MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yojo | 2025-10-09 16:06:43+00:00
I don't want to take the time writing up a cogent response to an article someone didn't bother taking the time to write. With this particular article, there were a couple of points I wanted to respond to, before I realized there was no human mind behind them.

I've always liked the HN community because it facilitates an intelligent exchange of ideas. I've learned a lot trawling the comments on this site. I don't want to see the energy of human discourse being sucked up and wasted on the output of ChatGPT. Aggressively flagging this stuff is a sort of immune response for the community.
by rjmunro | 2025-10-09 16:06:43+00:00
The other way to look at Crowdstrike is that it prevented probably thousands of attacks by ransomware and other adversaries. Then it had a bug which meant you had to visit your computer and manually reboot it, with no data loss or leakage.

Would you rather have to deal with criminals who have invaded your systems wanting ransoms with no guarantee they will restore the data, or not leak private information, or would you rather have to reboot your machines with a complete understanding of what happened and how?
Launch HN: Extend (YC W23) – Turn your messiest documents into data
by kbyatnal | 2025-10-09 16:06:49+00:00
Hey HN! We’re Kushal and Eli, co-founders of Extend (https://www.extend.ai/). Extend is a toolkit for AI teams to ingest any kind of messy document (e.g. PDFs, images, excel files) and build incredible products.

We built Extend to handle the hardest documents that break most pipelines. You can see some examples here in our demo (no signup required): https://dashboard.extend.ai/demo

I know you're probably thinking “not another document API startup”. Unfortunately, the problem just isn’t solved yet!

I’ve personally spent months struggling to build reliable document pipelines at a previous job. The long tail of edge cases is endless — massive tables split across pages, 100pg+ files, messy handwriting, scribbled signatures, checkboxes represented in 10 different formats, multiple file types… the list just keeps going. After seeing countless other teams during our time in YC run into these same issues, we started building Extend.

We initially launched with a set of APIs for engineers to parse, classify, split, and extract documents. That started to take off, and soon we were deployed in production at companies building everything from medical agents, to real-time bank account onboarding, to mortgage automation. Over time, we’ve worked closely with these teams and seen first-hand how large the gap is between raw OCR/model outputs —> a production-ready pipeline (LLMs and VLMs aren’t magic).

Unlike other solutions in the space, we're specifically focused on three core areas: (1) the computer vision layer, (2) LLM context engineering, and (3) the surrounding product tooling. The combination of all three is what we think it takes to hit 99% accuracy and maintain it at scale.

For instance, to parse messy handwriting, we built an agentic OCR correction layer which uses a VLM to review and make edits to low confidence OCR errors. To tackle multi-page tabular data, we built a semantic chunking engine which can detect the optimal boundaries within a document so models can excel with smaller context inputs.

We also shipped a prompt optimization agent to automate the endless prompt engineering whack-a-mole teams spend time on. It’s built as a background agent to replicate the best prompter on your team, and runs in a loop with access to a set of tools (view files, run evals, analyze results, and update schemas).

The most surprising part of this whole experience has been seeing how many crazy PDF formats are out there! We've run into everything from supermarket inventory magazines, pesticide labels, construction blueprints, and satellite manufacturing plans.

Everything described above is live today. You can see it in action here (no signup): https://dashboard.extend.ai/demo. To upload your own files, you can log in and do so (we’re adding free usage credits to all accounts that sign up today).

We’re excited to be sharing with HN! We’d love to hear about your experiences building document pipelines. Please try it out, and share any and all feedback with us (e.g. hard documents that didn’t work, feature requests).
by therealfiona | 2025-10-09 16:07:03+00:00
What ever you have laying around is a great starting point.

It all comes down to what you want to spend vs what you want to host and how you want to host it.

You could build a raspberry pi docker swarm cluster and get very far. Heck, a single Pi 5 with 4gb of memory will get you on your way. Or you could use an old computer and get just as far. Or you could use a full blown rack mount server with a real IPMI. Or you could use a VPS and accomplish the same thing in the cloud.
by marcosdumay | 2025-10-09 16:07:04+00:00
> a non-existent release method called "waterfall" as a straw man

The person that invented the name never saw it, but waterfall development is extremely common and the dominant way large companies outsource software development even today.

The only thing that changed now is that now those companies track the implementation of the waterfall requirements in scrum ceremonies. And yes, a few more places actually adopted agile.
by codingdave | 2025-10-09 16:07:06+00:00
> These aren't just tools anymore—they're systems that can handle entire flights from takeoff to landing.

Not quite. They can handle takeoff just fine. Landing? Not so much. If this company really thinks that vibe coding is key to speed, and hires based on people's buy-in to that concept, they have a mountain of tech debt that is going to land on that airplane in mid-air one of these days.
by ktosobcy | 2025-10-09 16:08:16+00:00
Hmm... maybe not less, but IMHO majority of the startups now focus on "discrupting the market" and colleting enough VC money that they could survive to be bought up by the bigger player.

The whole landscape is put on the head - instead of promoting creating something new that could survive on its own and be useful and provitable for the creator we are now in the market of creating a fodder for the BigCorp
by robots0only | 2025-10-09 16:08:24+00:00
Here you can see another much simpler robot folding clothes for far longer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdeBIR0jVvU (there are more videos from other companies as well)

To answer your question -- folding clothes is easy, because clothes easily deform, do not break, fall smoothly when you drop them and most importantly are easily resettable task. Just through the well folded cloth up and voila start again.
by R_Spaghetti | 2025-10-09 16:09:08+00:00
You write: I'm fortunate enough to work at a company (enum.co) where digital sovereignty is not just a phrase.

info.addr.tools shows [1]: MX 1 smtp.google.com. TXT "mailcoach-verification=a873d3f3-0f4f-4a04-a085-d53f70708e84"

TXT "v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all"

TXT "google-site-verification=TTrl7IWxuGQBEqbNAz17GKZzS-utrW7SCZbgdo5tkk0"

This is not just a phrase, it is a DNS entry. Using the most evil in phrases of digital sovereignty.

[1] https://info.addr.tools/enum.co
by 0xWTF | 2025-10-09 16:09:46+00:00
I love the idea of high quality code. I do, however, dismiss the energy efficiency issue.

> Data centers already consume 200 TWh annually.

That's 7.2 x 10^16 joules

Some estimates suggest that's low. Let's multiply by 5. Annually, that's

3.6 x 10^17 joules

The total radiant power of the sun that hits the Earth's atmosphere is about 174 PW, and about 47% of that lands on the surface. Even with the most drastic global warming models, approximately 100% of that is radiated away at the same time. Evidence: we're not charred embers. So the Earth's power budget, at the surface, is about 81 PW. Annually, that's

2.6 × 10^24 joules

Global annual oil production is about 3 x 10^10 barrels, that's

1.8 x 10^20 joules

So, the data centers consume 0.2% of the global petroleum budget and 1.4 × 10^-7 of the planet's power budget.

The digital economy is about 15% of global GDP, so I submit tech is thoroughly on the right side of their energy conservation balance sheet normalized against other industries and there are other verticals to focus your energy concerns on (e.g. internal combustion engines, including Otto, Brayton, Rankin, and Diesel cycle engines). Among serious people trying to solve serious problems, you would do your credibility a favor by not expending so many words and thus so much reader time on such a miniscule argument.

If you want to talk about energy related to code, take the total power consumption of the software engineer's life, and find a way to big-O that. I'm willing to bet they contribute more to global warming driving than all their compute jobs combined.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-10-09 16:09:56+00:00
> There’s no evidence that this ever happened other than this guy’s word.

There's a yt channel where the sessions were livestreamed. It's in their FAQ. I haven't felt the need to check them, but there are 10-12h sessions in there if you're that invested in proving that this is "so far outside of any capabilities"...

A brief look at the commit history should show you that it's 99.9% guaranteed to be written by an LLM :)

When's the last time you used one of these SotA coding agents? They've been getting better and better for a while now. I am not surprised at all that this worked.
by pydry | 2025-10-09 16:10:09+00:00
>Most software is its own little monopoly. Yes, you could ditch Teams for Zoom but is it really the same?

I worked for a company where people did that en masse because it was genuinely better. Microsoft then complained to their assets within the company who promptly banned zoom "for security reasons". IT then remote uninstalled it from everybody's workstation.

That's paid software eviscerating the competition, which was free and better.

A month later teams was hit with 3 really bad zero days and nobody said a damn thing.

So, more secure, too.
by zahlman | 2025-10-09 16:10:10+00:00
> What country are you from? To "wish a politically motivated death" on someone is illegal there?

This is a strawman. Your quoted text does not come from GP and does not fairly represent any of its argument (which makes your use of italics hard to understand).

Actual incitement to political violence is actually occurring on these platforms. People have screencaps and everything.
by Kavelach | 2025-10-09 16:10:27+00:00
I wish the most popular software forge didn't include a bunch of other software solutions like issue tracking or forums.

Having everything in one service definitely increases interoperability between those solutions, but it definitely decreases stability. In addition, each of the other systems is not the best in their class (I really detest GH Actions for example).

Why do so many solutions grow so big? Is it done to increase enterprise adoption?
by jcims | 2025-10-09 16:10:34+00:00
I don't know if I caught your comment in my peripheral vision or what but GPT-2 is exactly where I conceptually placed this.

Neural networks for motion control is very clearly resulting in some incredible capability in a relatively short amount of time vs. the more traditional control hierarchies used in something like Boston Dynamics. Look at Unitree's G1

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mP3Exb1YC8o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPSLMX_V38E

It's like an agile idiot, very physically capable but no purpose.

The next domain is going to be incorporating goals and intent and short/long term chains of causality into the model, and for that it seems we're presently missing quite a bit usable training data. That will clearly evolve over time, as will the fidelity of simulations that can be used to train the model and the learned experience of deployed robots.
by danaris | 2025-10-09 16:10:38+00:00
No, I assure you, it is very common for doctors' offices not to know whether a particular procedure will be covered.

This is not just because of the capriciousness of insurance adjusters, but because they have to deal with all the 273 different variations of insurance plans that people who come through their offices might have.

In general, a doctor's primary goal will be to get you good care.

An insurance company's only goal nowadays is to make as much money as possible for as little effort as possible.
by gengstrand | 2025-10-09 16:11:06+00:00
The conversation here seems to be more focused on coding from scratch. What I have noticed when I was looking at this last year was that LLMs were bad at enhancing already existing code (e.g. unit tests) that used annotation (a.k.a. decorators) for dependency injection. Has anyone here attempted that with the more recent models? If so, then what were your findings?
by jghn | 2025-10-09 16:11:08+00:00
Part of the problem is the mods' narrow definition of "conservative". And this is the larger point of this entire comment thread. There are plenty of people with traditional conservative values who are not welcome in r/conservative. Not to mention, over time the tent has been shrinking as well.

Which, to be fair, is not unlike how the GOP has been operating over the last few years.
by npodbielski | 2025-10-09 16:11:08+00:00
I would not use nuc like this guy. Had one and it was slow and it have limited capacity.

Then I had my old PC and it was very good but I wanted more nvme disks and motherboard supported only 7.

Now I am migrating to threadripper which is a bit overkill but I will have ability to run 1 or two GPUs along with 23 nvme disks for example.
by MrDunham | 2025-10-09 16:11:36+00:00
> "LLMs are terrible at asking questions. They just make a bunch of assumptions and brute-force something based on those guesses."

Strongly disagree that they're terrible at asking questions.

They're terrible at asking questions unless you ask them to... at which point they ask good, sometimes fantastic questions.

All my major prompts now have some sort of "IMPORTANT: before you begin you must ask X clarifying questions. Ask them one at a time, then reevaluate the next question based on the response"

X is typically 2–5, which I find DRASTICALLY improves output.
Career Pivot from Coding
by mightbeawhile | 2025-10-09 16:11:52+00:00
I've been working as a programmer (deliberately using a vague term) for about 10 years. Due to certain difficultis that I'd rather not disclose (not blacklisted in the industry, if that's your concern) I'm seriously considering a career change. Something relatively separate from coding work, and if possible development/IT work in general, but that would scratch the same itch for problem-solving and have a good chance of at least some skill transfer. That career being "lucrative" is not a primary concern.

One note - my reasons for this change are my own, and I can't prove this without disclosing things that I want to stay private, but they are not trite or shallow. I understand it may be fun to speculate why, and I guess I don't really care if you do; but it's not that I'm just "bored" and want to "try something new". Just know that it's something that's important to me, specifically - one person on the other side of the world. Thank you!
by jfengel | 2025-10-09 16:12:27+00:00
The classic advice is that even in an obvious bubble, you cannot time the market. Long term, the easiest solution is also the best: just leave your money broadly in the market. The market may crash, but in a decade or so it'll be back here, and pulling your money out just costs you opportunities during the run-up.

The aphoristic version: "Time in the market beats timing the market." History has borne that out repeatedly.

Having said that... maybe this time it really is different. Even before the AI bubble, there was the "Everything Bubble", and it looks for all the world as if the AI bubble is just a way to prolong that. Too much cash has flowed into the market, and it may never reach this point again. It could take out the dollar itself.

In which case... well, logically, you could cash out, put things into a wide basket of foreign currencies, and hope that you're not losing too many opportunities. Wait for what you hope is a bottom, and console yourself that if it does crash the time-in-market philosophy will reassert itself so it doesn't matter if you guess right or not.

Or not. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, in which case the best advice is to just not invest specifically in AI stocks and content yourself with ordinary market earnings -- averaging through the crash.

This is all really classic advice; I don't have any special insights. And the classic advice has always been good... until it isn't.
by JimDabell | 2025-10-09 16:12:40+00:00
If you clone the Windmill source from GitHub and build it, that’s AGPL.

If you enable the enterprise feature flag or use the Docker image, the result is source available.

I think it’s fair to call Windmill open source. It’s using the open core model for commercialisation. Just because you publish open source it doesn’t obligate you to make all the code you write open source.
by jopsen | 2025-10-09 16:12:43+00:00
Security updates.

And fixing things when they eventually break.

Honestly, there is a reason I still use a dreamhost shared plan. It's dirt cheap, been running forever, and I've never had to do the boring stuff.

And if they break my app, I can ask them to fix it.

If you deploy your app on a PaaS you still have to update everything inside the container.

Old school php hosting on a shared server does have some upsides - namely affordable support. (Sure, if I'm an extreme edge case support will not do much for me).

The same kind of thing for "self-hosting" would be cool.
by recursive | 2025-10-09 16:13:53+00:00
I had exactly this problem. In my experience, the documentation over-simplified things to the extreme. Why are hooks not normal function calls? Where do they get their state? Why are they not functionally pure? "Functional purity" has been muddied too. It used to mean a function whose output depends only on its parameter values. But hooks are not pure, and thus components that depend on them are not either. But react still uses this language.

None of the official docs helped, but I found myself required to use it for work. And I faced confusing behavior I could not explain with the documentation. So I went on a deep-dive for a month or so. I didn't learn everything about react, but I got an intuition for how hooks work. That's not to say I like them. I'll use them now only if I have to, but at least I can. To my mind, hooks present a surface that's difficult to make sense of and hard to use.
by cutemonster | 2025-10-09 16:14:31+00:00
> hollowed out economy based on services and finance

Just an example from today:

"N8n raises $180M (n8n.io)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45525336

That's what the US (and Europe?) seems to invest in - but things like that doesn't make the US any more competitive with China.

What if instead it was $180M in new green mining tech or something.
by zahlman | 2025-10-09 16:14:42+00:00
It's gone multiple ways in the past for not just city subreddits, but all kinds of regional ones. For example, r/canada has r/OnGuardForThee (because they thought the mods were allowing bigotry) and also (now private) r/RedEnsign (because, more or less, they thought the crowd making r/OnGuardForThee was falsely defaming them as bigots).
by BinaryIgor | 2025-10-09 16:14:56+00:00
"Many many years ago I was running an Android phone with Google services like Google Maps. One day I was looking for a feature in my Google account and saw that GMaps recorded my location history for years with detailed geocoordinates about every trip and every visit.

I was fascinated but also scared about that since I've never actually enabled it myself. I do like the fact that I could look up my location for every point in time but I want to be in control about that and know that only I have access to that data."

This made me thing whether there are any services (or ideas thereof) that would provide this kind of functionality but story encrypted in a similar way as proton does for email; in theory, you can use this pattern - data stored but encrypted on the server, but decrypted only by the client - to rebuild many useful services while retaining full sovereignty of your data.
by igor47 | 2025-10-09 16:15:10+00:00
Thank you for writing this! I've been playing around with writing something similar and I getting lost going way too far up the concept chain. Like, ultimately, I self host because... Capitalism?

In my ideal world, one tech savvy person would run services for a group of their friends and family. This makes the concept more mainstream and accessible, while also creating social cohesion for that group. I think we've monetized too many of our relationships, and often have no real reason to be in community. This is a big change from most of human history, where you depended on community for survival. Building lower-stakes bonds now (I run your email, you help me fix my car) helps avoid the problem later when you really need help (old, sick) but have never practiced getting anything you need except by paying for it
by AlexandrB | 2025-10-09 16:15:40+00:00
> I do see it as more of a craft than a typical trade. There are just too many ways to do things to compare it to e.g. an electrician.

There are sooo many ways to get electricity from one point to another. The reason that a lot of those options are no longer used is not because they don't exist but because they were legislated out. For example, if you want to run wild just run a single "hot" wire to all your outlets and connect each outlet's neutral to the nearest copper plumbing. Totally esoteric, but it would deliver electricity to appliances just fine. Safety is another matter.
by renewiltord | 2025-10-09 16:15:42+00:00
It's just that sci fi authors try to see into the future and have to write things interesting. There's two ways:

- novel idea or technology

- counterintuitive effect of technology

I think the second is easier written as "what if Good Thing was actually Bad". So that's what you get. The former style is perhaps still available in books like Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

But the latter style is much more readily written and consequently has dominated sci fi as more authors enter the field.

The Torment Nexus view is mostly driven by context blindness. "oh my god, they'll scan the mother's blood to perform eugenics if they have sequencing technology and it will be horrible". Well, advanced societies do that a lot: Down's is scanned for using a Maternal Serum Alpha Foetoprotein test. "oh my god, they'll use ultrasounds to find undesirable genetics, torment Nexus" but Nuchal Translucency tests are fairly routine in advanced societies and we're fine with them.

This might appear like a fixation on dystopian literature to others. "omg gattaca this MSAFP". It's just generic technoluddism because almost all near future tech is explored via sci fi in the "what if Good is Bad" genre.
by lukasschwab | 2025-10-09 16:15:49+00:00
After about a decade of experimentation (NetNewsWire, Feedbin, Miniflux...), I'm self-hosting a feed reader I wrote myself, running on a free hosted LibSQL db.

- NetNewsWire was slick, but wouldn't work on my phone.

- Feedbin was excellent, but eventually I decided to do some subscription cost-cutting.

- Miniflux worked fine, but 1) I found it a pain to set up with remote hosted Postgres and 2) it burned through the Neon free-tier usage limits in a couple days.

So I built one myself and run it on a Raspberry Pi home server.

Made a great little weekend project. The feed standards are known quantities, so a little AI assistance with boilerplate goes a long way.

Deciding you need a new feature and just adding it is refreshing — e.g. I wanted a "read it later" feature like Feedbin's (something missing from Miniflux), and now I have it.