MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by acdha | 2025-09-26 16:30:27+00:00
I think Itanium would have had a better chance if Intel had made their compilers and optimized libraries free, but your larger point is really important: Intel’s performance numbers for the Itanium seem to have been broadly extrapolated from a few very FPU-intensive benchmarks and I don’t think it was ever realistic to expect anything like that level of performance for branchy business logic or to decisively change the price-performance ratio to become compelling. I worked with some scientists who did have a ton of floating point-heavy code, so they were definitely interested but their code also had a lot of non-linear memory access and the Itanium never managed a performance lead at all, much less one big enough that it wouldn’t have been cheaper and faster to buy 2-4 other servers for each Itanium box. In contrast, when AMD released the Opteron it decisively took the lead in absolute performance as well as price/performance and so we bought them by the rack.
by array_key_first | 2025-09-26 16:30:41+00:00
Nobody can really because it's complicated. Or, at least, nobody can agree, which is why we have the terms. However, I think the terms have some validity, because the broader concept does.

I mean, is Hitler a murderer? Is your run of the mill burglary gone wrong worse than the Holocaust? Obviously not. So there has to be some kind of understanding of organized death.
by specproc | 2025-09-26 16:30:54+00:00
Nice. I'm sat on Gnome like a basic again, as I got tired of fucking around with dotfiles and deciding what sort of login manager defines me as a person.

Had been thinking of giving KDE another whirl, but now Cosmic seems roadworthy, and I could go back to hyprland with this Omarchy thing everyone seems so hyped about.

All these choices, such a great time to be a linux user.
by zb3 | 2025-09-26 16:30:54+00:00
We can't let Google get away with bundling their spyware in the name of security into a phone we must now have..

It's NOT ok that a government app (often practically mandatory) requires the user to accept some invasive ToS of a foreign corporation maintaining an illegal monopoly.

Requiring attestation doesn't mean Google spyware should be unremovable without breaking it, Google's business model should not be mandated by the law.
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-09-26 16:30:59+00:00
When I originally played it back in the day, there was one scene, combined with some "gameplay decisions" which had me completely lose it.

On the mission where you have to assasinate Lebedev in the airport, when you finally get to him on the airplane you start a conversation, but are interrupted midway by your fellow agent Anna something, who proceeds to kill Lebedev. Well since this wasn't my first playthrough, I knew where the whole thing was headed so I decided to plant some LAMS on the approach to see what would happen.

And what did happen was one of the funniest scenes in a video game. You hear Anna's footsteps, the camera angle change from the dialogue-style camera to a zoom out, and JC turns to the hallway she is coming from. LAMs go off, Anna lets out a scream, JC turns right back to Lebedev and just continues chatting as if it was some type of minor disturbance

I must have laughed for a good 10 minutes or so
by ActorNightly | 2025-09-26 16:32:26+00:00
The concept of a bubble doesn't exist anymore. In the past, investors were way more tuned to value investing. Now days, investors dgaf about value as much as hype. As long as they can generate hype, the money will flow. And everyone is bought into the hype.

And really, overall its not really a bad thing, because money flowing = economic activity. The only downside is the focus of technological progress gets lost in the sauce, with a lot of companies thinking short term rather than actual persistent value.
by skibbityboop | 2025-09-26 16:32:41+00:00
Yeah, kinda have to agree. I like traefik fine but getting mTLS working with it was a serious pain and the docs for doing so were _terrible_, had to keep searching around and piecing together bits from various third party blogs. Coming from haproxy where the documentation is _so_ _much_ better and things like e.g. mTLS are vastly easier, it was not a fun experience but we did finally get traefik to work as we needed.
by keeda | 2025-09-26 16:33:11+00:00
While this is sort of true, remember: it's not the size of the context window that matters, it's how you use it.

You need to have the right things in the context, irrelevant stuff is not just wasteful, it is increasingly likely to cause errors. It has been shown a few times that as the context window grows, performance drops.

Heretical I know, but I find that thinking like a human goes a long way to working with AI.

Let's take the example of large migrations. You're not going to load the whole codebase in your brain and figure out what changes to make and then vomit them out into a huge PR. You're going to do it bit by bit, looking up relevant files, making changes to logically-related bits of code, and putting out a PR for each changelist.

This exactly what tools should do as well. At $PAST_JOB my team built a tool based on OpenRewrite (LLMs were just coming up) for large-scale multi-repo migrations and the centerpiece was our internal codesearch tool. Migrations were expressed as a codesearch query + codemod "recipe"; you can imagine how that worked.

That would be the best way to use AI for large-scale changes as well. Find the right snippets of code (and documentation!), load each one into the context of an agent in multiple independent tasks.

Caveat: as I understand it, this was the premise of SourceGraph's earliest forays into AI-assisted coding, but I recall one of their engineers mentioning that this turned out to be much trickier than expected. (This was a year+ back, so eons ago in LLM progress time.)

Just hypothesizing here, but it may have been that the LSIF format does not provide sufficient context. Another company in this space is Moderne (the creators of OpenRewrite) that have a much more comprehensive view of the codebase, and I hear they're having better success with large LLM-based migrations.
by alchemist1e9 | 2025-09-26 16:33:11+00:00
Is there a good example you could provide of that? I just haven’t seen that personally so I’d be interested in any examples on these current models. I’m sure we all remember in the early days lots of examples of stupidity being posted and it was interesting. It be great if people kept doing that so we could get a better sense of which types of problems they are failing with astounding levels of stupidity on.
by simonw | 2025-09-26 16:33:59+00:00
This is the second Economist article to mention the lethal trifecta in the past week - the first was https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/09/22/... - which was the clearest explanations I've seen anywhere in the mainstream media about what prompt injection is and why it's such a nasty threat.

(And yeah I got some quotes in it so I may be biased there, but it genuinely is the source I would send executives to in order to understand this.)

I like this new one a lot less. It talks about how LLMs are non-deterministic, making them harder to fix security holes in... but then argues that this puts them in the same category as bridges where the solution is to over-engineer them and plan for tolerances and unpredictability.

While that's true for the general case of building against LLMs, I don't think it's the right answer for security flaws. If your system only falls victim to 1/100 prompt injection attacks... your system is fundamentally insecure, because an attacker will keep on trying variants of attacks until they find one that works.

The way to protect against the lethal trifecta is to cut off one of the legs! If the system doesn't have all three of access to private data, exposure to untrusted instructions and an exfiltration mechanism then the attack doesn't work.
by ta12653421 | 2025-09-26 16:34:33+00:00
I built a financial trading app in a couple of month, it would have taken 2 - 3 years without AI, at least. Maybe I would have never finsihed because I would have given up some time because of too much effort etc.

So - this thing would never be in existance and work without a 20 USD ClaudeAI subscription :)
by blaumaus | 2025-09-26 16:34:38+00:00
Hey guys, the Swetrix CE v4 is released, it's an open source and privacy-first Google Analytics alternative that I've been building since 2021.

I've spent this year working on this release and overall it's one of our biggest releases ever! It includes complete UI redesign, customisable OIDC/SSO support, accounts system & website sharing, host tracking and more!

Overall the key features of Swetrix are:

Traffic analysis with advanced stats like city level analytics, custom events, user flows Site speed across different percentiles, pages and locations Session analysis with page and error flows Automatic error tracking which now also supports error metadata and stack traces (like Sentry, but with an easy UI) Project sharing, team management, API access Real time dashboards

The project can be easily selfhosted with Docker and I tried to design it to be intuitive and simple!

Would be supper happy to hear some feedback!

Website -> https://swetrix.com

Github repo -> https://github.com/Swetrix/swetrix
by mjh2539 | 2025-09-26 16:34:39+00:00
I bought that specific model because they're a step up from the E-series (which is actually good now), but not as expensive as the X or T series. I'm very familiar with Thinkpads (I personally have owned 5, and have bought 3 for family, all used, all functioning perfectly). That specific model does not have soldered ram, has lots of replacement parts, is still fairly new, I'd owned an L14 Gen 1, and to be honest, it was just a good deal considering it was in mint condition.

With thinkpads, assuming you're buying used, you can pay the premium for a T or X series, and get a laptop with essentially the same parts, but maybe a better screen or chassis, or you can save money and go with the L or E series. NB, the T and X series oftentimes have soldered RAM, so if you're not satisfied with the amount of ram already in it, do your due diligence to ensure that the model support using SODIMM/replacing the ram.
by tptacek | 2025-09-26 16:35:02+00:00
I'm playing with that too (everyone should write an agent; basic sub-agents are incredibly simple --- just tool calls that can make their own LLM calls, or even just a tool call that runs in its own context window). What I like about Eternal Sunshine is that the LLM can just make decisions about what context stuff matters and what doesn't, which is a problem that comes up a lot when you're looking at telemetry data.
by orev | 2025-09-26 16:35:07+00:00
If Apple is leasing physical servers from Amazon, without Amazon further involved in running them (other than dealing with hardware issues), then this argument holds water. Otherwise it doesn’t, even if they’re using Amazon VMs or some higher level services. A VM hosted on someone else’s physical platform is not an “own servers” in this context (which is who has access to the data).

I know HN is very imbued with the cloud approach, and maybe from that perspective running your own servers is just so unthinkable it may as well not exist at all, you don’t get to change how language works. If someone says they’re running on “their own servers” that always means the whole stack including physical and up.

Ownership is determined not only by who pays for it, but also who has direct access to the actual devices.
by kmike84 | 2025-09-26 16:35:18+00:00
> whereas the best engines average 99.something%?

To compute accuracy, you compare the moves which are made during the game with the best moves suggested by the engine. So, the engine will evaluate itself 100%, given its settings are the same during game and during evaluation.

You get 99.9something% when you evaluate one strong engine by using another strong engine (they're mostly aligned, but may disagree in small details), or when the engine configuration during the evaluation is different from the configuration used in a game (e.g. engine is given more time to think).
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-09-26 16:35:34+00:00
> Imo its crazy that there basically hasn't been a game made since, in it's genre, with the same level of ambition.

I'm not sure what you mean by ambition. Deus Ex was pretty heavily criticized for having "last-gen" graphics

What made Deus Ex stand out was the writing and atmosphere, and maybe some gameplay mechanics which hadn't become quite so popular. As you mentioned System Shock had already pioneered them, although that game didn't reach the level of popularity of Deus Ex which won game of the year in 2000

I'd also add in the music, to this day I still remember the main theme. Alot of games these days, don't even bother.
by Volundr | 2025-09-26 16:35:44+00:00
It funny because having worked both in private industry and public (transit!) service, my experience is the exact opposite. In private anytime my department were coming in under budget on anything, there was always the end of the year pressure to spend it on something lest accounting take it away. Meanwhile in the public sector my team went to great lengths to get rid of vendor services that weren't providing value.
by teachrdan | 2025-09-26 16:36:18+00:00
> Starbucks corporate was offering better benefits to the entire company than the union (which was made up of like 10 people) had negotiated for themselves.

This was union-busting by Starbucks. The union was more than happy to accept the better benefits, but Starbucks corporate refused to negotiate with them to update their contract. Starbucks was acting in bad faith to undermine the union the workers had organized for themselves.
by polski-g | 2025-09-26 16:37:50+00:00
AI can detect a Black person vs a White person via their chest x-rays. Radiologists say there is no difference. Turns out they're wrong. https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/study-finds-a...

That being said, there are no radiologists available to hire at any price: https://x.com/ScottTruhlar/status/1951370887577706915
by tra3 | 2025-09-26 16:38:51+00:00
I keep wondering if we're forgetting the fundamentals:

> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/kernighan/

Sure, you eat the elephant one bite at a time, and recursion is a thing but I wonder where the tipping point here is.
by kibwen | 2025-09-26 16:39:26+00:00
The assertion that we are refuting is this: "human wants are infinite, and therefore, we always find new things for people to do". The context here is specifically about employment, human labor, and the spectre of joblessness. What you're describing is not a labor market, it's charity. And indeed, one peaceful, idyllic solution to mass unemployment that gets trotted out is something like UBI, where you pay people to simply keep them alive, without expecting anything in return. But that's not at all what's being discussed here; instead, what the OP is asserting is the usual yarn that technological advances will not decrease human employment, but at a certain point this simply stops being the case, and that point will be reached if or when the price of artificial labor falls below a critical level. In short: at the limit of technological advancement, you can either prioritize a market economy, or you can prioritize keeping people alive; you cannot have both.
by joz1-k | 2025-09-26 16:39:38+00:00
BTW, there are also other interesting, low-power RISC architectures that are used in millions of devices, but most people have never heard of them. For example:

* SuperH [0], 32bit only, now basically dead, but microcontrollers are still available * AVR32 [1], 32 bit only, also quite dead * ARC [2], 32/64bit, still quite popular in an automotive

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperH

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR32

[2]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_(processor)>
by fluoridation | 2025-09-26 16:39:40+00:00
The minicrossbow is even harder than the prod, especially at lower skill levels and with no weapon mods. The prod at least stuns enemies momentarily. With the darts they still stand around shooting at you and set off alarms, and that's if you manage to hit them at all. You can run up to a guy and get a guaranteed stun in the time it takes him to spin around like a dumbass to look at the source of the footsteps.
by BurningFrog | 2025-09-26 16:40:17+00:00
This is also - disturbingly - how the human brain operates.

1. Some subconscious process makes a cynical decision about what course of action is most beneficial for you.

2. Another part, known as the "Press Secretary" comes up with a good sounding motivation for why this is the morally right thing to do.

3. You now genuinely believe you're doing the right thing, and can execute your cynical plan, full of righteous zeal!

I'm as autism-brained as anyone, and would probably prefer brutal honesty in all communications, but I also think you have to accept that well functioning human organizations don't operate like that, and if you want to be part of such organizations it's best for everyone to accept how they work.
by qwerpy | 2025-09-26 16:40:19+00:00
In general I'm a big fan of incorporating drones and cameras into crime fighting techniques. It's safer and cheaper for the general public, law enforcement, and the criminals themselves. For example for retail thieves (the article's use case), or for car thieves and street racers, don't need to have a high speed chase anymore. Follow the car around until a trap can be set or it parks at the criminal's house.
by GeoAtreides | 2025-09-26 16:40:21+00:00
I trust Einstein and everyone else on the relativity theory. I trust Andrew Wiles and the dozen of people who understood his proof.

I trust my doctor.

You do too.

Of course, I was criticising the way they argue, a meta-argument, not the argument itself. I have no interest in discussing the methodology or result of this study.
by marojejian | 2025-09-26 16:40:40+00:00
The charting section of the report has a great set of data:

https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart

One thing I noticed, comparing the US to the top ranked (mostly Nordic) countries: There was no clear pattern in "positive emotions" scores. Indeed, the US might be above average. But the US was far above the Nordic countries in "negative emotion" scores. So perhaps it is more accurate to conclude the US is "more unhappy" vs. "less happy".

Also the variance in the US was much higher - so it's more a subset of the population dragging things down.

This is consistent with a story that the major factor in the rankings is that the support and security of Nordic states reduce downward variance in unhappiness (e.g. for the poor, & sick).

Of course there could be many other explanations too (e.g. the US having a competitive culture where people who don't succeed above average are less satisfied).

(Too bad no one will ever read this comment, due to HNs recency bias).
by danenania | 2025-09-26 16:40:52+00:00
It is, but there's a direct tension here between security and capabilities. It's hard to do useful things with private data without opening up prompt injection holes. And there's a huge demand for this kind of product.

Agents also typically work better when you combine all the relevant context as much as possible rather than splitting out and isolating context. See: https://cognition.ai/blog/dont-build-multi-agents — but this is at odds with isolating agents that read untrusted input.
by kordlessagain | 2025-09-26 16:40:53+00:00
I looked at this product and found some concerning issues.

First, you're using Firecrawl as your crawling infrastructure, but Firecrawl explicitly blocks Reddit. Yet one of your examples mentions "Check if user complaints about Figma's performance on large files have increased in the last 3 months. Search forums like Hacker News, Reddit, and Figma's community site..."

How are you accomplishing this? The comment about whether it's legal to crawl Reddit remains unanswered in this thread.

Second, you're accepting credit cards without providing any Terms of Service. This seems like a significant oversight for a YC company.

Third, as another commenter mentioned, GPT-5 can already do this faster and more effectively, and Claude has similar capabilities. I'm struggling to see the value proposition here beyond a thin wrapper around existing LLM capabilities with some agent orchestration. We're beyond assuming prompts are useful IP nowadays, or am I wrong?

Perhaps most concerning is the lack of basic account management features - there's no way to delete an account after creation. I'd say I'd like clarification, but there's no way I couldn't just code this up with Codex to run locally and do it myself (with a local crawler that can actually crawl Reddit even).
by tptacek | 2025-09-26 16:41:00+00:00
This seems like a worldview calculated so that individuals almost never have any culpability --- even when speeding down the road, the responsibility for that harm is more properly attributed to corporations and politicians. From that vantage point, it's clear to me why one would see the decisions of a hospital-owning PE firm as "violent", while not seeing the decisions of a reckless driver that way.
by jwpapi | 2025-09-26 16:41:01+00:00
I’m really wondering why so many advertising posts mimicked as discourse make it to frontpage and I assume it’s a new Silicon Valley trick because there is no way HN community values these so much.

Let me tell you I’m scared of these tools. With Aider I have the most human in the loop possible each AI action is easy to undo, readable and manageable.

However even here most of the time I want AI to write a bulk of code I regret it later.

Most codebase challenges I have are infrastructural problems, where I need to reduce complexity to be able to safely add new functionality or reduce error likelihood. I’m talking solid well named abstractions.

This in the best case is not a lot of code. In general I would always rather try to have less code than more. Well named abstraction layers with good domain driven design is my goal.

When I think of switching to an AI first editor I get physical anxiety because it feels like it will destroy so many coders by leading to massive frustration.

I think still the best way of using ai is literally just chat with it about your codebase to make sure you have good practise.
by amenhotep | 2025-09-26 16:41:17+00:00
What a lovely framing that is. Since time immemorial our right to vote without having to present papers was prized and protected and caused no appreciable problems whatsoever. Then, finally, in one of these inevitable spasms of authoritarianism, they do away with it and we're now turned away from the polling station unless we can show our permission slip.

Then they come up with even more papers for us, and the argument for it is that it's now a benefit that we can more easily comply with Voter ID laws.

Bugger off with that. Don't talk to me about any "benefit" in relation to voter ID that isn't abolishing it.
by jfengel | 2025-09-26 16:41:18+00:00
Comey thinks of himself as somebody who is simply pursuing justice. To hear him tell it, he was in a no-win scenario with the Clinton email servers. If he had failed to say anything it would have been perceived as partisan.

That makes him neutral, pursuing crimes by both sides. Which means Trump sees him as an enemy.

(Note: I don't buy Comey's explanation. He dropped that investigation two weeks later. It had already been investigated, finding no problems worth prosecuting. So choosing that particular day does not seem neutral to me.)