MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cogman10 | 2025-10-17 22:16:45+00:00
That's in the US where we have a bunch of tariffs to protect the local auto industry.

In the UK, you can get really cheap EVs because the china ev and battery market is open to them and their importers.

Further, because of the nature of both public transport and the city layout of the UK, there's much less of a need for long range EVs. Almost everything there is both walkable and within walking distance. It's very unlike the US.

I survived in the UK for 2 years on foot. It was really not that bad.

The Hyundai Kona Electric starts at £32,400. Which is ~$43,500 freedom bucks.

But there's very little reason why the majority of brits couldn't survive with the Dogood Zero which starts at £5,500 (and has a 50 mile range).
by globular-toast | 2025-10-17 22:16:53+00:00
Look into something like Prolog (~50 years old) to see how systems can be built from rules rather than it/else statements. It wasn't all imperative programming before LLMs.

If you mean that it all breaks down to if/else at some level then, yeah, but that goes for LLMs too. LLMs aren't the quantum leap people seem to think they are.
by Yizahi | 2025-10-17 22:16:53+00:00
Yeah, I've re-evaluated my misconceptions around the same time. As another datapoint - infamous Tether/Bitfinex corporation which was blatantly cheating and insolvent (per normal definition) for years and every time reasonable people were giving them less than a year to bankruptcy and jail. But here were are, Tether is still printing tokens like madman, no one is in jail and every analyst was proven both wrong and right at the same time. Apparently company can be insolvent and cheating and breaking law for a looong time, with zero repercussions. And no one bats an eye.

I suspect OpenAI is deeply in red today and any normal small company would went out of business years ago. But they are too big to fail and will continue working this way. They may even transition to being profitable later on, and people will retcon that they always have been so.

At this point I just wonder, what would be exact mechanism with which Sam will redirect his negatives to a regular public like us here. Bailouts? Irresponsible government investments? Banks overreaching and them getting bailouts? Something new?...
by mijoharas | 2025-10-17 22:17:24+00:00
Well, now there's gem.coop, and we don't have to worry about bundler/gem becoming hostile to other services so either:

gem.coop matures and people move to it

Or ruby central gets their crap together and regains some trust.

It's definitely a win that the tool entry point is now managed by competent people with a good track record that aren't involved in the current drama.
by ryandrake | 2025-10-17 22:17:27+00:00
Or just do it yourself. At least oil changes can be done entirely oneself with a very small number of non-specialized tools. You don't even need a house with a garage, you can do it in your driveway or even on the street if you only have street parking.

As others have pointed out, tires are somewhat more complicated, but not entirely out of the realm of the home shade tree mechanic, if you're willing to invest in a few specialized tools/fixtures.
by jackcviers3 | 2025-10-17 22:17:46+00:00
And adding ads into the responses is _child's play_ find the ad with the most semantic similarity to the content in the context. Insert at the end of the response or every N responses with a convincing message that based on our discussion you might be interested in xyz.

For more subtle and slimier way of doing things, boost the relevance of brands and keywords, and when they are semantically similar to the most likely token, insert them into the response. Companies pay per impression.

When a guardrail blocks a response, play some political ad for a law and order candidate before delivering the rest of the message. I'm completely shocked nobody has offered free gpt use via an api supported by ad revenue yet.
by fancyfredbot | 2025-10-17 22:19:15+00:00
Right now the AI business does not looking like a winner takes all situation at all. Everyone is losing money and nobody has any lock-in. Free open source models are only 6-12 months behind the frontier labs. Seems like a tricky business to me with no clear route to metaphorical world domination.

Making stuff for AI companies looks like better business to me!
by tchalla | 2025-10-17 22:19:54+00:00
> Prominent startup investor Ron Conway, who backed companies including Google, Airbnb and Stripe, resigned from the board of the Salesforce Foundation on Thursday. According to the New York Times, Conway told Benioff in an email that their "values were no longer aligned."

Money talks

> Opposition to Benioff’s initial suggestion also came from Garry Tan, CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator. He wrote on X that “We don’t need the National Guard,” but he used his post to go after liberal local officials and judges perceived as too lenient.
by cdavid | 2025-10-17 22:20:02+00:00
I agree the big deal is tool calling.

But MCP has at least 2 advantages over cli tools

- Tool calling LLM combined w/ structured output is easier to implement as MCP than CLI for complex interactions IMO.

- It is more natural to hold state between tool calls in an MCP server than with a CLI.

When I read the OT, I initially wondered if I indeed bought into the hype. But then I realized that the small demo I built recently to learn about MCP (https://github.com/cournape/text2synth) would have been more difficult to build as a cli. And I think the demo is representative of neat usages of MCP.
by lucasyvas | 2025-10-17 22:20:15+00:00
These are all non-issues - don’t allow an end user to determine a serial primary key as always.

And the amount of information it leaks is negligible - they might know the oldest and the newest and there’s an infinite gulf in between.

It’s better and more practical than SERIAL or BIGSERIAL in every way - if you need a random/external ID, add a second column. Done.
by hotep99 | 2025-10-17 22:21:05+00:00
It's probably much higher than that in reality if you look at assets spiking compared to the dollar. Gold is going completely parabolic right now. Real estate shows no signs of slowing down. Crypto (regardless of your opinion of it) is spiking as people try to store value anywhere besides the dollar. We hear about the AI bubble propping up equity markets all the time but I always wonder how much of it is just investors desperately converting dollars into anything else with a bit of liquidity.
Ask HN: If AI has 'eaten software', does it eat 'business' next?
by aaronSong | 2025-10-17 22:21:12+00:00
I’ve been building AI tooling and noticing a shift: shipping is cheap; discovering demand and capturing value is the hard part.

Hypothesis: as code/infra get commoditized, we may bifurcate into (1) commercial AIs that create and capture value (need-finding → offer design → pricing → distribution → support),

and (2) scientific AIs pushing the frontier. Humans concentrate where taste, narrative, and trust matter (IP, entertainment, relationships).

If agents can identify pain, design a product, source supply, spin up a storefront, set price, run ads, and close the loop, that starts to look like “quant for commerce”: models scanning micro‑signals, launching micro‑products, harvesting short‑lived edges. We already see early signs (e.g., tools that auto‑source SKUs from OEMs and generate Shopify pages, AutoDS‑style flows).

For founders/engineers/operators here:

Have you run (or seen) an end‑to‑end loop from need discovery → build → monetize with minimal human intervention? Where did it break (data access, distribution, compliance, returns, chargebacks)?

Which business functions automated cleanly vs stubbornly resisted it (BD/negotiation, procurement, sales ops, support, legal)?

Where do moats move in this world—distribution, proprietary data, regulatory position, brand?

Any concrete metrics you can share (time‑to‑MVP, CAC/LTV, return rates, fraud)?

Not looking for predictions—interested in real cases, trade‑offs, and failure stories. Happy to be wrong; keen to learn from people who’ve tried it.
by simonw | 2025-10-17 22:21:38+00:00
They complement each other.

Subagents are mainly a token context optimization hack. They're a way for Claude Code to run a bunch of extra tools calls (e.g. to investigate the source of a bug) without consuming many tokens in the parent agent loop - the subagent gets its own loop, can use up to ~240,000 tokens exploring a problem and can then reply back up to the parent agent with a short description of what it did or what it figured out.

A subagent might use one or more skills as part of running.

A skill might advise Claude Code on how best to use subagents to solve a problem.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-17 22:21:52+00:00
Imagine someone who doesn't know much about computers, and doesn't really want to learn. Then imagine a PC with a built in AI assistant a few generations more advanced than today's SOTA.

-

User: hey, why is the game running so slow?

AI Assistant: starts checking things.

Telemetry, apps: GTA 6 was launched 1 hour ago, then stopped 4 minutes ago. Likely the source of the performance complaints.

Telemetry, frames: FPS was at 60 when the game started, started dropping after 30 minutes of gameplay, deteriorated sharply. Reached the low of 18 FPS with unstable frame timings 12 minutes ago and remained there. Confirms GTA 6 as the source of the performance complaints.

Game settings: "medium" preset, locked to 60 FPS, lines up with recommendations for this system.

Expected performance of this game on this hardware with those settings: should stay at 60, with dips down to 50 in heavy areas. Does not match the observed performance.

Telemetry, resource utilization: normal until 30 minutes into gameplay, then increasingly GPU bound, causing poor performance.

Telemetry, power: the laptop was at 100% of charge and plugged in throughout. Temps were at 40C when the game was launched, then started ramping up, fan reached its RPM limit at 20 minutes, temperature kept climbing. Progressively more throttling was applied to GPU and CPU. 80C on GPU die (thermal limit) was hit 34 minutes in. GPU performance was choked by the thermal throttling.

Local temperature: no dedicated air intake sensor to query the air temperature from. 19C outside according to the weather report, but the laptop is plugged in, so it's probably not outside. Inside would be warmer. No smart thermostat to query the air temperature from. Anything else to get the air temperature from? Paired smartphone: is in proximity, was not used or moved for the past hour, reports that its core temperature is 24C. That's the room temperature.

Cooling system analysis: cross-referencing power draw logs to estimated room temperature to internal temperature. Not enough heat is being rejected by the cooling system. It underperforms the factory specification by at least 60%.

Past performance data: this laptop was used 7 times in the past 10 days. Seems like the cooling system was underperforming every time.

AI Assistant: your computer was overheating while you were playing GTA 6, which caused the performance issues. Check the air exhaust - the port at the left side of the laptop, with hot air coming out of it. Is there anything blocking it?

User: uh, no? The laptop was on the table the entire time. There's nothing to the left of it.

AI Assistant: it's likely that the laptop's cooling system needs cleaning. Should I check the prices at the nearest repair shop?
by mgh95 | 2025-10-17 22:22:11+00:00
> The value of the dollar has already plummeted, 10% or so this year.

Compared to what? From Nov 3, 2024: the USD against:

GBP (3)%

JPY (1.7)%

EUR (6.7)%

INR 4.6%

AUD 1.3%

CAD .74%

RMB .4%

The EUR (if that is what you are going by) is unusually strong, and that's actually starting to cause issues. But the dollar isn't "collapsing".
by cogman10 | 2025-10-17 22:24:07+00:00
EV sedans use ~ 250Wh/mile. So £0.18 is ~$0.24. So you are looking at about $0.06/mile.

Much cheaper if you get a much smaller EV (which are much more available in the UK).

For example, the Dogood Zero uses 95Wh/mile which means $0.02/mile.
by nitwit005 | 2025-10-17 22:24:36+00:00
He seemed to want free security for his event (he talked about all the extra security he was hiring). I suspect he learned he'd get free protests too.

The San Francisco reddit discussion of this included such lines as "Welp, picking up my frog costume from Temu asap.", and "San Francisco must out gay them": https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1o7mexv/trump...
by simonw | 2025-10-17 22:25:12+00:00
A few things:

1. By giving this name a pattern, people can have higher level conversations about it.

2. There is a small amount of new software here. Claude Code and https://claude.ai/ both now scan their skills/ folders on startup and extract a short piece of metadata about each skill from the YAML at the top of those markdown files. They then know that if the user e.g. says they want to create a PDF they should "cat skills/pdf/skill.md" first before proceeding with the task.

3. This is a new standard for distributing skills, which are sometimes just a markdown file but can also be a folder with a markdown file and one or more additional scripts or reference documents. The example skills here should help illustrate that: https://github.com/anthropics/skills/tree/main/document-skil... and https://github.com/anthropics/skills/tree/main/artifacts-bui...

I think the pattern itself is really neat, because it's an acknowledgement that a great way to give an LLM system additional "skills" is to describe them in a markdown file packaged alongside some relevant scripts.

It's also pleasantly vendor-neutral: other tools like Codex CLI can use these skills already (just tell them to go read skills/pdfs/skill.md and follow those instructions) and I expect they may well add formal support in the future, if this takes off as I expect it will.
by tpmoney | 2025-10-17 22:25:20+00:00
> Its literally offsetting imports which is great for independence.

But that has nothing to do with whether someone considers it a blight on the landscape or not. You might think they’re wrong, but saying the solar farms are “great for independence” is like answering someone who doesn’t want a freeway being built through their town because they’re a blight on the landscape that “cars are great for independence”. Your talking past each other.
by mijoharas | 2025-10-17 22:25:30+00:00
I don't think that's fair, I mostly thought that until I read his recent blog post[0] where he wished for fewer non-white people in London and praises a far-right fascist figure in England (Tommy Robinson, he was a member of the BNP[1] for while before he started the EDL which was more extreme).

When you're advocating for ethno-nationalism and praising fascists, I don't think you can get mad at people thinking maybe you're a little bit fascist, or can claim to be in the centre politically.

[0] https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party
by aw1621107 | 2025-10-17 22:25:45+00:00
> Is it better if I drizzled the same amount of olive oil, on a baked potato instead?

"Drizzled" might be a bit difficult to do for the amount of olive oil you'd need. For example, the USDA FNDDS database says 100g of plain potato chips has ~34g of fat and ~54g of carbs [0]. 100g of a plain baked potato (with presumably nothing added), on the other hand, has approximately no fat and ~21g of carbs [1], though to be fair 100g is probably not what you're eating; the database lists a medium baked potato as 285g and a large at 400g.

[0]: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/2709422/nutrients

[1]: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/2709383/nutrients
by nine_k | 2025-10-17 22:26:21+00:00
In short: oil is soon to be over (because solar), Moore's law is dying (and has been for last 20 years), so the tech boom is soon to be over, so the elites of last 50-100 years are facing a wall ahead of them, and have little idea what to do. Hence bigger and bigger upheavals.

Well, not that it's completely wrong, but China and India only increase their oil consumption, and the US have just recently started to drill the local oil. It seems that oil is very far from over.

The AI boom looks to me quite similar to the dotcom boom of 30 years ago: we're certainly in a bubble, but that bubble is blown around some very real and powerful change. The bubble will burst (or maybe get deflated less dramatically), but the AI/ML stuff which is actually very useful will remain, and will continue developing.

So, no. If there's a pivotal moment, it's not because of the oil and computers. It's more about elite production of last few decades, the universities, the business and political leaders, the effects of global social networks, the discourses that permeate different social strata. But it's a completely different kettle of fish.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-10-17 22:26:41+00:00
I don't know why LINQ would have any better or worse performance than a standard loop for most tasks. Abusing LINQs will of course lead to degraded performance. I've found if you want to insert more logic into your loop, sometimes you have to switch batch to good 'ol loops. I'm sure folks abuse the convenience factor to write more loops rather than modify existing ones which can lead to degraded performance.

For my game it's irrelevant because most linq loops are only triggered by events so there's no loops running on every frame.

For example, lets say you have state machine based AI, and a scripted event triggers tells an enemy starship to change allegiance. The enemy starship then scans a runtime set of enemy factions using LINQ that are within 3 km to identify new targets to attack.
by hackinthebochs | 2025-10-17 22:27:01+00:00
>How much would you bet that there isn't a CSV somewhere in the training set exactly containing this data for use in some GIS system?

Maybe, but then I would expect more equal performance across model sizes. Besides, ingesting the data and being able to reproduce it accurately in a different modality is still an example of modeling. It's one thing to ingest a set of coordinates in a CSV indicating geographic boundaries and accurately reproduce that CSV. It's another thing to accurately indicate arbitrary points as being within the boundary or without in an entirely different context. This suggests a latent representation independent of the input tokens.

>I think that "modeling the world" is a red herring, and that fundamentally an LLM can only model its input modalities.

There are good reasons to think this isn't the case. To effectively reproduce text that is about some structure, you need a model of that structure. A strong learning algorithm should in principle learn the underlying structure represented with the input modality independent of the structure of the modality itself. There are examples of this in humans and animals, e.g. [1][2][3]

>I think a more useful definition of "model the world" is that a model needs to realize any facts that would be obvious to a person.

Seems reasonable enough, but it is at risk of being too human-centric. So much of our cognitive machinery is suited for helping us navigate and actively engage the world. But intelligence need not be dependent on the ability to engage the world. Features of the world that are obvious to us need not be obvious to an AGI that never had surviving predators or locating food in its evolutionary past. This is why I find the ARC-AGI tasks off target. They're interesting, and it will say something important about these systems when they can solve them easily. But these tasks do not represent intelligence in the sense that we care about.

>The fact that frontier models can easily be made to contradict themselves is proof enough to me that they cannot have any kind of sophisticated world model.

This proves that an LLM does not operate with a single world model. But this shouldn't be surprising. LLMs are unusual beasts in the sense that the capabilities you get largely depend on how you prompt it. There is no single entity or persona operating within the LLM. It's more of a persona-builder. What model that persona engages with is largely down to how it segmented the training data for the purposes of maximizing its ability to accurately model the various personas represented in human text. The lack of consistency is inherent to its design.

[1] https://news.wisc.edu/a-taste-of-vision-device-translates-fr...

[2] https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/using-sound-to...

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59342-9
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-17 22:27:08+00:00
Probably not at this point, because he actually said it.

I mean, it still could be - if the video shows him in a compromising position, if it shows him with a sneer that wasn't how he actually said it, or something else that makes it more negative than just the words.

I mean, look, it's still a lie, because it's pretending to be a video of him saying it, and it's not. But it's probably not slander or libel... at this point.
by technothrasher | 2025-10-17 22:27:11+00:00
> how time was a Western construct

Japan had a whole fancy temporal hour system before Western contact. It was more complicated than our modern framework, as it was based on the time between sunrise and sunset and so the length of the hours had to be adjusted about every two weeks. But they certainly thought quite a bit about it, so I'm not sure how it could be claimed to not be a concept there at the time.
by crdrost | 2025-10-17 22:29:29+00:00
I mean they hide it as best they can. Big restaurants like Applebee's you'll see "2 for $28" not priced at $28 so you can guesstimate the squeeze but otherwise you kinda have to go straight to Starbucks or McDonalds using a mobile app to order your "usual" to compare "here's what it looks like if I use DoorDash, here's what it looks like if I go myself," to find that the actual delivery fee is some $20-25 per order. Even worse, I'm pretty sure that they test algorithms to try to selectively lower this for new customers so that in the early days when you're more aware of the cost it seems like a steal.

Of course, you can arrive at the $20 just by thinking, "okay, I need someone to go do an errand for me, they'll have to drive to the restaurant, wait there for 15-20 minutes, and then bring it back... so it'll cost $15 for the hour of their time plus a few bucks of overhead for the platform plus a few bucks of messed-up-my-order insurance..."

Which gets us to 5 years from now when the DoorDash killer comes out, it'll be called Kourier or something starting with a K, and it'll start with trying to give Target a way to call up some extra trained Target employees, but they're cross-trained in packaging orders for K. One person will pick up 10 carefully-packaged K-orders, take them all to the central delivery hub, they'll get sorted into driverless cars that plot through some neighborhood some 10 stops, it'll be marketed as a real Amazon-killer and fly under DoorDash's nose -- InstaCart might balk, but DoorDash won't. Until they reveal some pizza-delivery partnership and suddenly within a year every restaurant has some K-employee working for them, whose job it is to batch orders down to the bikes that come by.

Sure, delivery times for Kourier will be 75, 80 minutes long at first. People won't mind because you pay $4 for delivery instead of $20. And Doordash/Amazon won't die, Amazon will just buy Kourier and DoorDash will focus on more rural locales.