MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Pitched a VC for 30min before realizing they invested in a competitor
by uchibeke | 2025-10-21 15:12:51+00:00
Hey HN,

I pitched an investor for 30 minutes before realizing they'd already passed on a similar company in their portfolio.

That moment broke me. I'd wasted both our time because I didn't do basic research.

So I built Briefing AI: Paste any calendar invite and Get an Intelligence-style dossier on attendees in 30 seconds.

THE WORKFLOW:

You have a meeting in 10 minutes. You know nothing about the attendees.

Before:

• Open LinkedIn, search "Sarah Chen Sequoia" • Skim profile, open 5 tabs • Google her recent activity • Try to remember talking points • Show up flustered • Total time: 15-20 minutes (if you even do it)

After:

• Paste calendar invite into Briefing AI • Get: Executive summary, attendee backgrounds, company context, talking points, red flags • Walk in prepared • Total time: 30 seconds

THE TECH:

• Next.js 15 + Cloudflare Pages (serverless) • Brave Search API (real company/attendee data, not just AI hallucinations) • GPT-4 (parsing + generation) • Device fingerprinting (1 free briefing, then $49 LTD or $19/month)

Launched Friday. Made 2 sales. Learning fast.

"BUT CAN'T I JUST USE CHATGPT?"

Yes. But:

• ChatGPT = 8-10 prompts, 10 minutes ("extract attendees" → "who is Sarah?" → "what should I ask?") • Briefing AI = 1 paste, 30 seconds • ChatGPT = conversation disappears • Briefing AI = saved dashboard, searchable history

I'm not competing with ChatGPT. I'm making one specific workflow 10x faster.

WHAT I LEARNED (2 sales in 3 days):

The problem is real (everyone wings meetings), but I have zero distribution. 80 website visits, 2.5% conversion. Product works. Distribution doesn't.

So I'm asking HN:

• Is this genuinely useful, or am I solving a fake problem? • Would you pay $49 lifetime for this? • What's the #1 feature I'm missing?

Try it free (no card required): getbriefing.io

I'm here all day to answer questions and iterate based on your feedback.

PS: If you've ever Googled someone 5 minutes before a Zoom call, this is for you.
by binary132 | 2025-10-21 15:13:39+00:00
Tbh even though I got my start with Emacs Live I really do think at this point the simplest way to get started is to start vanilla and stay as vanilla as possible as you slowly build up your config based on simple and straightforward examples. The main problem is the utter lack of such examples in the community. I had to figure it out for myself for the most part. KISS!
by teaganga | 2025-10-21 15:14:08+00:00
I think they started as cool kids and they changed their mind on the way. I'm using postman for a long time. I liked it, i preferred the online version, slowly slowly they started to push users towards the app, making it harder and harder first to use it without and account, then to use the online version. This is how I ended up with a heavy desktop app, when i needed something simple and easy to use.
by prewett | 2025-10-21 15:14:24+00:00
If one picture is unimaginative and vulgar, I don't see why doing it 30 years somehow makes it "art". It makes me think he's just angry and rude, just like I'd think about someone who goes around flicking people off for 30 years. In a post-modern perspective that's "telling truth to power" or something, but that's just sophistry.
by scott_w | 2025-10-21 15:14:25+00:00
> "Fraud allegations"

Financial fraud. This isn't something the average person is going to dig up on their own because they aren't going to start reading the FT and WSJ before they buy a car.

> This is what google spews out when I type in "tesla major problems".

Be honest: have you ever done this in literally any other context? In fact, don't bother because I know you haven't. Because nobody does this.

How do I know nobody does this? Because, as I evidenced above, Tesla's public reputation only started to decline in 2024/2025 when Musk started throwing Sieg Heils, sorry, "putting his heart out to the crowd" after Trump's inauguration.

> it's not something mild what you would get replacing Telsa with e.g. Peugeot, but some really troublesome issues

Thanks for giving me a point of comparison. Apparently, the electronic handbrake can fail on certain Peugeots: https://www.service4service.co.uk/news/peugeot/the-most-comm...

I did the same thing you did. Why is this important? Just to point out that, if you do your "due diligence," you can find major issues with any car make. Again, going back to the average consumer, you can't really tell the difference between reports of one car brand being shit vs any other.

Again, this is not to defend Tesla: this is to point out that it's really fucking difficult for an average consumer to know whether a trusted car brand is actually just taking them for a ride.
by smileysteve | 2025-10-21 15:14:28+00:00
To jump in on the political, in minimum wage "debates" the conservative side was always that higher minimum wage will encourage automation.

But as we look at post-pandemic automation (the counter operator is mostly replaced by an app) or automation (China's robots per capital), or tax policies that encourage capital spending (2018 tax bill, depreciation) it becomes obvious that automation will happen and is in many ways good. But our policy makers, media, and therefore average voter miss the forest for the trees.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-10-21 15:15:11+00:00
Very much a "the children yearn for the mines" sentiment.

People don't "need" jobs, they need food, shelter, clothing, health care, and community. Jobs are just how those unfortunate enough not to be born into wealth finance those things, and occasionally some luxuries.

A good society should raise the standard of living for everyone when technological advances make things more efficient.
by WithinReason | 2025-10-21 15:15:27+00:00
JPEG is a good idea:

The simple, elegant approach of training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) directly from RGB pixels has enjoyed overwhelming empirical success. But can more performance be squeezed out of networks by using different input representations? In this paper we propose and explore a simple idea: train CNNs directly on the blockwise discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients computed and available in the middle of the JPEG codec. Intuitively, when processing JPEG images using CNNs, it seems unnecessary to decompress a blockwise frequency representation to an expanded pixel representation, shuffle it from CPU to GPU, and then process it with a CNN that will learn something similar to a transform back to frequency representation in its first layers. Why not skip both steps and feed the frequency domain into the network directly? In this paper we modify \libjpeg to produce DCT coefficients directly, modify a ResNet-50 network to accommodate the differently sized and strided input, and evaluate performance on ImageNet. We find networks that are both faster and more accurate, as well as networks with about the same accuracy but 1.77x faster than ResNet-50.

https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2018/file/7...

I suspect mp3 is also a good idea
by bigyabai | 2025-10-21 15:15:29+00:00
HN isn't a monoculture. Many people visit this website to hear the criticism from a diverse constituent of software developers. If you expect any unanimous conclusion, I'd argue your expectations are the strange one.

My foremost concern is that robots, particularly American-made ones, aren't ready for primetime yet. Human bodies solve problems that aren't easily automated even with a perfectly capable humanoid robot and AI-powered IK solver. I've worked in the computer vision and factory automation fields, and outside a completely automated redesign I don't think robots will significantly reduce headcount in this field.
by novoreorx | 2025-10-21 15:15:35+00:00
When I made the script httpstat [1] 9 years ago, I had this exact thought - if I want to show the statistics of a HTTP request, why not just use curl, why bother working out the figures myself? And since then, the more I use curl, the more I find it robust, sophesticated and irreplaciable. It's the only thing and everything I need.

[1]: https://github.com/reorx/httpstat
by groovybits | 2025-10-21 15:15:38+00:00
Legacy KDE apps used to follow this naming convention until the late 2000s, early 2010s.

You had apps like Konqueror (web browser, file manager), KMail (email client), Kompose (music score editor), KImages (later rebranded to Krita), and KDevelop (software dev IDE).

Modern KDE apps dropped the 'K' prefix and moved to a more recognizable scheme, like: Falkon (web browser), Dolphin (file manager), and Okular (document viewer).

As you can see, its now a mix of whether the app keeps the 'K' in the name. Some do not.
by freedomben | 2025-10-21 15:15:42+00:00
> Football seems super messed up with a clock that never seems to end

I'm guessing you haven't watched much football then. I'm not saying that as an insult or anything, just a guess. There are plenty of weird things about the game, but the clock isn't one of them IMHO. The clock always runs while the ball is in play. It stops until the start of the next play when a player goes out of bounds or throws an incomplete pass, but continues running after a normal down. Each quarter is 15 minutes of play time, and it's quite strictly applied, and it is always displayed prominently, so it definitely ends. The length of a game is a lot more predictable/understandable than a game like baseball where time is disconnected from game length.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-21 15:15:45+00:00
The whole thesis that AGI will come about through advances in coding agents makes zero sense. This isn't a coding problem - it's first a matter of defining the goal ("AGI" means nothing), then considering architectures and learning algorithms, etc, capable of achieving it. What's needed isn't agentic coding ability but rather creativity and ability to design new learning algorithms that are not to be found in the training data.

Coding is the least problem, and I'd guess today's Claude Code, etc is well capable of doing the drudgework.
by gnabgib | 2025-10-21 15:15:51+00:00
Discussions

(399 points, 2 days ago, 222 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45636285

(35 points, 2 days ago, 55 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45633191

Related: It was a weather balloon, not space debris, that struck a United Airlines plane (12 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45652120
by Larrikin | 2025-10-21 15:16:12+00:00
Optimize the check out flow for the human worker like Aldi has done and pay them a decent wage so it's no longer a menial job?

Self check out of more than a few items at the grocery store will always suck and be slower than someone who has trained to scan items quickly and has memorized the produce codes.

I never use self check out because I don't work at the grocery store and would rather just wait on my phone than take an active role in an activity I have no interest in ever becoming good at while giving the company more money over all for the shittier experience. I'm also not afraid of the cashier asking me how my day is going.
by panick21 | 2025-10-21 15:16:37+00:00
> China is the closest and will likely have something equivalent to the Falcon 9 within the next 2 years.

That's wildly optimistic. Falcon 9 launches operationally 100+ a year and single boosters with 20+ uses. Even if in the next 2 years, China has some kind of first stage that lands, its in no way 'like Falcon 9'.

So lets not be unreasonably optimistic just because its China. China isn't magic and they wont have such a rocket no matter if they invest in it or not.

> But someone in the USA? People are delusional.

BlueOrigin is much closer then anybody in China. They have actually attempted launching a large rocket, China has not. And BlueOrigin has made its own advacned reusable engine and flown them to Orbit, argaubly China has not done that.
by Rebuff5007 | 2025-10-21 15:17:18+00:00
Before people bring their pitchforks to this headline, take a look at existing automation in factories [1][2] and ask yourself why would we ever want humans to do something that robots can do this well? Also despite the fact that humanoids are all the hype now (and included in the article), note that amazon has been investing in much more specialized approaches for quite some time [3][4].

There are so many things we can be doing with our time, and moving objects from a left-bin to a right-bin simply does not need to be one of them. The real question is if we have the collective will to get all these folks education and opportunities to do something else before they feel too much pain in the near term.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/1iwgb19/a_dark_factor... [2] https://www.fortna.com/ [3] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-vulcan-ro... [4] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/10-years-of-amaz...
by Tangurena2 | 2025-10-21 15:17:35+00:00
There were some bad weather incidents where warehouse workers were not permitted to seek shelter from tornados = from which they died [0].

Additionally, the warehouses are staffed by contractors, who once laid off from the subcontracting company are permabanned from ever working for any other contracting company that Amazon will use. Amazon is literally running out of humans that they can hire. If they are unwilling to address their "one and done" policy, Amazon will have to use robots in order to stay in business.

0 - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/20/amazon-warehouse-in-illinois...
by bityard | 2025-10-21 15:17:37+00:00
I love KDE Connect, it is insanely useful and pairs nicely with KDE Plasma.

But I think it has some major usability issues. The two things I struggle with the most:

1. Sometimes (not always, but often!) the phone is not connected to the computer at all. In order to send something from the computer to the phone, I have to unlock the phone, find KDE connect in the apps, run it, and connect to the computer. I understand that this could very well be just The Way of Android, but it's still obnoxious.

2. The text/SMS sub-app in KDE connect is terrible. It doesn't sync text messages in the background, so it tries to sync when you start it. But it's very slow and takes a good 5-10 minutes for all of your text messages to sync. And apparently it does contacts last because in the beginning you only see phone numbers. And it doesn't show pictures. And (this is normally not a complaint I make), it is very ugly. GS Connect looks way better, but I have no idea if it _works_ any better.
by traveler01 | 2025-10-21 15:17:48+00:00
I kept getting “business proposals” and “invoices” by email that looked a bit too shady to open. Most of them were PDFs, which as many of you know can hide embedded scripts, phishing links, or even malware.

I wanted a way to safely see what’s inside those files without actually opening them on my own computer. I couldn’t find any service that did exactly that, so I built one: Seguradoc.

It opens PDFs inside a sandbox, generates image snapshots of each page, and uses Mistral AI to run OCR and produce short summaries of image-based scanned PDFs. It also checks any detected links or QR codes against URLhaus for known phishing or malware sources.

This comes from a real problem I had, as some of these PDFs were actually malicious containing phishing attempts. These are directed and personalised attacks.

Of course your browser sandboxes these PDF files but I'd prefer not opening these files at all in my computer - being sandboxed by the browser or just using MacOS preview.

Let me know your feedback regarding this tool.
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-21 15:17:48+00:00
UBI is going to be the only option eventually, outside of a moneyless, post-scarcity utopia.

Investing in subsidized worker retraining can work very short term, but with widespread automation and a reduced requirement for human workers, that can only go so far as the demand for employees simply won’t be there.

So we either have strong laws and protections that enforce that everyone receives the benefits of automation, or we don’t and only a small percentage of the population receives the benefits while everyone else starves to death.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-21 15:18:06+00:00
There are barely any customers in this country now. We're operating off credit: the US (as a currency, not just the government) is 1.2 trillion in the red. It's an accounting identity, it can't be argued with.

It's an inevitability that people unproductive in the real economy will get cut off. You can't run an economy on gigwork that just makes parasitic upper-middle and upper-class lives more comfortable. Elite comfort isn't real production. You cannot feed, clothe, or house people with Uber rides and advertising. Instead, in the US, you feed, clothe, and house people with imports, purchased with borrowed foreign currency.

And the government takes whatever it gets and redistributes it upwards to capital-intensive industries and "US" businesses that are completely supplied by imports. It's almost an optimized destruction.
by ModernMech | 2025-10-21 15:18:24+00:00
At best, a company's culture is just a branding and marketing strategy to attract employees and to appear cool. They are not real cultures -- they are constructed, forced and dictated by management, and oftentimes cult-like in their construction.

Company cultures are not built to last, they are designed to generate profit. The culture is incidental, it will be whatever is most profitable at any given moment. At best, a company's culture is just a branding and marketing strategy to attract employees and to appear cool. Therefore they are fickle and prone to complete collapse when just a few people are replaced.
by parliament32 | 2025-10-21 15:18:36+00:00
I think you missed the "critical path" part. Why would your product stop functioning if your admins can't log in with IAM / VPN in, do you really need hands-on maintenance constantly? Why would your product stop functioning if Office is down, are you managing your ops in Excel or something?

"Some kind of dependency" is fine and unavoidable, but well-architected systems don't have hard downtime just because someone somewhere you have no control over fucked up.
by mehdibl | 2025-10-21 15:19:15+00:00
The funny part the 5090 mobile is more like a 5080 desktop edition!

See the Alienware laptop flagged as 5090 while it's ‎"GeForce RTX 5090 24 GB GDDR7" as laptops can't sustain the TDP and RTX XX90 full power. For AI an external GPU is less costly option.
HTTP error codes illustrated with stills from Columbo
by ColinWright | 2025-10-21 15:19:17+00:00
With the current degraded state of internet search capabilities I'm having trouble finding this. Or maybe I just have a search-fu failure.

I remember a web site with descriptions of all the HTTP error codes illustrated with still from episodes of Columbo. Can anyone help me find it?

More, can you tell me how to find it? I used to be great at web searches, but nothing seems to work for me any more.

Thanks in advance.
by parpfish | 2025-10-21 15:19:23+00:00
yeah, you should put your prep time into the non-technical parts of the interview.

- everybody you meet is going to ask "so, tell me about yourself" so you better have a good answer. have a pitch that highlights relevant parts of your work history, discuss goals/interests, show a bit of personality.

- there's always going to be "do you have any questions for me?", so you need to have a couple of questions ready to go that make you seem interested/thoughtful AND help you extract good signal from the interviewer.
by antisthenes | 2025-10-21 15:20:00+00:00
Well, sometimes perception is reality. If you have too many slackers, then your group/society stops functioning altogether and/or succumbs to other, more successful groups.

Then it doesn't matter what entitlements you think you should have been getting (or were getting)

Also, based on your phrasing, you seem to think that the current system punishes slackers (and/or perceived slackers) and that's our collective preference? In your opinion is this being done deliberately, or just through regular pricing mechanisms of capitalism?
by chrisjj | 2025-10-21 15:20:06+00:00
Workaround for HN's mangling.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Chris Jordan <chrisjj@xxx>

To: Chris John Jordan <chrisjj@xxx>

Cc:

Bcc:

Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2025 10:32:03 +0100

Subject: Test Test 2
by ssttoo | 2025-10-21 15:20:07+00:00
Meta.ai (at least its WhatsApp version) has been really ghosting me lately. For example I asked “what’s CA prop 50?”. Answer:

> Thanks for asking. For voting information, select your state or territory at https://www.usa.gov/state-election-office

A real answer flashes for a second and then this refusal to answer replaces it.

Similarly when I asked about refeeding after a 5-day fast: “call this number for eating disorders”
by khuey | 2025-10-21 15:20:16+00:00
> The Philippines was a U.S. territory in 1939. Shouldn't dad have had birthright citizenship?

No. Filipinos as a group were never US citizens. They were non-citizen US nationals during the American colonial period. When the Philippines became independent in 1946 the status of Filipinos as non-citizen nationals was terminated and they became citizens of the Philippines only.

https://fam.state.gov/fam/08fam/08fam030806.html

tl;dr your dad really did have to go through all that trouble.
by simmons | 2025-10-21 15:21:22+00:00
When you become good at using Palm graffiti, it's not too bad. I remember playing through all of the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ game on a Palm IIIx while commuting on the bus between Boulder and Denver back in 1999 or so, and being amazed that I could play an actual computer game on a handheld device.
by nickysielicki | 2025-10-21 15:21:25+00:00
> Distributed executor: Inference engines support model parallelism via distributed executors (e.g., Ray [32] and NCCL [9]), whose initialization takes tens of seconds.

I mean, it really shouldn't take tens of seconds for those initialization(s) to occur. There's no good fundamental reason that it should take that long. It's just bloat.
by _pvzn | 2025-10-21 15:21:37+00:00
It was really great! The thing is, kind of like the Flutter ecosystem, it's as good as its third party libraries. This app is mostly a very advanced UI on top of the CLI with not a whole lot else - I think maybe the only 3rd party library I'm using is the file picker. But for other apps that might have more complex use cases there may be more of a struggle there.

The framework itself is great.
Show HN: Katakate – Dozens of VMs per node for safe code exec
by gbxk | 2025-10-21 15:22:25+00:00
I've built this to make it easy to host your own infra for lightweight VMs at large scale.

Intended for exec of AI-generated code, for CICD runners, or for off-chain AI DApps. Mainly to avoid Docker-in-Docker dangers and mess.

Super easy to use with CLI / Python SDK, friendly to AI engs who usually don't like to mess with VM orchestration and networking too much.

Defense-in-depth philosophy.

Would love to get feedback (and contributors: clear & exciting roadmap!), thx
by palata | 2025-10-21 15:22:48+00:00
"If", indeed. That's the problem of metrics: it depends on what you measure, and sometimes it's hard to get a meaningful answer in the short term.

If you ship more for less, but less maintainable or less correct, then it's not necessarily an upgrade. Always the same question: does it benefit the developer? The product? The company?

It was already possible, without AI, to look like one is doing a great job ("they are producing so much! Let's promote them!") but actually just building a bad codebase. The art being to get the promotion and move to the next step before the project implodes.

Not saying that AI necessarily ends up doing that, but it most certainly help.