MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sksksk | 2025-10-09 14:21:00+00:00
The use cases in their videos are interesting, I suppose the world we live in is build for humans, so it makes sense to build a robot that is human shaped. So we don't need to buy new washing machines and redesign our house to get a robot maid.

The hotel reception use case seems ridiculous though, if you get rid of a human receptionist, you lose the human element of the check in process, which people like. If you're getting rid of the human and losing all the benefits of that, then just replace it with a kiosk (or mobile check in), which will do a far better job than a robot.
Show HN: Google Ads campaigns from 0 to live in 15 minutes, by Multi-Agent AI
by adeptads | 2025-10-09 14:21:19+00:00
Are you manage PPC campaigns for clients? Are you a business or startup founder?

Create a fully bootstrapped Google Ads campaigns in one click and 15 minutes wait time!

Connect your ads account, fill in the basic campaign's traits, description of the target product and users - get a unique campaign generated on each run, with multiple ad groups with ads / asset groups for Pmax.
by cmsj | 2025-10-09 14:21:48+00:00
Surely the goal is to ensure that there is no erosion of FOSS as a concept?

The existence and growth of FOSS is something that has happened as a result of considerable advocacy, and while its broad success has become somewhat self-sustaining, there will never not be the risk of a slide into more single-corporation-friendly "source available" realms.

It's not a bad thing to push for "source available" to be considered as not going far enough, and to not let it supplant FOSS through purely pragmatic concerns.
by gunta | 2025-10-09 14:22:02+00:00
Author here. I analyzed the infrastructure shift happening as AI agents become the majority of web traffic (51% per Imperva 2025).

Key findings: - Token costs drop 95% when serving JSON/Markdown vs HTML - Companies with agent-friendly APIs seeing 400% traffic increases - New metrics (AIX, TX, MPX) becoming more important than traditional KPIs

The article includes: - OpenAPI, Arazzo, MCP and GEPA - Examples for content negotiation - 30-day transformation roadmap

Happy to answer questions about implementation details or the economic implications.
by simonw | 2025-10-09 14:22:16+00:00
I feel like the copy and paste thing is overdue a solution.

I find this one particularly frustrating when working directly with ChatGPT and Claude via their chat interfaces. I frequently find myself watching them retype 100+ lines of code that I pasted in just to make a one line change.

I expect there are reasons this is difficult, but difficult problems usually end up solved in the end.
by hobofan | 2025-10-09 14:22:21+00:00
Yes, DB tickets should only be booked via a payment provider that allows for chargebacks.

I know of instances where the end result of a more than half a year support escalation process of the highest instance said "you (the customer) did everything correctly, but our support provided wrong advice. Bad luck though, as we don't consider ourselves accountable for mistakes in the support process. Please stop contacting us."
by rsynnott | 2025-10-09 14:22:24+00:00
> Pretty soon we will have articles like "That time that CEO's thought that AI could replace workers".

Yup, it's just the latest management fad. Remember Six Sigma? Or Agile (in its full-blown cultish form; some aspects can be mildly useful)? Or matrix management? Business leaders, as a class, seem almost uniquely susceptible to fads. There is always _some_ magic which is going to radically increase productivity, if everyone just believes hard enough.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-10-09 14:22:28+00:00
Yeah, that's a very good metric to look for. In the software space, one of the coolest things and a clear signal that "AI coding" is here was watching Aider's graph of "amount of code aider wrote itself in each PR" and seeing that number go up.

On the robot side, there are many things that have to go right. Hardware needs to become good enough, reliable enough and cheap enough to scale. Then you have the software stack on top that needs to scale in training, fine-tuning, control and generalisation. None of these are "easy" even in a lab setting. Doing it at scale, in production will be huge. And then there's data collection, where whoever does it better will probably win. Collecting data in peoples houses is problematic, but on the factory floor should be ok.

ATM my bet is on Tesla being the best positioned to best deliver (eventually). They have plenty of experience on all fronts, and more importantly they have ample places to test them. Their factories are as automated as possible, so it's safe to say that every human being still doing manual labor is critical in their role. As soon as they can replace some of them with humanoids, and see the "task success" number go up, they can scale it up all over their floors. And we know they can scale.

I used to think that generalist humanoid robots are still 10y out, due to hardware and generalist software stacks, but it seems like things are heating up. It's gonna be an interesting next decade.
by simonh | 2025-10-09 14:22:41+00:00
I don't know, but I suspect the interpretation is that the impact should be during the preceding year, the wording doesn't say the work has to occur in the preceding year. So arguably the work could have been decades ago, but if the impact has only recently become apparent that counts.

I think that's fine. Often it's not really possible to assess the impact of a contribution until long after, it takes a lot of context to be able to do that.
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-09 14:22:47+00:00
> The problem isn't the MSG. It's providing a well balanced diet.

Part of the problem is the logistics and financing of school and generally cantina meals.

Unlike restaurants which can command high meal prices for artisans preparing meals out of ingredients as close to "fresh from the field" as possible, mass kitchens face insane cost pressure, which often means going for pre-processed food with very long shelf lifes for packaged units to keep waste as close to zero as possible.

Generally, I love to point at tomatoes when talking about food access and quality... for one, most tomatoes you can buy these days are grown in greenhouses with artificial light and bred to have pretty robust skin to avoid damages in shipping and storage, at the cost of flavor. As an individual making a tomato salad, you can mask off that lack of flavor by just dumping balsamico, olive oil, salt and pepper over the tomatoes... but if you are making, say, a tomato soup in a large ass kitchen for pasta, you'll probably go for the ultra-processed variant from a can or tub: no need to have employees cut up and mash tomatoes, it will keep fresh for far longer than if you'd send someone to the wholesalers to buy tomatoes every day...

And the truly ultra large kitchens that make meals for thousands of school children (or prisoners or hospital patients) a day, they probably go for the even cheaper variant and that's where the problems really show - entirely premade tomato sauce, filled with preservatives to prevent the sauce from going bad, with tons of sugar and flavorings to make it palatable (as the source tomatoes are going to be the cheapest, lowest quality, flavorless tomatoes the original processor can find), and quite possibly with a bunch of food dyes on top to appear "healthy red like a good organic tomato".
by silexia | 2025-10-09 14:22:51+00:00
I went to the dentist a couple of weeks ago and had the shortest dental visit I've had. They did the X-rays, then the dental assistant spent five minutes cleaning my teeth and pronounced them good. The dentist came in and looked for about one minute and said they were fine. I was sent on my way.

They billed my insurance for over a thousand dollars.
by majora2007 | 2025-10-09 14:23:01+00:00
I think LLMs provide value, used it this morning to fix a bug in my PDF Metadata parser without having to get too deep into the PDF spec.

But most of the time, I find that the outputs are nowhere near the effect of just doing it myself. I tried Codex Code the other day to write some unit tests. I had a few setup and wanted to use it (because mocking the data is a pain).

It took about 8 attempts, I had to manually fix code, it couldn't understand that some entities were obsolete (despite being marked and the original service not using them). Overall, was extremely disappointed.

I still don't think LLMs are capable of replacing developers, but they are great at exposing knowledge in fields you might not know and help guide you to a solution, like Stack Overflow used to do (without the snark).
by hu3 | 2025-10-09 14:23:35+00:00
This tired, flamewar-prone argument of gatekeeping new code in C/C++. Oh the irony coming from someone who wrote this some days ago:

> One of the highest priorities for the HN algorithm is to promote good interactions and discourage bad interactions. The logic is if you have a lot of people bickering with each other, regardless of the topic, it normalizes bad behavior. HN is trying to sustain itself as a forum with great discussions.
by sixtyj | 2025-10-09 14:24:02+00:00
Why are we alive? To be useful. Not happy all the kind. Everyone wants to be useful.

I am not doing anything special but I do inform our community (“mankind”) for 25 years… And I feel useful because I am good at it.

“Mankind” can be a group of other people.

Edit: What people value the most? Compliments. So if you are useful and receive compliments, you will eventually be happy. But ofc you can be happy without being useful, for sure.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-10-09 14:24:06+00:00
I know nothing about why the administration is doing this. It feels though like a rather flaccid show of power — like the school bully trying to show how tough they are by beating up a Kindergartener or something.

Using your authority to order others killed is a very sobering responsibility. And I guess I don't see the graveness I would expect in the administration's actions.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-10-09 14:24:19+00:00
Point taken (both from you and the sibling comment mentioning Phil Blunsom), I should know better than carelessly dropping such broad generalizations as "no one in the field expected..." :)

Still, I think only a tiny minority of the field expected it, and I think it was also clear from the messaging at the time that the OpenAI researchers who saw how GPT-3 (pre-instruct) started solving arbitrary tasks and displaying emergent abilities were surprised by that. Maybe they did have an ultimate goal in mind of creating a general-purpose system via next word prediction, but I don't think they expected it so soon and just by scaling GPT-2.
by schiffern | 2025-10-09 14:24:24+00:00
Good show, and I appreciate your sentiment about the "messiness" of pi.

There's a unit-converting calculator[0] that supports exact rational numbers and will carry undefined variables through algebraically. With a little hacking, you can redefine degrees in terms in an exact rational multiple of pi radians. Pi is effectively being defined as a new fundamental unit dimension, like distance.

Trig functions can be overloaded to output an exact representation when it detects one of the exact trigonometric values[1] eg cos(60°) = 1/2. It will now give output values as "X + Y PI", or you can optionally collapse that to an inexact decimal with an eval[] function.

That's the closest I got to containing the "messiness" of pi. Eventually I hit a wall because Frink doesn't support exact square roots, so most exact values would be decimals anyway.

Still, I can dream!

[0] https://frinklang.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exact_trigonometric_values
by 1121redblackgo | 2025-10-09 14:24:31+00:00
It's going to be wild when these things cost 30 grand, and we all start having them in our houses. Along with fusion, I think robots in the home will be the defining technology of our generation. It's been talked about and fictionalized forever, and within my lifetime I expect the economics on it to finally break through.

Equal parts terror, awe, fear, when it comes to having a robot in my home.
by nonethewiser | 2025-10-09 14:24:32+00:00
I stopped all social media a while ago. Unless you consider hackernews, reddit, etc. social media. I always considered these news aggregators/forums as different but I digress.

I recently wondered how my perspective would change if I cut that out too. Would my understand of "what really happened" change? Would my worldview change? I already find myself disagreeing with "my" groups fairly frequently but still, I wonder what different conclusions I would come to if I just consumed the primary sources. Of course the source will matter ideally I could read a wide variety of sources on the same story.

For some reason I never thought about RSS. But its the perfect tool for the job.
by boleary-gl | 2025-10-09 14:24:35+00:00
1000% this. Today LLMs are like enthusiastic, energetic, over-confident, well-read junior engineers.

Does it take effort to work with them and get them to be effective in your code base? Yes. But is there a way to lead them in such a way that your "team" (you in this case) gets more done? Yes.

But it does take effort. That's why I love "vibe engineering" as a term because the engineering (or "senior" or "lead" engineering) is STILL what we are doing.
by lxgr | 2025-10-09 14:24:36+00:00
> Why do the hard work if the same thing can be done by the kernel, or even by the card itself?

How would you swap out the TCP congestion control algorithm in an OS, or even hardware, you don't control?

> Drown other applications for your own benefit?

Fairness equivalent to classic TCP is a design goal of practically all alternative algorithms, so I'm not sure what you're implying.

It's entirely possible to improve responsivity without compromising on fairness, as e.g. BBR has shown.
by sofixa | 2025-10-09 14:25:16+00:00
> The bigger and older the company, the more ossified the structures are that have a want to keep headcount equal, and ideally grow it.

I don't know, most of the companies doing regular layoffs wheneveer they can get away with it are pretty big and old. Be it in tech - IBM/Meta/Google/Microsoft, or in physical things - car manufacturers, shipyards, etc.
Ask HN: How can I delete my Instagram?
by firefax | 2025-10-09 14:25:17+00:00
When I was in graduate school, I ran a closed instagram where I posted artful photos of landscape and architecture. (This was back when HDR was coming into vogue, and achieving a similar "look" with a simple iPhone and zero editing was no small feat)

When Trump took office, since my focus had been on censorship circumvention and I had promised my research participants, some of whom had connected with me on the site, that I would delete any data in the event of a hostile government event, I permanently deleted my Facebook and Instagram.

I recently decided to give the site a second chance -- I registered for Facebook, then used that as an SSO for Instagram, and began posting my photos, geotagged, with descriptions of the set and setting they were taken in. Not in a spammy way, one every day or so.

Suddenly, one day my Facebook was disabled -- I was told my account was "inathentic" without any option for appeal. To add insult to injury, the policy they linked to on "inauthenticity" (which, since I registered using my legal name, I was not violating) didn't even exist -- I got a big fat 404 looking for how my profile could be seen in any way, shape, or form as inauthentic.

Since my art featured no humans, I never had to deal with the issues some photographers of human subjects bump up against. I was never one uncivil on the platform.

I've given up on being able to use things like Facebook Marketplace (one of the reasons I gave them a second shot, since Craigslist is a ghost of it's former self), but... the Instagram persist. I continue to get emails nudging me to return... but I can't, because the Facebook account I used for SSO has been arbitrarily banned.

I am not eligible for EU citizenship (paid a lawyer to check -- Italy has changed their nationality law to only go back two generations) so it's my understanding the GDPR is not in play despite many of these photos being taken and uploaded from within the EU during my travels.

Do I have any recourse here? I do not like the idea Meta can make money off my content while denying me the use of their platform, and wish to permanently part ways given this terrible customer service experience.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-09 14:25:25+00:00
Why would one need to sell anything to anyone after one acquires the first machine that can automatically build the others? Capitalist economies kinda suffer from Goodhart's law: money is a better metric for success in a capitalist economy than most metrics are but it's important to remember that money is only a token to stand in for work and materials (I'd argue that the value of materials themselves are really just the work of retrieving them but that's a different argument). Having money in reality is just having work and materials in potentia. So what happens when the materials can do all the labor? Workers are cut out from the loop of owners gathering more things to own, and this does not hamper the owners at all. Adding AGI to capitalism isn't going to bring about capitalism with AGI in it like adding salt to water. Adding AGI to capitalism is going to act much more like adding sodium to water. I don't see it happening this generation, which is I guess nice, but I'm not looking forward to the transition between what we're doing now and Star Trek post-scarcity because I have the oddest feeling that if you look closely at any society that has done that transition there's likely to be an extreme genetic bottleneck, if I may be vague about it for pleasantries' sake.
Show HN: A context aware backend for AI coding agents
by ddmdd | 2025-10-09 14:25:29+00:00
Hey HN, I’m Hang. Today I’m open-sourcing InsForge, a context aware backend for AI coding agents.

When using agents like Cursor or Claude to build applications, they often assume what the backend looks like instead of inspecting it. Without access to the actual backend state, they fall back on outdated information, which leads to concrete issues. For example:

1. Storage, edge functions, and database logic are closely connected. Without understanding how these parts interact, existing setups get overwritten and important flows break. 2. Database migrations conflict with foreign keys or miss functions because the agent never inspects the live schema. 3. Recreating tables or adding columns that already exist, which leads to conflicts and failed deploys.

These problems are not about the agent’s ability to code. They happen because there’s no structured way for the agent to inspect and understand the actual backend before acting.

To address this, I built InsForge, which exposes the backend in a structured way and gives the agent direct control:

1. Introspection endpoints for schema, relations, functions, triggers, policies, routes, storage, roles, documentation, logs and events 2. Control endpoints for operations usually done through CLI, dashboards or SQL editors

InsForge is a full backend platform that includes:

- Postgres - Authentication - Storage - Edge functions - Built in AI-model endpoints (via OpenRouter)

On top of this, it exposes structured backend metadata and control capabilities through an MCP server and tools, providing a structured, self-describing interface for agents to inspect schemas, policies, triggers, and docs, and interact with the backend.

It’s open source and can be self hosted (https://github.com/InsForge/InsForge) or try our cloud service at (https://insforge.dev/).

We love feedback!
by mbesto | 2025-10-09 14:25:44+00:00
> In any large corps, the decision makers refuse to take any risks, show no creativity, move as a flock with other orgs, and stay middle-of-the-road, boring, beige khaki.

It's hard to take this sentiment seriously from a source that doesn't have direct experience with the c-suite. The average person only gets to see the "public relations" view of the c-suite (mostly the CEO) so I can certainly see why a "LLM based mouthpiece" might be better.

The c-suite is involved in thousands of decisions that 90% of the rest of the world is not privy to.

FWIW - As a consumer, I'm highly critical of the robotic-like external personas the c-suite take on so I can appreciate the sentiment, but it's simply not rooted in any real experience.
by jvanderbot | 2025-10-09 14:26:22+00:00
I think the old HN ethos that I loved, on full display here, won't survive intact in the AI era. It'll have to change from "It is cool to try making <neat tool> in <non obvious language>". Such a project is now a prompt away, and there's light-years of distance between a carefully hand crafted version and something that is posted aspirationally by an AI.

Every agent I know of or use will always say they built "Production ready, secure, fast package for X" if you ask them to build that, but they rarely actually will. It takes enormous time and effort to actually do that, and any first iteration of "production ready" is definitely aspirational until it actually hits the real world and survives. I'm speaking from experience, fwiw.
by swiftcoder | 2025-10-09 14:26:22+00:00
> even the cpp one, will reserve atleast the number of elements given

The C++ one, however, will not reserve more than you ask for (in the case that you reserve greater than the current capacity). It's an exact reservation in the rust sense.

> reserve() will grow the underlaying memory area to the next increment, or more than one increment, while reserve_exact() will only grow the underlaying memory area to the next increment, but no more than that

No, not quite. Reserve will request as many increments as it needs, and reserve_exact will request the exact total capacity it needs.

Where the docs get confusing, is that the allocator also has a say here. In either case, if you ask for 21 items, and the allocator decides it prefers to give you a full page of memory that can contain, say, 32 items... then the Vec will use all the capacity returned by the allocator.
by kannanvijayan | 2025-10-09 14:26:27+00:00
The difficulty is that even trivial generic types aren't cleanly one or the other. A mutable reference type is covariant on read, and contra on write.

Scala was the first language in my exposure to try to simplify that away by lifting the variance annotations into the type parameter directly. It reduced some of the power but it made things easier to understand for developers. A full variance model would annotate specific features (methods) of a type as co/contra/invariant.

I'm not sure what approach C# takes - I haven't looked into it.

Rust doesn't expose variances for data structures at all. It exposes them for traits (type classes) and lifetimes, but neither of those are accessible in a higher order form. Trait usage is highly constrained and so is lifetime usage.

Traits mainly can be used as bounds on types. Some subset of traits, characterized as object traits, can be used as types themselves, but only in an indirect context. These are highly restricted. For example, if you have traits T and U where U extends T, and you have a reference `&dyn U`, you can't convert that to a `&dyn T` without knowledge of the underlying concrete type. You _can_ convert `&A where A: U` to `&B where B: T`, but that just falls out of the fact that the compiler has access to all the concrete type and trait definitions there and can validate the transform.

Rust's inheritance/variance story is a bit weird. They've kept it very minimal and constrained.