MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Exploring the limits of local LLM coding on consumer HW
by jeremyfowers | 2025-10-16 17:11:19+00:00
Hi HN! We're Jeremy, Victoria, Krishna, and Daniel from the local LLM (Lemonade SDK) team at AMD and we're building Infinity Arcade (https://infinity-arcade.app). This project combines an open-source app and model to demonstrate what is possible for local LLM coding on the ~200 million everyday laptops out there with 16 GB of RAM. The progress has been surprisingly good, so I thought I'd show it here.

The problem: while LLM coding is amazing with large cloud-based models, the results you get with today's open-source 7B-8B parameter models (the maximum size for an average consumer laptop) are anything but inspiring. Even when we constrain ourselves to something "easy", like vibe coding retro arcade games in Python, the best sub-8B-parameter models can barely produce working copies of Snake and Pong.

Our solution: first, we needed an app that would make it easy to drive local LLMs with exactly the right prompts and features for creating games. We built three minimal agents: Create, Remix, and Debug. This allows users to make new games, make changes to existing games, and allows the system to automatically fix its own bugs.

Second, we needed to build our own model because none of the open-source offerings were cutting it. We assembled a dataset with >50k lines of high-quality Python game code, then used LORA SFT to create Playable1-GGUF (https://huggingface.co/playable/Playable1-GGUF): by far the world's highest performing 7B model at this task. It can handle 3x more game types and many fun riffs, like "space invaders with exploding bullets" and "breakout where the ball accelerates every time, I hit it."

There's a short GIF with a demo of the outputs here: https://github.com/lemonade-sdk/assets/blob/main/arcade/arac...

And one showing the full UI here: https://github.com/lemonade-sdk/assets/blob/main/arcade/infi...

Ultimately, the goal is to deliver a reference design that inspires startups to build with local LLMs. Local has no ongoing cloud costs and no privacy/security concern with sharing user's data over the internet. The main challenges are the capabilities of smaller local models, as well as the work to integrate a software stack that is relatively less mature than OpenAI/Open Router APIs. We believe Infinity Arcade shows that both challenges can be overcome and the benefits of local can be realized.

What you can do today: download the app from GitHub, install with 1 click, run Infinity Arcade and its LLM 100% free and local, check out the training data and process for the fine-tuned model, and build your own app using all of this as a reference.

Links:

GitHub: https://github.com/lemonade-sdk/infinity-arcade

Model: https://huggingface.co/playable/Playable1-GGUF

We’d love to hear your feedback! Are you convinced that the benefits of local outweigh the challenges? Do you have all the resources you need to get started? Let us know in the comments!
by anjel | 2025-10-16 17:11:23+00:00
Non-profits are headed but also staffed with the same ambititious types as for-profit businesses. If you think only Mozilla pays its CEO attractively, you are misinformed. Managerial talent costs, and non-profit CEOs, in my direct experience, use the same lateral pay package comparisons to other non-profit CEOs to justify their comp packages.

The whole point of carving out an alternate rules space for non-profits in a capitalistic economy is that some business functions are both necessary and very unlikely to be profitable.

The assumption that employees would work in non-profits at an uncompetitve wage is a widespread fallacy. In the end a non-profit is either:

1. unprofitable but so necessary it finds subsidies to continue unprofitable operations

2. breaks even

3. runs well enough to generate an operating surplus which by NP tax regs must be either distributed to employees as a bonus or put forward to organisational growth.

In any of these three revenue scenarios, underpaying critical staff is an org death spiral by loss of requisite talent.

CEOs in the US often make much more in the US than other countries, and US non-profit are not nearly immune to the larger forces responsible for that trend.
by hirvi74 | 2025-10-16 17:11:37+00:00
Oh no way? TVA is great. I went to college down the road from their HQ, and they were the main source of internships for my comp sci program. My university had a strong cybersecurity program that was partly DoD funded, in which many graduates went on to perform cybersecurity roles for TVA. After all, power plants are often juicy targets.
How was your raising experience?
by leobradshaw | 2025-10-16 17:11:52+00:00
I raised $25m and hated it. The process of raising funding was the part of building a startup that I loved/loathed the most depending on the day.

Funding is essential for many businesses, and adds huge value; but every founder I talk to describes it as a “necessary evil”. Not a great start.

We’re testing an AI deal engine for Seed/A raises to take some of the pain out of it: • Investor fit scoring • Warm-intro style emails • VC-ready teaser/model/diligence reports

I’m looking for 10 founders to pressure-test it this week. If this sounds like you (or someone you know) then check it out:

https://upcap.ai/
by lunias | 2025-10-16 17:11:57+00:00
There definitely is: "I disagree with X (and maybe A, B, and C too), but I agree with Y." You may not feel that's reasonable or that the negative impacts of X far outweigh the positive effects of Y, but it's possible for people to arrive at this conclusion due to having limited choices and specific interests.

Maybe you want to buy a sports car, but the dealer only has one coupe and it has a sunroof (that you don't want). You can go look at other dealerships for one with the package you like, but in a world where there is only one dealership you have to take what they give you. Lots of people will end up buying that coupe with a sunroof to take to the track. Especially if they approach their decision from a "I want a sports car" perspective and the other option is a minivan.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-16 17:12:02+00:00
This idea is "floated" by the exact people who make taxes complicated in the US.

Every time they insist they want to "simplify" taxes, they demonstrate that what that means is just another tax break to wealthy businesses.

The DOGE team shut down a simple tax filing system the IRS had freely made available.

It's republicans. Stop saying "Government" when it is republicans

Form 1040 isn't even complicated! But republicans have convinced millions that the IRS is going to black bag them for missing a decimal point somewhere.

Guess what! The IRS is not funded enough to care! They will send you an automated form saying "We fixed it for you, here's how much you owe/are getting back". You can even ignore that letter and you won't end up in prison! They just seized a couple of my state tax returns!
by teleforce | 2025-10-16 17:12:03+00:00
> I think it works very well for things that have a human in the loop, like codeing agents where someone needs to review changes

This is the best case for AI, it's not very different from the level 3 autonomous car with driver in the loop instead of fully autonomous level 5 vehicle that probably requires AGI level of AI.

The same applies to medicine where limited number specialists (radiologist/cardiologist/oncologist/etc) in the loop are being assisted by AI for activities that probably require too much time for experts manually looking at laborious evidences especially for non-obvious early symptom detection (X-ray/ECG/MRI) for the modern practice of evidence based medicine.
by dijit | 2025-10-16 17:12:20+00:00
Hah, yes, I've also been in those companies, and that's exactly why I have the shared view of the person I was replying to.

There's a sort of apathy osmosis that happens when you realise that you can't actually do anything because everyone else is sort of checked out... so the you, yourself, sort of check out too.

I get anxiety and "itchy" if I don't move towards my goals with any kind of swiftness.
by dotancohen | 2025-10-16 17:12:26+00:00
My forefathers were expelled from our lands in the first century AD, and returned just about a century ago. Over 1800 years in exile. During all that time, every generation longed to return, and 1800 times we as a nation prayed for return.

We did it. It took almost two millennia, but we kept our goals and we kept our customs and we kept our values.

Perhaps a similar social structure will help humans inhabit other star systems on generational ships.
by sodapopcan | 2025-10-16 17:12:50+00:00
As a fan of both, the LiveView DX is simpler than Hotwire's (though of course there are trade-offs both ways). With Hotwire you have the think about frames whereas LiveView is more like React where you just change the state and the appropriate diff is patched in without having to think about much else. This is not to say that Hotwire's frames are complex, LiveView is just that much simpler in that regard.
by mindslight | 2025-10-16 17:13:13+00:00
I just wore a half face respirator with an activated carbon filter (3M 7503 + 6001 + something over that for particulates, probably 2297). Quality respirators seem like simple table stakes for doing a lot of things these days. It was an off label use of the organic vapor cartridge but it worked fine (it also worked fine for cleaning with ammonia in deep cabinets). I also probably plugged the O3 generator into an extension cord which I could unplug without going in the room, the mask was just to go in and open the windows some time afterwards. It seems like, as with anything, the important part is to know the technicals of what something does and create an overall plan.
by rachh8 | 2025-10-16 17:13:15+00:00
Been a longtime spectator of HN and finally making my first post! Seeing threads here wavering between Claude Code and Codex inspired me to make the analysis I shared above, and I hope you all enjoy :)

For context:

We spent a few thousand dollars to benchmark the performance, latency, price, and tool-calling profiles of popular code agents and found that agent performance doesn't match base model SWE-bench scores. There's a clear winner on code quality, a balanced option for those paying API rates, and an astounding alternative for price-sensitive developers.

…There's also an unexpected laggard, with weaknesses in every dimension.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-10-16 17:13:56+00:00
Been there - done that. Worked at a company with no employee pressure, and it was absolutely infuriating that I could work my tail end off, while another employee was provably committing borderline wage fraud, but it always got written off as "personal issues" rather than take the risk of intervening... ever.

To the point I even had a boss say that part of this happens because nobody is there to spank adults when they need it (seriously), rather than intervene too strongly and have to find a replacement or hurt feelings or something. Or another contract worker, I got an apology from said boss... but he insisted she's better now than she used to be, the latest incident is mild compared to incidents before I arrived. As though that fixes it.

Much happier now at a company which cuts dead weight; and accepts we can't afford it.
by vel0city | 2025-10-16 17:13:57+00:00
Its not just a "tier" of store, its a "genre" of store. Stores like Dollar General are not really grocers, they just happen to carry some food products. They typically do not carry any fresh foods. So its not a matter of their tomatoes are somehow worse quality, its that they do not sell tomatoes. Its not that their meats are worse quality, they do not sell fresh meat. They practically only sell pre-packaged goods. Think about the few isles of junk food and small packages of household products (soaps and what not) you might find at a gas station, and scale that up ~800m^2.

If its not something that is OK to sit on a shelf for a few months, you won't find it at a Dollar General.

When it comes to actual fresh foods (which can be found if you go to actual grocery stores), those are highly regulated. You'll find fancier varieties at fancier grocery stores, but in the end a yellow onion at Kroger is about the same as a yellow onion in Safeway or Publix or Albertsons or HEB or Whole Foods.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-16 17:14:05+00:00
You can't change the code to remove the notice, but you could let the link expire. Or the frontend server, while adding your own branding, might remove the notice the backend added.

> I suspect a judge would not look kindly on such shenanigans in any case.

I completely agree there, but they still need to find the license clause sufficiently correct and in scope if they want to throw the book at you.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-16 17:14:24+00:00
> In the US, you can fire someone because you don't like that they wore a green shirt!

And if that employee can show that other people were allowed to wear green shirts without being fired, they can use that to support an illegal discrimination claim against the company.

The reason it takes effort and documentation to fire people is because companies want to have a uniform set of rules that are applied equally to all employees. They also want documentation to support the firing. Having a consistent process, applied equally and with supporting documentation discourages people from even trying to bring frivolous lawsuits.

Having additional process is also a check on managers. Some managers try to fire anyone they disagree with, dislike, or even to do things like open headcount so they can fill it with a nepotism hire. Putting process in place and requiring documentation discourages managers from firing people frivolously and adds another level of checks and balances to discourage gaming the system.
by JodieBenitez | 2025-10-16 17:14:36+00:00
> The main problem is that the state of your frontend application is in the URL.

There are plenty of ways to maintain state, including server store, sessions, localstorage, cookies, etc. Say you want the user to be able to customize the app layout: that doesn't need to be in the URL. Now say you provide a search functionality where the user can share the results: now your search criterias definitely should be in the URL.

It's not a black or white, one actually has to think about what the application must achieve.

> modern UI where you might have many different zones, widgets, popups, etc.

This is completely independent from the HTMX matter, but not all your application functionality has to fit one screen / one URL. There's a thin line between "modern" and bloat. Unfortunately this line is crossed every day.

> React / Vue that all provide their version of a state store that can hold the state

And many times they duplicate what's already available server-side.
by consumer451 | 2025-10-16 17:14:39+00:00
Thanks, I missed that thread.

Important detail at 19:38. ~"It's not just in schools. Retail, banks, hotels, airbnbs, hospital rooms ..."

My hot take after finishing that talk: building owners/managers are paying $1200 a piece for relatively easily hacked devices, which allow anyone with basic skills to spy on the building occupants. It is in the interest of personal privacy and freaking natsec to stop this type of idiotic thing.
by nodesocket | 2025-10-16 17:14:43+00:00
I know it’s going to come off as a swiss mechanical watch snob, but I am disappointed that Omega allowed swatch to clone their work of art timepieces in what are essentially plastic quartz frauds. It’s the opposite of what a high end luxury brand does. You think we’ve ever see Rolex make $500 plastic quartz watches? I think not.
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-16 17:14:55+00:00
> You need a way to get rid of dead wood, otherwise you would be too afraid to grow and hire when you need to.

Alternatively, you can retrain the workers. Replacing workers has serious cost disadvantages: recruiting itself costs money (the HR staff dedicated to that, external headhunters, "employer branding" measures, job exhibition rents and swag), layoffs cost reputation, and new workers need to be trained in your company specific procedures from timetracking to expense refunds.

Unfortunately, these costs are all too often hidden deep in the balance sheets, which makes just dumping off entire departments while hiring up other departments appear much more financially attractive than it is in reality, all costs considered.

And finally, the ethical question remains: executives get paid sometimes a hundred million dollars a year because of the "responsibility" they hold. But in the end, they do not hold any responsibility, any accountability - financial penalties for shenanigans get covered by D&O insurance, and the first ones to get sacked for (or having to live with) bad executive decisions are the employees while the executive gets a departure agreement showering them with money.

IMHO, before a company can even fire a single worker for another reason than willful misconduct, the entire C-level executive has to go as well, with immediate stop of pay and benefits.
by tracker1 | 2025-10-16 17:15:00+00:00
I think if you're going to push closer to the server in a client+server app, I'd probably look towards either HTMX integration options with a preferred backend (there's some cool C# integrations from Jetbrains as an example) or Astro over Next.js ...

That said, I'm not necessarily a big fan of mixed environments since IMO most web apps can be mostly client side and most websites can be mostly server driven. Either is simpler than the mingling tends to get. That's just my take though.
by qwery | 2025-10-16 17:15:13+00:00
The term 'layoffs' in this context is simply not what you're describing. These layoffs occur at such scale that it's unreasonable to assume any individual employee being "let go" has even been evaluated as an individual.

And, yes, of course layoffs are something that need to be justified, just as with firing an individual employee, as you know -- the "employee is not being productive" is a justification.
by gruez | 2025-10-16 17:15:14+00:00
>My weekly routine now consists of going to local farmer's market and buying stuff from farms I trust. Going to local butchers to get grass fed, naturally raised meats. Then off to the local grocery store to get whatever else I need that week for the stuff I prepare at home.

>If you want to eat healthy, you certainly can, but takes quite a bit of effort and some additional cost.

It does, but you really don't need to go to farmers markets and buy grass fed beef from a dedicated butcher to "eat healthy". You can get 95-100% of the benefits of your routine by going to a regular supermarket and buying non-ultraprocessed foods.
by idopmstuff | 2025-10-16 17:15:17+00:00
I buy and operate small e-commerce brands, and since GPT-3.5, I've been attempting to vibe code software to help me manage the business. With GPT-5 Codex I have finally managed to create something legitimately useful for myself. The code may be (almost certainly is) not of great quality, but for the purposes of an internal application that only I use, it's doing the job just fine.
by hunterpayne | 2025-10-16 17:15:32+00:00
Only if that system is stateless. If you have any sort of internal memory that sticks around between requests, then either you face a cold start problem (because of empty caches) or you somehow need to persist that state somewhere. And persisting that state either means you need a backup solution or your latency is terrible because you are hitting network for something that only needs to hit RAM.
by roywashere | 2025-10-16 17:15:58+00:00
I think this is not too weird? I write text messages all day on my phone. Every holiday I keep a dairy of my travel in a Google doc. While I prefer a proper keyboard I also appreciate the way I can just type some stuff on my phone while in a bus or waiting for a train, or at night in my hotel room. This adds up to significant documents. And then indeed I prefer the writing over mindlessly ‘consuming content’.
by TophWells | 2025-10-16 17:16:15+00:00
Let's see if I understood this right. For the Betweenness Amazing Dragons rule:

* Compute the "betweenness" of each living cell, which is 1 divided by its degree. Cells which are not connected to anything have infinite/undefined betweenness, but it doesn't matter.

* Then, for each cell, sum up the betweenness of its connected neighbours.

* If the total betweenness of a dead cell is in the range [(1.3, 3.6)], it is born and becomes alive at the next generation.

* If the total betweenness of a living cell is in the range [(0.9, 2.6)], it survives and remains alive to the next generation.

* Exception: any cell with 0, 1, 7 or 8 neighbours (in total, ignoring betweenness) dies anyway after the rules above were applied.

... That's not quite right, there's some references to "eligibility" that I can't make sense of. What else am I missing?
by aeldidi | 2025-10-16 17:17:30+00:00
This is a really nice insight. I think years of linux have kind of numbed me to this. I've spent so much time on systems which use systemd now that going back to an Alpine Linux box always takes me a second to adjust, even though I know more or less how to do everything on there. I think docker's done a lot to help with that though since the interface is the same everywhere. A typical setup for me now is to have the web server running on the host and everything else behind docker, since that gives me the benefit of using the OS's configuration and security updates for everything exposed to the outside world (firewalls, etc).

Another thing about packaging. I've started noticing myself subconsciously adding even a trivial Dockerfile for most of my projects now just in case I want to run it later and not hassle with installing anything. That way it gives me a "known working" copy which I can more or less rely on to run if I need to. It took a while for me to get to that point though
by lotsofpulp | 2025-10-16 17:17:43+00:00
>But that's still cheaper than paying for the health problems downstream of ultraprocessed food.

It is unrealistic to expect the vast majority of humans to prioritize the long term in every single decision they make, especially if they have a dim view of the long term.

It is logical to want to enjoy life in the present, even if it will hurt in the long term, if you are being brought down by other aspects, such as stress about income volatility and belief in low probabilities of upward movement, etc.
by astrobe_ | 2025-10-16 17:17:50+00:00
Or just watch its market share erode until it vanishes from the charts. You picked "beginning" too, and indeed it started when they betrayed the power-users userbase they had (the one that installed FF on their mum's computer and actively promoted it) to be more like the oh-so-successful Chrome (which was pushed with dark patterns like being bundled with AV updates). Personally, it made me go to the "old" Opera (Opera 12) until it got "Chromified" and sold to China.

They have consistently been doing the opposite of what the majority of their userbase expect from them (Pocket, paid sites forced to the "Speedial" page,...). To me, the only remaining value of FF is being up-to-date with web shena^H^H^H^H^H standards.

A FOSS project shouldn't be focused on succeeding; they should be focused on doing the right thing. No little compromises or play-on-words on your values. And if that means less funding, too bad, but so be it.
by caconym_ | 2025-10-16 17:18:17+00:00
Probably because everyone knows most SaaSes are slimy schemes to lock customers in and exploit them for every last penny that can be wrung out of them.

If you want trust, you don't need a Chief Officer for it---you just need a product that works well and a business strategy that doesn't rely on making your product slowly worse and more expensive until all your customers hate you.