MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do you have any AI agent success stories?
by baalimago | 2025-09-26 05:54:51+00:00
Firstly to clarify what I mean with AI agent: A script which utilizes an LLM is not an agent. It's automation, alternatively a "workflow" (according to Anthropic). An AI agent is a system which is handling complex semantic input by gathering information about the input via tooling + memory and then lastly process it into some "judgement based" response.

The shell script which writes a poem about the current weather in your city -> automation.

A chatbot for customer support -> agent. Codex/Claude Code -> agent.

Primary difference being that an agent build its own context depending on the task that it needs to solve.

I've heard a lot of buzz around AI agents, but I've yet to see that many success stories where they fit nicely and provide more value than what they cost to develop and maintain (exception being coding agents). So, please share your AI agent success stories!
by kennywinker | 2025-09-26 05:54:58+00:00
I am not asserting a specific number. There have been between 65,000 and 680,000 gazans murdered by the idf directly and indirectly. I think it’s unlikely the number is as high as 680k, but there is absolute chaos on the ground, doctors and hospitals and records destroyed. We won’t know until the slaughter stops what number is real.

If you want to let the lack of a specific number hold you up while the killing continues, that’s up to you.
by ccgreg | 2025-09-26 05:55:33+00:00
> they were actually very performant

Insanely expensive for that performance. I was the architect of HPC clusters in that era, and Itanic never made it to the top for price per performance.

Also, having lived through the software stack issues with the first beta chips of Itanic and AMD64 (and MIPS64, but who's counting), AMD64 was way way more stable than the others.
by zer00eyz | 2025-09-26 05:55:42+00:00
You might not have been here 25 years ago when the dot com bubble burst.

A lot of us ate shit to stay in the Bay Area, to stay in computing. I have stories of great engineers doing really crappy jobs and "contracting" on the side.

I couldn't really have a 'startup' out of my house and a slice of rented hosting. Hardware was expensive and nothing was easy. Today I can set up a business and thrive on 1000 users at 10 bucks a month. Thats a viable and easy to build business. It's an achievable metric.

But Im not going to let amazon and its infinite bill you for everything at 2012 prices so it can be profitable hosting be my first choice. Im not going to do that when I can get fixed cost hosting.

For me, all the interesting things going on in tech aren't coming out of FB, Google and hyperscalers. They aren't AI or ML. We dont need another Kubernetes or Kafka or react (no more Conways law projects). There is more interesting work going on down at the bottom. In small 2 and 3 man shops solving their problems on limited time and budget with creative "next step" solutions. Their work is likely more applicable to most people reading HN than another well written engineering blog from cloud flare about their latest massive rust project.
by logifail | 2025-09-26 05:55:49+00:00
> It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents?

Unless there is both serious pressure from the state and the population at large supports a massive increase in checking and being checked I struggle to see this working.

During the pandemic various countries experimented with mandating showing of QR codes to do stuff to "prove" compliance ... yet looking back on that, all it seems to have done is accelerate the erosion of trust in politicians and systems of government :/
by l33tbro | 2025-09-26 05:55:54+00:00
Yes, I feel these type of conspiracies were structurally similar, but of a slighly different composition to political conspiracy. But I think what changed is that political conspiracy became activated by the atomisation of culture and the lack of social consensus. As a result, these former examples (ufo, moonlanding, etc) now almost feel quaint and cartoonish, because they are relatively inconsequential compared to the choices people make and socially harmful actions they'll undertake with political conspiracy.

For a few reasons I personally find that the best medicine is just to nod along with these people and watch them give away their ideological hand:

a) You know where they stand and who you are dealing with.

b) They can, however rarely, be forced to actually confront the irrational logic when sharing it.

c) I think it is the compassionate thing to do, as people just often want to spout these theories as a much needed release valve. After all, people believe this stuff often because of a confusion or frustration they have with their own lives.
by marak830 | 2025-09-26 05:56:14+00:00
"But it’s not just “online comments” as Yaxley-Lennon seems to imply. A police officer quoted deep within the article explains that these acts include “any form of communication,” and can relate to “serious domestic abuse-related crimes.” "

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...

Yeah, not really online posts though is it.
by imiric | 2025-09-26 05:56:20+00:00
> We use it to save our progress

Saving progress is useless if your history is a mess and you have no idea what a previous state contains.

> backup files, communicate with others.

You do know that there are better tools than a VCS specifically built for these use cases, right?

> You know, the main benefits of version control?

No, I don't think you understand what version control is for.

You can use a knife to open a wine bottle, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

> Writing a story no one will ever see is not one of them.

You won't. I definitely will, and I take the liberty to be as verbose as I need in personal projects.

> Write real docs and your PM, QA, SMEs will benefit as well, not only developers who bother to dig thru the history.

You should write "real docs", but that's not what commit messages are for. They're not meant to be read by non-developers either. And developers don't have to "dig thru the history" to see them. Commits are easily referenced and accessible.
by Vespasian | 2025-09-26 05:56:29+00:00
If they want to offer functionality in Europe they should consider this from the beginning as cost of doing business.

They pride themselves as being privacy and security minded when releasing new products.

They already have mechanisms to trust some accessories and apps ("my watch" vs. "your watch"). Just offer the same to devices not made by them.

If the user then decides to install the (probably illegal) "Meta Spy Master 9000 App" then so be it.

They are adults after all.

The DMA very explicitly disagrees with the notion of "Apple knows best" and until the tech giants come to terms with that, their comments on the laws cannot be trusted.

I would love to see them cooperate because then, over time, their considerable technical knowledge could be used to work out the details.
by rock_artist | 2025-09-26 05:56:35+00:00
> In UK though, everything is run over proof of address and it's quite annoying for new immigrants(legal or not) because its circular.

The circular issue is quite similar to Spain. Where in order to obtain residency you need an address. But for being able to rent, most likely you’ll need a bank account and ideally a Spanish identification number. But for having a local bank account you need an address.

Similar to the above. This needs to be broken in order to get residency.
by n3storm | 2025-09-26 05:57:01+00:00
I hope someone can bring this issue to redox-os project about its package management command "pkgar". Reading it aloud in spanish sounds as "pa cagar". "pa" is a very common contramption of "para" so we have "para cagar" which translated back is "to shit".

Sorry for commenting this here, Redox is using a private gitlab instance I have no access to.
by ilikehurdles | 2025-09-26 05:57:05+00:00
Is that how they’re coping on bluesky?

For a political action, the blowback has been several thousand-fold larger than the support. So far I’ve seen the tailwind creator, shopify ceo, reactjs creator, creator of ladybird browser, writer of pragmatic engineer, many prominent people in the rails community, and so many others speak out against this fork.

The letter (more like a resume blacklist) has shown that the Overton window has shifted enough to where people can comfortably and publicly call out obviously dumb nonsense.
by matwood | 2025-09-26 05:57:05+00:00
> Internet explorer became the dominant browser for one reason only: it came by default.

Default helped, but IE was the far superior browser for a long time. People chose to use it.

I was also a FF user and it came out a few years later than IE6. When FF came out IE6 was still the superior browser, though it was eventually overtaken by both FF and Chrome.
by FranzFerdiNaN | 2025-09-26 05:58:44+00:00
> Consider the DMA’s impact on Europe’s tourism industry. The DMA requires Google Search to stop showing useful travel results that link directly to airline and hotel sites, and instead show links to intermediary websites that charge for inclusion. This raises prices for consumers, reduces traffic to businesses, and makes it harder for people to quickly find reliable, direct booking information.

Lmao this is just such a big pile of nothing. Lets let Google and Apple run unchecked so consumers can see a link to a hotel. Yes. Good deal.
by barishnamazov | 2025-09-26 05:59:16+00:00
> "For the first time I felt what it's really like to play Prince of Persia when you're not the author and don't already know by rote what's lurking around every corner."

This perfectly captures why code reviews by someone who didn't write the original are so valuable. You can't unsee your own assumptions.

I remember seeing the following short but extremely interesting documentary about makings of the game as well: https://youtu.be/sw0VfmXKq54?feature=shared - Essential viewing for anyone interested in game development history.
by al_be_back | 2025-09-26 05:59:47+00:00
> So now we are calling booking.com a “monopoly” ,

No, you are. I suggested they're not exactly a small player, considering that DMA is trying to also appeal to local entrepreneurs/startups - and not stand for consumers too.

Personally i use any channel that suits my need and budget, including Booking, Google, etc, but DMA is regulating for 450million people so, I can see their side of argument.

> Why not regulate Spotify

what about them? not a Spotify user - so what can they do that say YT Music, Amazon Music, Apple etc aren't allowed?
by a-dub | 2025-09-26 05:59:52+00:00
i don't think it has to be all that robust yet as it mostly runs in vms (even though it may be!).

an internet community project to write an entire operating system from scratch using some newfangled programming language is literally the final boss of yak shaving. there is no reason to do it other than "it's fun" and of course writing a filesystem for it would be fun.
by matt-attack | 2025-09-26 05:59:56+00:00
Agree, I’m constantly taking screenshots of crazy URLs in Zoom meetings. Just a quick screenshot, and click.

Furthermore, the number of apps that make text unelectable is mind-boggling. It’s crazy to me that my common workflow now for selecting text out of an app is just a screenshot it and select right out of the image. It just always works, perfectly.
by inkyoto | 2025-09-26 06:00:47+00:00
Looking back, I think we can now conclude that it was largely inevitable for the other designs to fade sooner or later – and that is what has happened.

The late 90's to the early aughts' race for highest-frequency, highest-performance CPUs exposed not a need for a CPU-only, highly specialised foundry, but a need for sustained access to the very front of process technology – continuous, multibillion-dollar investment and a steep learning curve. Pure-play foundries such as TSMC could justify that spend by aggregating huge, diverse demand across CPU's, GPU's and SoC's, whilst only a handful of integrated device manufacturers could fund it internally at scale.

The major RISC houses – DEC, MIPS, Sun, HP and IBM – had excellent designs, yet as they pushed performance they repeatedly ran into process-cadence and capital-intensity limits. Some owned fabs but struggled to keep them competitive; others outsourced and were constrained by partners’ roadmaps. One can trace the pattern in the moves of the era: DEC selling its fab, Sun relying on partners such as TI and later TSMC, HP shifting PA-RISC to external processes, and IBM standing out as an exception for a time before ultimately stepping away from leading-edge manufacturing as well.

A compounding factor was corporate portfolio focus. Conglomerates such as Motorola, TI and NEC ran diversified businesses and prioritised the segments where their fab economics worked best – often defence, embedded processors and DSP's – rather than pouring ever greater sums into low-volume, general-purpose RISC CPU's. IBM continued to innovate and POWER endured, but industry consolidation steadily reduced the number of independent RISC CPU houses.

In the end, x86 benefited from an integrated device manufacturer (i.e. Intel) with massive volume and a durable process lead, which set the cadence for the rest of the field. The outcome was less about the superiority of a CPU-only foundry and more about scale – continuous access to the leading node, paid for by either gigantic internal volume or a foundry model that spread the cost across many advanced products.
by kennywinker | 2025-09-26 06:01:04+00:00
GP here. The GMH number doesn’t include indirect deaths, i.e. all the deaths that happen because of war that aren’t bullets and bombs. Disease, famine, not getting cancer screenings or antibiotics because all the hospitals have been blown up… that stuff.

So while 680k (the current highest estimate) is probably higher than reality, god i hope it is, it’s also true that reality is probably much higher than the current GMH numbers.
by logifail | 2025-09-26 06:01:08+00:00
> some sort of number provided by the government

There are countries where each citizen has one unique identifier (Sweden's "personnummer", Denmark's CPR).

The UK is definitely not one of those! [yet]

Instead there are many different identifiers, each for a different purpose, and stored in different systems which almost certainly don't talk to each other.

Just for starters: NHS number for healthcare, National Insurance number for social security and pensions, Unique Taxpayer Reference for tax, Passport (with a number that changes when you renew your passport), Driving licence (with a "number"[alphanumeric] which stays constant even when you renew)...

Multiple overlapping identifiers... and I may have missed some :)
by elric | 2025-09-26 06:01:50+00:00
If the goal really was "to protect the children" then all the time, money, and effort being spent on this dystopian shit would instead be spent on the treatment of pedosexuals in order to reduce the number of perpetrators. On child support and on reducing poverty in order to reduce the number of victims under the radar. On psychological support for the victims of sexual crimes. On reinforcing justice systems so they can process the existing cases related to (child) sexual assault. Etc.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-26 06:03:02+00:00
Fuckery is relative and desperation will motivate people to make decisions even if they aren't sustainable ones. Furthermore, the externalities of colonial exploitation, coups, resource curses, economic exploitation like through the IMF, and climate change caused largely by the Global North tend to lead many countries in the Global South unlivable. American exceptionalism is over except for people who overvalue their worth and undervalue the worth of others.
by hvb2 | 2025-09-26 06:03:09+00:00
You would need to get to insane read counts pretty much 24/7 for this to work out.

For HA redis you need at least 6 instances, 2 regions * 3 AZs. And you're paying for all of that 24/7.

And if you truly have 24/7 use then just 2 regions won't make sense as the latency to get to those regions from the other side of the globe easily removes any caching benefit.
by cerved | 2025-09-26 06:04:15+00:00
Yesterday I asked Gemini to recalculate the timestamps of tasks in a sequence of tasks, given it's duration and the previous timestamp. It proceeded to write code which gave results like this

2025-09-26T14:32:10Z 2025-09-26T14:32:10Z200s 2025-09-26T14:32:10Z200s600s 2025-09-26T14:32:10Z200s600s300s

It then proceeded to talk about how efficient this approach was for thousands of numbers.

Gemini is by far the dumbest LLM I've used
by culturestate | 2025-09-26 06:05:11+00:00
I’m no lawyer but I feel like clause seven leaves a clear opening to undermine the spirit of this license:

> “The User may not sell this Work directly, unless they/she/he/it/ey/fae/ze/bun/puppy/foxxo … use it only as a small part of a work of a much greater scale.”

That said, TIL that there are two things that can be considered “Belgium denialism” and surprisingly neither of them involves refusing to acknowledge that Belgium exists.
by PNWcossack | 2025-09-26 06:05:18+00:00
I agree, I went on a road trip recently and drank a lot of coffee on the road. a lot of it was from McDonalds, but I was pleasantly surprised how all the machines at the gas stations were freshly brewed coffee at the push of a button. I would have never conceived that gas stations would one day have consistently decent coffee 10 years ago.
by MadnessASAP | 2025-09-26 06:05:51+00:00
Its not unreasonable to look at the source code to understand the disk format to then create an independent driver. So long as you are not directly copying code (or in this case, paraphrasing C to Rust.)

More importantly though, Linux or the Linux Foundation are unlikely to file a lawsuit without clear evidence of infringement, whereas Oracle by their nature will have filed lawsuits and a dozen motions if they catch even a whiff of possible infringement.

I wouldn't touch Oracle IP with a 50' fibreglass pole while wearing rubber boots.
by panick21_ | 2025-09-26 06:07:29+00:00
I don't think that x86 beat Alpha. Alpha was more expensive because of a bunch of reason, but just in terms of how much performance they got out of the same amount of transistors, Alpha was better.

But I think generally speaking you are right, the size of the teams that all the RISC people had compared to the amount of resources Intel had was not really comparable.

> The transition from bipolar to CMOS was also difficult because it did mean a regression in performance

DEC already had the VAXCluster by 1983 and they were working on a bunch of implementations at the same time. They did a lower performance VAX already when the did a AMD 29000 bit-slice implementation in 1982. So they did know the value lower performance. By 1985 they had matched the 780 in a single chip. Basically by 1988 the CMOS version was already faster then anything else.

The transition was really just difficult because some people (who happen to be CEO) didn't want to see the reality.
by sfn42 | 2025-09-26 06:07:42+00:00
Honestly I didn't even know you were allowed to write that much. I've always tried to make the commit message fit in a sentence or two, what you showed here looks more like what I'd write on a PR description. Except I wouldn't write that much there either.

> Honest question: why do you even use version control? What do you get out of it? > Change history is the entire point of version control. It gives you the ability to revert to a specific point in time, to branch off and work on experiments, to track down the source of issues, and, perhaps most useful of all, to see why a specific change was done.

You answered your own question here. I get pretty much all of that stuff. Maybe you get some of that stuff a bit better than I do but I don't really think there's much of a difference. I can still go back in time and make changes etc, I can't necessarily revert every specific small change ever made using git alone but I can easily just make that change as a new commit instead - which is probably faster than scanning through a million commit messages trying to find the one I want to revert anyway.

I can go back to some arbitrary point in time just like you can. My resolution may not be as fine as someone who makes more commits but so what? Being able to go back to an arbitrary day and hour would be timetravel enough for me, I don't need to be able to choose the specific second.

Just to be clear I do make commits and I do try to write descriptive messages on them - I just also try to avoid spending more than a few seconds deciding what to write. That commit you just showed is larger than most of mine. That's a whole PR for me, which is pretty much what I said initally: I'll just do the whole task and commit it all in one go - what I'm not doing is splitting it up into 50 individual commits like some people would want.

I think the primary difference between the two of us is that you write huge commit messages and I don't, aside from that our commits seem very similar to me.
by koverstreet | 2025-09-26 06:07:54+00:00
Rust really is attractive to a filesystem developer. Over C, it brings generics for proper data structures, iterators (!), much better type safety, error handling - all the things Rust is good at are things you want.

For me, the things that would make it just perfect would be more ergonomic Cap'n Proto support (eliminate a ton of fiddly code for on disk data structures), and dependent types.
by skinkestek | 2025-09-26 06:08:01+00:00
You mean like we did with Germany?

Obviously if the nazis and hamas had come out and surrendered we wouldn't have had to.

But sometimes one has to take out evil. Be it nazis in Berlin or Hamas in Gaza.

And it also serves as a lesson. A lesson certain countries might soon have to learn the hard way:

don't vote for evil, and if you did, don't be the ones who line the streets to cheer for them like Germans and Gazans did.
by JamesAdir | 2025-09-26 06:11:48+00:00
As a non-US based customer, I can totally relate. Even though prime is not really applicable to me (in terms of free shipping, a small selection of the media libary, etc), I'm still getting pushed to try Prime each time I try to shop at Amazon.

The main problem is that unless it's a specific brand store, with products sold and shipped by Amazon, all the other products are pure junk. I can easily find them on AliExpress with much lower prices.
by raffraffraff | 2025-09-26 06:11:52+00:00
Ireland's Supreme Court decided in 1987 to make a referendum mandatory before they would ratify EU treaty amendments. Not that it mattered, because they got a "no" vote but their puppet masters wanted a "yes", so they just reran the referendum the following year...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-eighth_Amendment_of_t...

Only 59% turn out, and the vote won 67%. So in reality less than 40% of the population were for it.

I have vague memories of people saying that the treaty was indecipherable. The EU were like, "Here, vote yes for this big bag of 'misc', or else"

This wasn't the first time they reran a referendum for an EU treaty. They did it back in 2003!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-sixth_Amendment_of_th...

If the UK wanted to avoid BREXIT all they had to do was look a few miles to the west for the knack.