MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-12 21:18:43+00:00
> How do I break out of this mindset?

To the extent there is a single mindset, it’s in execution orientation more than the various deficiencies that interrupt it.

That said, the most common forms are procrastination and perfectionism. The former results in mis-prioritization, e.g. fucking with the font in your incorporation docs instead of making sales calls. The latter in task obsession, e.g. fucking with the wording in a sales message.

My demon was the former, so I can speak to it directly: pick up hobbies that force you to prioritize on the fly. For me, that’s been backcountry skiing, diving and flying. Except, of course, those are hobbies I picked up after my startup. The real answer is to find a co-founder (and/or team) who balances your patience setting.
by vldszn | 2025-10-12 21:18:46+00:00
I’m working on a free and open-source invoice generator: https://easyinvoicepdf.com/?template=stripe

- No sign-up, works entirely in-browser

- Live PDF preview + instant download

- VAT EU support

- Shareable invoice links

- Multi-language (10+) & multi-currency

- Multiple templates (incl. Stripe-style)

- Mobile-friendly

GitHub: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf

Would love feedback, contributions, or ideas for other templates/features.
by andy99 | 2025-10-12 21:18:47+00:00
Cell phones have been through how many generations between the 80s and now? All the past generations are obsolete, but the investment in improving the technology (which is really a continuation of WWII era RF engineering) means we have readily available low cost miniature comms equipment. It doesn’t matter that the capex on individual phones was wasted.

Same for GPUs/LLMs? At some point things will mature and we’ll be left with plentiful, cheap, high end LLM access, on the back of the investment that has been made. Whether or not it’s running on legacy GPUs, like some 90s fiber still carries traffic, is meaningless. It’s what the investment unlocks.
by pr0j3c7t0dd | 2025-10-12 21:19:16+00:00
Also built my own MCP server off the back of this article. I too have noticed during refactors that Coding agents take the long way around to move things to other files, and it can cause errors in the process (and burn tokens). Here's my attempt at the solution, with an encrypted data store and undo operations. Give it a try and see if you like it: https://github.com/Pr0j3c7t0dd-Ltd/cut-copy-paste-mcp
by wsxiaoys | 2025-10-12 21:19:41+00:00
I've spent the last few months working on a custom RL model for coding tasks. The biggest headache has been the lack of good tooling for tuning the autorater's prompt. (That's the judge that gives the training feedback.) The process is like any other quality-focused task—running batch rating jobs and doing SxS evaluations—but the tooling really falls short. I think I'll have to build my own tools once I wrap up the current project
by duxup | 2025-10-12 21:20:09+00:00
The time sink of youth sports is bonkers.

Hockey in my area (Minnesota) is effectively year round. Hockey families are almost isolated in their own worlds they spend so much time on it. I know some basketball families like that too ... only time we see them is a wave as they're coming and going.

If they're happy I guess that is good, but the cost in $$$ and time, you almost need a parent dedicated to spend much of their non working time to this sport seems like it would exclude a lot of people.
by tpm | 2025-10-12 21:20:42+00:00
Yes, and the language, as well as the state are both culture-specific things too. So once the topic is "what is the value of the 'sex' field in Indian passport for a member of the hijra community", the answer might be 'E'. That is the sex as seen by the Indian state. The US state might see that in a different way. They now apparently decided to cancel everyone who's not 'm' or 'f', but that does not make it true.

And you probably had a different 'sex' in mind. But I'm not going to answer that, because not only I truly don't care, but also it's a great example how even one simple word has different meanings. Reality is complex.
by sudodevnull | 2025-10-12 21:20:43+00:00
You are very very right, I guess my real problem is I don't care what they say behind stuff that is a straight out lie. Your boos mean nothing to me, I've seen what they cheer for.

I'll push back a bit in that I'm still out here helping other devs and making cool stuff so not exactly like them. Happy to have head to head with actual code and some modicum of stakes on the line.
by mrighele | 2025-10-12 21:21:29+00:00
The issue is not the invention of the dotless I, it already exists, the issue is that the took a vowerl , i/I, and the assigned the lower case to one vowel, and the upper case to a different one, and invented what left missing.

It's like they decided that the uppercase of "a" is "E" and the uppercase of "e" is "A".
by wowohwow | 2025-10-12 21:21:35+00:00
Going solo on https://meldsecurity.com/

I'm putting a bunch of security tools / data feeds together as a service. The goal is to help teams and individuals run scans/analysis/security project management for "freemium" (certain number of scans/projects for free each month, haven't locked in on how it'll pan out fully $$ wise).

I want to help lower the technical hurdles to running and maintaining security tools for teams and individuals. There are a ton of great open source tools out there, most people either don't know or don't have the time to do a technical deep dive into each. So I'm adding utilities and tools by the day to the platform.

Likewise, there's a built in expert platform for you to get help on your security problems built into the system. (Currently an expert team consisting of [me]). Longer term, I'm working on some AI plugins to help alert on CVEs custom to you, generate automated scans, and some other fun stuff.

https://meldsecurity.com/ycombinator (if you're interested in free credits)
by godelski | 2025-10-12 21:21:55+00:00
This is only first order accurate and the failure comes from higher order effects.

In your model you need the religious leaders to be aware of the ruse but still be benevolent actors. This is problematic because it makes selecting leaders from within the religion difficult (especially at lower ranks). By waiting to tell them the game many followers are likely to revolt as they've been told their entire lives and core beliefs are a lie. That risks collapsing the system. By pulling leaders from outside the faith you garner distrust from followers (maybe this could work if those members can be said to directly come from heaven rather, but that's difficult to pull off). By selecting from the followers and not revealing the ruse your system has no self realigning mechanism. In all instances you suffer from the effects of a game of telephone ("Chinese whispers"), but probably the most in the last case.

In all situations you are still vulnerable to the rise of fanatics. True believers of any philosophy can be dangerous, and the more power they possess (such as leadership) the more danger they possess. With competing religions you justify division between true believers. Even if the leaders of competing are not, the true believers will create that division and organize. A small population is all that is needed in order to upset the system.

I think you're right that there is utility to many aspects of religion (not just Christianity) but holy wars are still bloody wars. It's important to realize that these features can be met through other beliefs. Some of the greatest features are community, as organized religion forces common ground and people that have differing opinions in disjoint domains (e.g. shared religion, different politics) are forced to interact, which leads to lower tribalism (though not sub-tribes).

Maybe religion is a local optima, but it would be naïve to discount its flaws. By its nature it is dividing, even if at the same time it is unifying. Local and global structures need not be identical.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-10-12 21:23:31+00:00
Exactly. If human characters don't react like real humans would, then that is much harder to 'justify' or 'suspend belief' about.

Lets take our helmets off in a unknown hostile enivroment?

Lets play with giant worms with teeth, as if in real life those things wouldn't scare the crap out of you even if they weren't alien.
by prmoustache | 2025-10-12 21:23:53+00:00
> I don’t know what happens after we die.

It is quite simple actually, you are dead and you as a whole only exist as a memory in other people's brains and your identity as paperwork, tombstones and for those that couldn't refrain from attracting attention history books, old journals artworks and memorials. Your molecules and atoms are disponible for anything else the cycle of nature needs. Expecting anything else is at best delusional.
by emporas | 2025-10-12 21:24:21+00:00
> Are you willing to indemnify the manufacturer from any liability [..] No factory warranty once you make changes.

Car manufacturers have figured out how to make expensive cars with good materials and very safe as well. The problem is cheap cars, which can be much more defective and dangerous to drive.

There is a solution to that though. 10-50 people combining their buying power, getting an expensive car and time sharing their usage of it. A mix between public transportation, robo-taxi and personal ownership.

> The engineer might decide to use a particular grade of aluminum on a control arm [..]

That's a problem indeed, a 3d printer for example might be off by some millimeters in some dimension, the manufacturer accounts for that in software and it prints well afterwards. What kind of materials are used is important for sure, but the properties of metals used in the car can be made public, especially if the manufacturer is paid premium and just sold an expensive car instead of a cheap one.

The thing with software though, is that it can be infinitely extended and modified. I can have ten thousand programs more running in my computer tomorrow, with no change to anything physical. Physical stuff need to be manufactured, transported, warehoused, so there is always a limit.

Consumers want always more stuff, if 10 programs are available they want 10 programs. If 100 programs are available they want 100 programs. It never ends. Proprietary software is not ideal there.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-10-12 21:24:22+00:00
> I wouldn't hasten to blame outsourcing on one political party or the other.

I don't blame it on one political party, I'm setting the blame record straight. The current admin blames the Democrats for everything including outsourcing, when in fact only some Democrats tried to prevent it from going too far.

> Ross Perot and his "giant sucking sound"

The guy damaged the independent candidate idea more than anyone because he was politically illiterate - a common occurrence among big ego business owners.

> Until Trump, neither party was willing to commit political capital towards questioning the free trade orthodoxy.

On the contrary, The GOP and the Trump admin are trying to make political capital by hyping ridiculously implemented tariffs which fuel inflation, kill the dollar and put a lot of small businesses in danger. Trump doesn't even rise to the level of Perot, rumors are already floating around about who's actually running the show.

"Questioning the free trade orthodoxy" isn't the same as doing the right thing at the right time and place. We get tariffs at arbitrary levels, on a haywire timetable and that cannot be good for anything besides speculation, which the people pay for via inflation.
by BuildTheRobots | 2025-10-12 21:24:33+00:00
Bigger orgs for the most part use whatever vpn solutions their (potentially decade old) hardware firewalls support. Until you can manage and endpoint a Wireguard tunnel on Cisco, Juniper, Fortigate (etc) hardware then it's going to take a while to become more mainstream.

Which is a shame, because I have a number of problematic links (low bandwidth, high latency) that wireguard would be absolutely fantastic for, but neither end supports it and there's no chance they'll let me start terminating a tonne of VPNs in software on a random *nix box.
by mceachen | 2025-10-12 21:24:50+00:00
I have to balance this with what I know about my reptile brain. It’s distracting to me when Claude declares that I’m “absolutely right!” or making a “brilliant insight,” so it’s worth it to me to spend the couple context tokens and tell them to avoid these cliches.

(The latest Claude has a `/context` command that’s great at measuring this stuff btw)
by leptons | 2025-10-12 21:25:21+00:00
I once worked at a startup where I was employee #1 doing full-stack. The CTO who hired me and 5 other developers wanted 100% test coverage from the start, and none of the details about his demands were discussed ahead of time. The rest of the tech workflow was so mired in bureaucracy and process that it was like swimming through mud. It was a disaster, we couldn't ship anything fast enough or at all, then the company pivoted, and then finally failed after about 8 months.
by kayo_20211030 | 2025-10-12 21:25:23+00:00
This is very glib. Hindsight is always 20/20 vision. No corpse appreciates the coroner explaining why they died. A patient prefers a doctor who prevents them moving from a patient to a corpse. A lot of startups have 3-6 months before they're dead. Stone dead! Architectural review sounds great, and it is, but the requirements change every day - they know what those requirements are right now; but later, even a day later, who knows? Can any company do a review before they know the "shape" of what they're trying to achieve? They have 3-6 months, and they need to ship. No startup has a reasonable chance of getting the architecture right unless the requirements for the product (a product that should generate income, and should pay the bills) are at least close. Testing? Test what? The product hasn't gelled. What are they testing? They're fumbling though. That reddit fella should cut them some slack at the funeral, and not dance on the grave. Ex post facto bs.
by jasonfarnon | 2025-10-12 21:25:47+00:00
"Are geriatrics really expected to put up with all this theatrical nonsense"

reminds of circa 2000 watching all the new Internet users struggling with the multiple/cascade pop-ups on websites. That's what's so odious about the situation now: The OS bears the same relationship to the user as those spammy websites.

speaking of "geriatrics" I wonder if the youth are actually responsible for a lot of this, unintentionally. this constant line between corporations and my device reminds me mainly of the smartphone experience. And, I'm told, modern videogames. Older folks like me tend to thnk of their desktop OS as inviolate--too many decades when a program phoning home on its own without my permission meant virus or other grave problem. Maybe people who grow up with smartphones don't have this boundary. Msft would know this.
by Llamamoe | 2025-10-12 21:25:55+00:00
> Otherwise, what's the benefit seen if you delay an average (but inevitable) infection from occurring by X days? There basically is none.

It reduces the R0 factor, which reduces the amount of people that need to be resistant for herd immunity to take place, and which makes it easier for other measures to bring it down further, potentially below 1 where the disease dies out instead of continuing to spread.
Show HN: Music Visualizer with Animated Color Themes Created via ChatGPT Prompts
by sylwekkominek | 2025-10-12 21:26:17+00:00
I built an open source real-time music visualizer that lets you create animated color themes simply by describing them with natural language prompts. ChatGPT helps convert your descriptions into live visual styles.

The visualization is fully customizable and powered by DSP and GPU shaders.

Specification: https://sylwekkominek.github.io/SpectrumAnalyzer/
by rhl314 | 2025-10-12 21:26:39+00:00
I am working on Magnetron (https://magnetron.ai)

It is a tool that lets you create whiteboard explainers.

You can prompt it with an idea or upload a document and it will create a video with illustrations and voiceover. All the design and animations are done by using AI apis, you dont need any design skills.

Here is a video explainer of the popular "Attention is all you need" paper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x_jIK3kqfA

Would love to hear some feedback
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-12 21:26:41+00:00
Symbolic AI is dead. Either stop trying to dig out and reanimate its corpse, or move the goalposts like Gary Marcus did - and start saying "LLMs with a Python interpreter beat LLMs without, and Python is symbolic, so symbolic AI won, GG".

Hallucinations are incredibly fucking overrated as a problem. They are a consequence of the LLM in question not having a good enough internal model of its own knowledge, which is downstream from how they're trained. Plenty of things could be done to improve on that - and there is no fundamental limitation that would prevent LLMs from matching human hallucination rates - which are significantly above zero.

There is a lot of "transformer LLMs are flawed" going around, and a lot of alternative architectures being proposed, or even trained and demonstrated. But so far? There's nothing that would actually outperform transformer LLMs at their strengths. Most alternatives are sidegrades at best.

For how "naive" transformer LLMs seem, they sure set a high bar.

Saying "I know better" is quite easy. Backing that up is really hard.
by okanat | 2025-10-12 21:27:00+00:00
As a Turkish speaker who was using a Turkish-locale setup in my teenage years these kinds of bugs frustrated me infinitely. Half of the Java or Python apps I installed never run. My PHP webservers always had problems with random software. Ultimately, I had to change my system's language to English. However, US has godawful standards for everything: dates, measurement units, paper sizes.

When I shared computers with my parents I had to switch languages back-and-forth all the time. This helped me learn English rather quickly but, I find it a huge accessibility and software design issue.

If your program depends on letter cases, that is a badly designed program, period. If a language ships toUpper or a toLower function without a mandatory language field, it is badly designed too. The only slightly-better option is making toUpper and toLower ASCII-only and throwing error for any other character set.

While half of the language design of C is questionable and outright dangerous, making its functions locale-sensitive by all popular OSes was an avoidable mistake. Yet everybody did that. Just the existence of this behavior is a reason I would like to get rid of anything GNU-based in the systems I develop today.

I don't care if Unicode releases a conversion map. Natural-language behavior should always require natural language metadata too. Even modern languages like Rust did a crappy job of enforcing it: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.char.html#method.to_... . Yes it is significantly safer but converting 'ß' to 'SS' in German definitely has gotchas too.
by klardotsh | 2025-10-12 21:27:07+00:00
I’ve worked in plenty of startups (the overwhelming majority of my career, actually) and did not perceive the performance of in-office teams to be significantly better than the remote teams I’ve been on. The floor is probably lower for remote teams (in that ineffective remote teams are horribly ineffective), but the ceiling is comparable, and the average is (again, in my experience) anywhere from comparable to slightly better, because folks are working the ways+hours they’re most effective, not what someone else thinks should be the most effective.
by j79 | 2025-10-12 21:27:34+00:00
> That's why there's a government shutdown, 100% of that is on the Dems.

Back in my day, the filibuster existed to encourage compromise. The idea that this is "100%" on the Dems is absolutely ridiculous.

There's not much I agree with Trump on, but I do agree with what he said back in 2013: "A shutdown means the president is weak."

Mr. "Art of the Deal" really makes the best deals.
by LTL_FTC | 2025-10-12 21:27:46+00:00
An application that helps deaf and nonverbal individuals with daily interactions when they’re out and about.

My first career was in sales. And most of the time these interactions began with grabbing a sheet of paper and writing to one another. I think small LLMs can help here.

Currently making use of api’s but I think small models on phones will be good enough soon. Just completed my MVP.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-10-12 21:28:05+00:00
NGL that's kind of been the appeal of atproto. Once you get into the weeds you start learning about all the many many many moving parts but at its face 99% of it is:

Hey here's some schema files we call lexicons. Every single interaction with the network is a JSON RPC call to the same domain (whatever your PDS is) with the lexicon's path appended to it.

The fact that it's trivial to hack on atproto via the devtools console or a curl prompt makes things so much more fun to play with.
by phaser | 2025-10-12 21:28:43+00:00
Microlandia, the brutally honest city builder. Posting this for a second time, because i’ve been working super hard on a steam release.

last month’s “what are you working on” thread impulsed me to upload this game to itch and 1 month later, i’ve got a small community, lots of feedback and iterations. It brought a whole new life to a project that was on the verge of abandoning.

So, I’m really grateful for this thread. https://explodi.itch.io/microlandia
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-10-12 21:30:08+00:00
Some other discussions recently:

Oracle will have to borrow at least $25B a year to fund AI fantasy, says analyst

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45417523

The biggest sign of an AI bubble is starting to appear – debt

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45461975
by rubyn00bie | 2025-10-12 21:30:37+00:00
I don’t get this. Marketing this as an urban bike makes no sense. It’s heavy, looks like it’ll be awful to maintain because so much is custom, and it’s relatively expensive. I rode fixed gears for years because they’re light, easy to carry up stairs, and can take being knocked about or banged up by other cyclists locking their bikes up next to one.

Even something of equal weight like the legendary Surly Long-Haul Trucker is going to last longer and be more practical in every possible application. Maybe if you live somewhere costal and salt will corrode the steel or something it makes sense? I have a hard time believing this would fair better though.
by ysnp | 2025-10-12 21:31:00+00:00
All mobile computing and connectivity hardware is unverifiable in reality and by design. It's not some property exclusive to Google Pixels.

Their business model also does not involve selling data afaik, it's selling access to their adspaces [1] all over the internet including the ability to target people (based on information Google jealously hoard). They stand to lose just as much as most other OEMs if they did suspicious things in hardware just like Apple, Samsung etc.

If you're serious about security you will avoid using OEMs that have unfortunate patch gaps which leave device owners at the mercy to *known vulnerabilities* [1][2][3][4] as well as unknown threats which is fortunately one of GrapheneOS's many reasonable device support requirements.

[1] https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/more-effective-med...

[2] https://srlabs.de/blog/android-patch-gap

[3] https://srlabs.de/blog/android-patch-gap-2020

[4] https://www.android-device-security.org/talks/

[5] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/vulnerability-manag...
by victornomad | 2025-10-12 21:31:25+00:00
I'm working on a series of "fun experiments" that use LLMs under the hood.

Some are small tech jokes, while others were born from curiosity to see how LLMs would behave in specific scenarios and interactions.

I also tried to use this collection of experiments as a way to land a new job, but I'm starting to realize it might not be serious enough :)

Happy to hear what you think!

https://llmparty.pixeletes.com