2025-09-03 22:28:42+00:00
Also when vou create a product you can’t speed up the iterative process of seeing how users want it, fixing edge cases that you only realized later etc. these are the things that make a product good and why there’s that article about software taking 10 years to mature: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-take...
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-03 22:29:12+00:00
I do web radio with a media server itself that's "static", but with no actual "website" needed at all. Regardless of whether any website which plays the stream for listeners would be static or not, that's not part of my equation.

No website necessary. Nor a browser to access the stream whatsoever. It's a radio station, at the same place on your dial every time. It'll play in a mere media player that can access a web stream. And there's no reason to have a dial or do any channel changing if there's only one channel.

Once the media streaming app is doing its thing and music is emanating from it in digital form, then you can choose to present the stream to others if you want from a "static" website or otherwise, you may not want them to link directly to your raw stream using their own player anyway.

But I've got to be able to serve the same stream in all kinds of ways before deciding on the preferred webpage code for the particular situation.
by measurablefunc | 2025-09-03 22:29:39+00:00
That still won't work b/c there is no backtracking. The point is that there is no way to encode backtracking/choice points like in Prolog w/ a Markov chain. The argument you have presented is not extensionally equivalent to the Prolog solver. It is almost equivalent but it's missing choice points for starting at a valid solution & backtracking to an incomplete board to generate a new one. The typical argument for absorbing states doesn't work b/c sudoku is not a typical deterministic puzzle.
by kragen | 2025-09-03 22:30:04+00:00
I think this might depend on the language you're writing in.

Historically, at least, it's pretty verbose to define a data type in Python compared to languages that are more designed for writing compilers. Consider these definitions from my prototype Bicicleta interpreter, which is written in ML, specifically OCaml:

type methods = NoDefs (* name, body, is_positional ... *) | Definition of string * bicexpr * bool * methods and bicexpr = Name of string | Call of bicexpr * string | Literal of string option * methods | Derivation of bicexpr * string option * methods | StringConstant of string | Integer of int | Float of float | NativeMethod of (lookup -> bicobj)

Those ten lines of code would be ten classes in Python with an average of 1.6 attributes each. Using dataclasses or attrs, that would be 36 lines of code, and then (if you're doing it the OO way) every function that I defined on one of these OCaml types becomes a method implemented in each class implementing a particular protocol, with a copy of its argument signature in every class. (If you used namedtuple instead, it's no less code, but you write it on less lines.) So, for example, this function on bicexprs

let rec freevars = function Name n -> stringset [n] | Integer _ | StringConstant _ | Float _ -> stringset ["prog"] | NativeMethod _ -> stringset [] | Literal (Some selfname, methods) -> StringSet.diff (freevars_methods methods) (stringset [selfname]) | Literal (None, methods) -> freevars_methods methods | Derivation(object_, self, methods) -> StringSet.union (freevars object_) (freevars (Literal(self, methods))) | Call(object_, _) -> freevars object_

becomes six to eight method definitions in the different classes. (You can cut it down to six if you define an abstract base class for the constant classes.) And Literal.freevars needs an if-then-else. So that's another 20 lines of code.

Python does support pattern-matching now, so functions like this might not be any more verbose than the ML version if you program them the same way instead of in the OO fashion. I haven't tried using Python pattern-matching, so I don't really know.

In general, though, Python is more verbose than ML-family languages for this kind of thing by a factor of about 2–4, and that's before you count the test code you need in Python to get the kind of confidence in correctness that ML's type-checking gives you with no extra code. To my knowledge, Mypy doesn't do the kinds of pattern-matching-exhaustiveness checks that ML compilers do.

I've sometimes "cheated" by trying to write code like this in Python using regular tuples rather than named tuples. You can definitely make it work, but it's a real pain to debug.

Quoting Andy Chu from https://andychu.net/projects/:

> Python is not the right language for [implementing] languages. I will use OCaml for subsequent projects like this.

Python does have GC and dynamic dispatch, though, and those count for a lot.
by smjburton | 2025-09-03 22:30:21+00:00
I generally agree with the sentiment of the article, but the OP should also be looking at product launch websites like ProductHunt, where there are tens to hundreds of vibe coded SaaS apps listed daily.

From my experience, it's much easier to get an LLM to generate code for a React/Tailwind CSS web app than a mobile app, and that's why we're seeing so many of these apps showing up in the SaaS space.
by creddit | 2025-09-03 22:30:42+00:00
Threads did grow very fast at launch as Meta leveraged IG to supercharge growth but has fewer DAU than ChatGPT does today so it does seem a bit odd to suggest Threads is growing faster than ChatGPT or even has.

In fairness to your point, "fastest growing consumer product ever" isn't well defined per se. If a consumer product gets 1 sign up and then 1e-32 seconds later it gets a second, maybe THAT'S the "fastest growing ever".

> On the other hand, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has more intense pressure from competitors, isn’t making any money, and costs are still rising for its operation.

This isn't the first time someone has suggested that the social media space is low competition but I always think it's completely incorrect. Threads competes with IG, FB, WA, Snap, TikTok, Bluesky, X and many more. All are well funded and most have comparable or greater DAU.

In terms of making money, Threads only recently began to show ads at all. During this time, Threads has also been cannibalizing IG engagement. It's quite UNLIKELY that IG is making very much money and even less likely that on the whole has been a positive revenue tailwind for Meta even with the actual revenue they are starting to book. Meanwhile ChatGPT, which apparently isn't making any money, has a revenue run rate of ~$12B.

> I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that it’s the “fastest growing consumer product ever” and “revenues are like super exponential” as it’s demonstrated repeatedly that OpenAI has yet to turn a profit or even meaningfully dent their burn rate

Revenue != profit. Their revenue is growing unbelievably fast. Their user base has and is still growing extremely fast. Current revenue run rate ~$12B which is >3X 2024 total revenue. That is enormously fast especially at that already sizeable ~$4B base!

That their losses are so large is in large part a choice as they provide a huge amount of inference for free today. The same argument you're making about losses is the same tired one people made about FB, Uber, Amazon and plenty of other high growth companies all of which are highly profitable today.

Anyone sitting around arguing that LLMs are a low-demand product that "hardly anyone wants" is one or more of an idiot, willfully ignorant, highly misinformed by a trusted source or actively spreading bollocks.
by FloorEgg | 2025-09-03 22:31:36+00:00
Yes, for me both customers and colleagues continually suggested "hey let's just take all these samples of past work and dump it in the magical black box and then replicate what they have been doing".

Instead I developed a UX that made it as easy as possible for people to explain what they want to be done, and a system that then goes and does that. Then we compare the system's output to their historical data and there is always variance, and when the customer inspects the variance they realize that their data was wrong and the system's output is far more accurate and precise than their process (and ~3 orders of magnitude cheaper). This is around when they ask how they can buy it.

This is the difference between making what people actually want and what they say they want: it's untangling the why from the how.
by lacker | 2025-09-03 22:31:39+00:00
Of course a crime-fighting company "sells to police forces and corporations". Who else would you sell crime-fighting tools to?

Flock reminds me of Replit: they both predate the modern era of AI, and in some sense they were lucky to be well-positioned when advances in AI enabled their core product to become much more powerful. Of course, the harder you work, the luckier you get....
by thunky | 2025-09-03 22:31:43+00:00
> would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc

Yeah another example I think about from time to time is our own sense of perspective. It's all relative, but my sense of how far away is "that thing over there" is probably different from yours. Partially because we may be different sizes and heights, but also because our eyes and brains process the world differently. Like a camera with different lenses.

Also, speed. If your brain's clock is faster than mine then you may perceive the world to be moving slower than I do.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-09-03 22:32:51+00:00
Yeah, that's a recent addition, as far as I can tell. It became available in my account a few weeks ago. I currently use 'Robot' mode, call myself a 'Researcher', and use these custom instructions:

Answer concisely when appropriate, more extensively when necessary. Avoid rhetorical flourishes, bonhomie, and (above all) cliches. Take a forward-thinking view. OK to be mildly positive and encouraging but NEVER sycophantic or cloying. Above all, NEVER use the phrase "You're absolutely right." Rather than "Let me know if..." style continuations, you may list a set of prompts to explore further topics, but only when clearly appropriate.

Pretty happy with the results so far. Very low BS factor (although it does ignore the last part sometimes.)
by LexiMax | 2025-09-03 22:33:14+00:00
I am also friends with a fair few anti-vaxers and have attempted the reasonable and kind approach based on the facts. After many, many attempts, the conclusion I finally came to is that there isn't truly a gap in communication, but in culture.

This can take many forms, be it religious, political, or just whatever social groups they are a part of, but I believe that this form of motivated reasoning isn't necessarily something you can reason someone out of. To that effect, I don't believe trying to inform them is productive, but rather asking probing questions that attempt to reveal _why_ they believe what they believe.

In my own personal experience, I've found that nearly all of the anti-vaxxers I've talked to root their dismissal for vaccinations in religious reasons or in grievance politics.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-09-03 22:34:04+00:00
I'll have to reflect more on the first part, but as far as

> It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data.

There are specific failure cases for non-integrability:

1. Dissociation/derealization = partial failures of gluing.

2. Nausea = inconsistent overlaps (ie: large cocycles) interpreted as bodily threat.

3. Anesthesia = disabling of the sheaf functor: no global section possible.

At least for me it provides a consistent working model for hallucinogenic, synesthesia, phantom limb phenomena, and split-brain scenarios. If anything, the ways in which sensor integration fails are more interesting than when it succeeds.
by Animats | 2025-09-03 22:35:33+00:00
That article is weird. They seem obsessed with nuclear reactors. Also, they misunderstand how floating point works.

As one learns at high school, the continuous derivative is the limit of the discrete version as the displacement h is sent to zero. If our computers could afford infinite precision, this statement would be equally good in practice as it is in continuum mathematics. But no computer can afford infinite precision, in fact, the standard double-precision IEEE representation of floating numbers offers an accuracy around the 16th digit, meaning that numbers below 10−16 are basically treated as pure noise. This means that upon sending the displacement h below machine precision, the discrete derivatives start to diverge from the continuum value as roundoff errors then dominate the discretization errors.

Yes, differentiating data has a noise problem. This is where gradient followers sometimes get stuck. A low pass filter can help by smoothing the data so the derivatives are less noisy. But is that relevant to LLMs? A big insight in machine learning optimization was that, in a high dimensional space, there's usually some dimension with a significant signal, which gets you out of local minima. Most machine learning is in high dimensional spaces but with low resolution data points.
by NooneAtAll3 | 2025-09-03 22:35:47+00:00
while I don't disagree with the facts, I don't understand the... tone?

when Dennard scaling (single core performance) started to fail in 90s-00s, I don't think there was a sentiment "how stupid was it to believe such a scaling at all"?

sure, people were compliant (and we still meme about running Crysis), but in the end the discussion resulted in "no more free lunch" - progress in one direction has hit a bottleneck, so it's time to choose some other direction to improve on (and multi-threading has now become mostly the norm)

I don't really see much of a difference?
by cnst | 2025-09-03 22:36:32+00:00
Or let me tell you as a Firefox user on macOS.

I'd much rather have to switch to Brave or Vivaldi for a video phone call, or keyboard configuration, or NFC, than install half a dozen of outdated third-party XXX-only apps with full permissions and questionable security practices or distribution methods.

The better question to ask here, is, why would you NOT want to have a CHOICE to have these things in a secure browser by SEVERAL distinct major vendors like Google, Microsoft, Brave and Vivaldi, and Yandex, and Opera, and others?

Again, I don't even use Chrome. I replace it even on Android. So, I am not concerned with Google taking me over, because they clearly aren't.

But how am I more secure when I have to install lots of dodgy apps to get the most basic things like video conferencing working?
by quantumcotton | 2025-09-03 22:36:37+00:00
Today you will learn what diminishing returns are :)

You can only utilize so many people or so much action within a business or idea.

Essentially it's throwing more stupid at a problem.

The reason there are so many layoffs is because of AI creating efficiency. The thing that people don't realize is it's not that one AI robot or GPU is going to replace one human at a one to one ratio. It's going to replace the amount of workload one person can do. Which in turn gets rid of one human employee. It's not that you job isn't taken by AI. It's started. But how much human is needed is where the new supply demand lies and how long the job lasts. There will always be more need for more creative minds. The issue is we are lacking them.

It's incredible how many software engineers I see walking around without jobs. Looking for a job making $100,000 to $200,000 a year. Meanwhile, they have no idea how much money they could save a business. Their creativity was killed by school.

They are relying on somebody to tell them what to do and when nobody's around to tell anybody what to do. They all get stuck. What you are seeing isn't a lack of capability. It's a lack of ability to control direction or create an idea worth following.
by mannykannot | 2025-09-03 22:36:42+00:00
That's true, but still, a single individual or small group living isolated in the real world will, over a lifetime, learn only a tiny fraction of what we can learn from the written knowledge accumulated over millennia.

Having said that, I tend to agree that having AI interact with the world may be key: for one thing, I'm not sure whether there is any sense in which LLMs understand that most of the information content of language is about an external world.
by imiric | 2025-09-03 22:38:22+00:00
> If folks corrupt the integrity of LLM responses, as it were, they’ll destroy the value proposition.

Highly unlikely. Google's SERP is an ad-infested abomination that sometimes shows useful results, and yet people still use Google Search.

The same will happen with LLMs, except in far more subtle and insidious ways. Instead of showing you ads directly, they will be naturally interwoven in conversations, suggestions, and generated content. You won't be able to tell whether the content is genuine or promoted, as is common on the web today.

The ads will target you more accurately than ever before based on not just the data you've given them, but on the context of the conversation, your surroundings, and any other piece of real-time information they can use to secure a conversion, or to influence your thoughts on a particular matter. You will trust it more than any current ad channel since the AI will be personal, and the tone will be friendly.

As with the web, ad-free services will exist, but the only way to escape this entirely will be to use local and self-hosted models.
by larve | 2025-09-03 22:38:59+00:00
Their main point is "AI coding claims don't add up", as shown by the amount of code shipped. I personally do think some of the more incredible claims about AI coding add up, and am happy to talk about it based on my "evidence", ie the software I am building. 99.99% of my code is ai generated at this point, with the occasional one line I fill in because it'd be stupid to wait for an LLM to do it.

For example, I've built 5-6 iphone apps, but they're kind of one-offs and I don't know why I would put them up on the app store, since they only scratch my own itches.
by realityfactchex | 2025-09-03 22:39:03+00:00
Gosh, please accept these remarks in the most positive spirit possible.

> Yes, it is unethical

Agreed on that.

> The real issue is that parents who want herd immunity to protect their own children...

Arguably, for some, the "real issue" is whether viruses have even been reasonably shown to exist at all with something other than a) appeal to authority or b) other logical fallacy.

For instance, if one reads many virology papers (just a PubMed search away) for detail and understanding, one may find that there are not actually scientifically controlled studies proving the existence and causal nature of so-called viral particles, but instead the papers are a house of cards that undo themselves. There's no science in the The Science™ -- just enough to look like it and pass muster among people just trying to get along in this hectic and challenging world.

--> The cognitive dissonance (and conditioning) is so loud on the above point, that most people will label the claim a Conspiracy Theory and become instinctively distraught or look the other way in emotion, unable to bear scrutinizing the claim.

Thus, to assume that

> they want the risk to be taken by other people

is missing the point entirely, for a quite serious and well-informed contingent of conscientious objectors to vaccination requirements.

At that point, it is moot to point out that, if people are convinced by the likes of world's greatest omnichannel marketing campaigns that they need a certain product put into their body (for fear of death and disease), nothing stops those people from doing as they please to themselves.

After all, if the product really (a) is safe and (b) works, then the customers of that product certainly have nothing to worry about. (Nobody needs to convince *other people* to take a product, if it works for them.)
by Animats | 2025-09-03 22:39:32+00:00
True. In some ways, that's worse. Instead of crashes, you get something working on the wrong data.

I had one bug in a renderer where I'd see object shadows moving across a 3D scene, but not the object casting the shadow. Didn't crash. That was hard to find. A dead index was still in use, and it pointed to something valid enough to be drawn.
by novia | 2025-09-03 22:40:12+00:00
This wasn't luck. They specifically used Flock's cameras which are all over town recording which license plates pass. They sent Flock a request, and Flock sent them the data, and then the police recovered the car.

More information: the car was stolen at night, and my housemate only saw it was gone in the morning. The police were able to return it that same morning and he was able to go to work.

We had a ring camera pointed right at the car which was parked on the street. Ring didn't record its theft as an "event" so there was no footage to work with.

My housemate also had a camera in his car which records while driving. There was footage of the thief just taking the car for a joyride. My housemate did not press charges.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-09-03 22:40:17+00:00
It has. The Moore Special Tool Company makes diamond turning lathes much like this one. But replicating that precision on your own is still an immense achievement.

As Dan Gelbart once said: "Building your own lathe is an admirable ambition. Building one with micron accuracy is a terrible illness which, at my age, has no cure."