MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by echelon | 2025-10-21 17:29:10+00:00
If the DeepSeek approach to training hyperscaler models "cheaply" after all the hype wears down works, we just need to follow in their footsteps and build open source alternatives to everything.

Frontier models take a lot of money and experimentation. But then people figure out how to train them and knowledge of those models and approaches leaks. Furthermore, we can make informed guesses. But best of all, we can exfiltrate the model's output and distill the model.

If we work together as an industry to open source everything, we can overcome this.

OpenAI has to 100x in five years or they're going to be in trouble.

Models are making it easy to replace SaaS, but also easy to replace other AI companies.

There may be no moat for any of this. The lead is only because they're a few generations ahead, running as fast as they can on the treadmill.

I don't think this hurts China at all.
by lucideer | 2025-10-21 17:29:41+00:00
> there are processes that work within the scale of small European nations that simply won't at larger scales

Coming from Ireland (tiny population, low pop density) I've heard this argument countless times (we're an obvious target for this critique), but I still to this day don't see the logic of it. At all.

Constituencies are sized per capita, count centres are staffed per capita, if you have higher pop-density you'll either have more observers at count centres, or the same number at more count centres. This is a distributed system - it's the definition of scalable.

Fwiw the last count I tallied at (Dublin MEP) had an electorate of 890k. It was the smallest constituency in Ireland in that election, but still bigger than the largest congressional district electorate in the US. We counted in one large open warehouse. There were 23 candidates & 19 separate repeating counts.

That could work in favour or against your argument - I don't really know - I don't really think it matters either direction though.
Show HN: I'm building an open source discussion forum for latest ArXiv papers
by peterdunson | 2025-10-21 17:29:44+00:00
Hey HN!

I built arXiv News (https://arxiv-news.com) – a discussion space for research papers.

The problem: I browse arXiv constantly for new papers, but there's nowhere good to discuss them. Twitter is chaotic, Reddit is fragmented, and arXiv itself has no comments.

So I cloned HN's design (using https://github.com/clintonwoo/hackernews-react-graphql) and applied it to arXiv. Upvote papers, comment, sort by hot/new/discussed, filter by category, post ideas/papers you've found. A daily scraper pulls all new papers automatically.

I'd love to hear peoples thoughts. Trying to iterate/improve upon what I currently have so I need feedback.

https://github.com/peterdunson/arxiv-news

Thanks!
by babyshake | 2025-10-21 17:29:46+00:00
The thing is, a software based voting system with a sufficient number of checks and balances preventing tampering seems to be a lot more trustworthy to me than human poll watchers and workers. It wouldn't surprise me at this point that there may be moles in parties that are secretly from the other party.

And the other related issue is that in 2025, it simply should be possible to vote from your phone in a way that verifies your identity, if you'd like, using the faceId/fingerprint biometrics that most smartphones from recent years have.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-10-21 17:29:48+00:00
Each polling station should have representatives from multiple parties as well as independent observers.

> how can a constituent know with absolute certainty that their vote was counted

The representative of your party plus independent observer said all votes at your polling station were counted. You know both those community members and know them to be generally honorable. Ergo your vote was counted.

> every voter in the system was legal

None of the observers at the polling station, or the station head claimed any illegal person voted.

> the final tally was authentic

The observers all signed as witnesses on the final tally.

This is not the "system. it is humans you know who are telling you what they saw. If you can't trust other humans at their word, democracy cannot fundamentally work.
by mlnj | 2025-10-21 17:30:15+00:00
>I really hope open-source Browsers like Firefox follow up soon with better alternatives, like on-device LLMs to counteract the "all in the cloud" LLM approach.

That's the first thing that came to mind. Every single action across every single website would be available to OpenAI with this browser. Even if I wanted to leverage something like this it'd have to be a fully local LLM interacting with a huge local DB of my info.
by president_zippy | 2025-10-21 17:30:24+00:00
The one that really blows me away is how KazeEmmanuar explained the software-controlled cache. Using it well would involve either manually making calls to load/invalidate it or writing a compiler backend that replaces loading data from memory into registers with instructions to load specific memory address ranges into cache.

The whole thing reminds me in a fuzzy way that I don't yet fully comprehend of register-memory architecture.
by ncr100 | 2025-10-21 17:30:33+00:00
Could this be an Extension, for Chrome / Firefox / Edge / and others ?

Are these extension-fodder:

- "new tab" shows custom UI with LLM prompt

- Reads contents of user's web page in Chat UI, shown alongside web page

- new UI gizmo at Text-selection, showing ChatGPT flower icon, with context features available for selected text

- maintains "agent personality / context" (IDK the term) across tabs
by mentalgear | 2025-10-21 17:30:39+00:00
I was sceptical as well before trying it out, but it is unfortunately very practical to ask the AI sidebar about an information-dense website or even github codebase (just as dev examples).

There were of course many browser extensions that did this beforehand (and even better, by hyper-linking the exact text passage of answer segments), but the main differentiator is that most people don't use them/know about them, and this comes with a big tech nametag and it is free.
by shit_game | 2025-10-21 17:30:48+00:00
So the fear is a new Chrome, but "agentic"?

It's not an irrational fear, but the frightening bit depends on whether or not this actually takes off. I very much doubt it ever will. The browser ecosystem, despite being in desperate need of upheaval, is largely resiliant to it because things that work don't tend to get replaced unless they are broken to a point where even the most basic of users are inconvenienced. Or forced to change (due to vendor pressure). Oh, there's the rational fear.
by slowmovintarget | 2025-10-21 17:30:57+00:00
Dan Harmon's Story Circle actually works, though.

You end up building this circle for each character, where the plot becomes the vehicle for them seeking and satisfying (or failing to) some need. You don't need purple prose, you just need characters that have motivations that are self-consistent and understood by the viewer. Such understanding does not require sympathy, either.

Much of the complaint over modern narrative is that what we're presented takes on the structure of propaganda pieces [1], not stories for entertainment. We're supposed to be entertained by the propaganda, instead. Many who grew up on good-guy wins against bad-guy don't resonate with story structure broken in service of some message.

I'll probably still see this movie eventually, and I'm not claiming Tron: Ares has these issues (no idea). I'm just not in any hurry to go see it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

>> Propaganda can often be recognized by the rhetorical strategies used in its design. In the 1930s, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis identified a variety of propaganda techniques that were commonly used in newspapers and on the radio, which were the mass media of the time period. Propaganda techniques include "name calling" (using derogatory labels), "bandwagon" (expressing the social appeal of a message), or "glittering generalities" (using positive but imprecise language). With the rise of the internet and social media, Renee Hobbs identified four characteristic design features of many forms of contemporary propaganda: (1) it activates strong emotions; (2) it simplifies information; (3) it appeals to the hopes, fears, and dreams of a targeted audience; and (4) it attacks opponents.
by ookblah | 2025-10-21 17:31:37+00:00
nice, so instead of just searching for the specific spf i want and moving the mouse myself/checking out quickly i can instead write a bunch of words that make my commands even more vague lol.

reminds me of when echo would let you order stuff "instantly" and how shitty that experience was outside of a narrow focus. except worse since you have to type it vs. just talking.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-10-21 17:31:37+00:00
would a 499 billion cap make you happy? 100 Billion?

It would require substantial punitive taxes and penalties to prevent this accumulation. Would founders and investors still develop in the USA if their upside were curtailed? Would Musk Found spaceX if they were not allowed to profit from it?

Also, it is not as simple as taxing profits. Almost all of this value is simply equity in controlled companies. What is the mechanism here? If you are too successful, the government seizes your company? Dont you think that would be disruptive to investment and growth?
by amthewiz | 2025-10-21 17:31:39+00:00
Andrej Karpathy posted in early 2023 (https://x.com/karpathy/status/1617979122625712128) -

> "The hottest new programming language is English"

I've built a Natural Language Programming stack for building AI Agents. I think it is the first true Software 3.0 stack.

The core idea: Use LLMs as CPUs! You can finally step debug through your prompts and get reliable, verifiable execution. The stack includes a new language, compiler, developer tooling like VSCode extension.

Programs are written as markdown. H1 tags are agents, H2 tags are natural language playbooks (i.e. functions), python playbooks. All playbooks in an agents run on the same call stack. NL and python playbooks can call each other.

Quick intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX2L453km6s

Github: https://github.com/playbooks-ai/playbooks (MIT license)

Documentation: https://playbooks-ai.github.io/playbooks-docs/getting-starte...

Project website: runplaybooks.ai

Example Playbooks program -

# Country facts agent This agent prints interesting facts about nearby countries ## Main ### Triggers - At the beginning ### Steps - Ask user what $country they are from - If user did not provide a country, engage in a conversation and gently nudge them to provide a country - List 5 $countries near $country - Tell the user the nearby $countries - Inform the user that you will now tell them some interesting facts about each of the countries - process_countries($countries) - End program ```python from typing import List @playbook async def process_countries(countries: List[str]): for country in countries: # Calls the natural language playbook 'GetCountryFact' for each country fact = await GetCountryFact(country) await Say("user", f"{country}: {fact}") ``` ## GetCountryFact($country) ### Steps - Return an unusual historical fact about $country

There are a bunch of very interesting capabilities. A quick sample -

- "Queue calls to extract table of contents for each candidate file" - Effortless calling MCP tools, multi-threading, artifact management, context management

- "Ask Accountant what the tax rate would be" is how you communicate with other agents

- you can mix procedural natural language playbooks, ReAct playbooks, Raw prompt playbooks, Python playbooks and external playbooks like MCP tools seamlessly on the same call stack

- "Have a meeting with Chef, Marketing expert and the user to design a new menu" is how you can spawn multi-agent workflows, where each agent follows their own playbook for the meeting

- Coming soon: Observer agents (agents observing other agents - automated memory storage, verify/certify execution, steer observed agents), dynamic playbook generation for procedural memory, etc.

I hope this changes how we build AI agents going forward for the better. Looking forward to discussion! I'll be in the comments.
by basisword | 2025-10-21 17:31:41+00:00
AI-powered browsers are an interesting step beyond "ChatGPT in a tab". Potentially as disruptive as Chrome was in 2008.

However there's a tension between convenience and control. If one company mediates all of your browsing, search and transactions, it becomes both a powerful assistant and a single point of failure. Atlas will need to demonstrate that it can respect user privacy and provide robust on-device or open-source options if it's going to convince people it's more than just a new walled garden.
by foxyv | 2025-10-21 17:31:42+00:00
Starship has yet to demonstrate that capability. They would need to show rapid re-usability for it to be viable. Not to mention docking and orbital re-fueling.

Falcon Heavy seems to have that capability though. I suspect that Starship will have similar cost to Falcon Heavy when they get done with it. Maybe marginally cheaper. The re-entry problem is really throwing a wrench into things.
by kqr | 2025-10-21 17:32:03+00:00
I am actually in the process of writing one in Lua to amuse my child! He's not yet a very strong reader nor typist, so to begin with the story will progress just by moving around, similar to Inside the Facility[1]. This is also to help keep the parser simple – I don't really want to write a parser, but I do need to implement the basics to get an engine in my child's native language.

[1]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=stsdri5zh7a4i5my
by AustinDev | 2025-10-21 17:32:04+00:00
Just to be meta, I downloaded the browser and added this thread as context and asked for some insightful comments I could leave (It doesn't seem to understand block-quoting format for this site):

Analytical / Insightful (well-received on HN)

> The interesting thing here isn’t that OpenAI made “a browser,” it’s that they’ve collapsed the boundary between the page and the assistant. Plugins and “GPTs” tried to bolt APIs onto chat; Atlas inverts that—chat is now the substrate for all interaction. > > It’s not hard to imagine a future where the web becomes more of an agent runtime than a hypertext medium. The real question is whether users will trust the runtime owner enough to live inside it.

Technical / Developer-oriented

> Everyone’s asking “is it Chromium,” but that’s missing the deeper move. Atlas is effectively an agentic runtime with privileged access to DOM and user context. The engine matters less than the control plane—who gets to mediate input/output between human, model, and site. > > That layer, not rendering, is the new “browser wars.”

Cautiously critical / philosophical

> Atlas looks less like a new browser and more like a new operating system for cognition. It’s powerful, but the trade-off is subtle: every convenience deepens the model’s visibility into what we do, not just what we search. The real competition now isn’t about tabs or engines—it’s about how much of our thinking we’re willing to outsource.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-10-21 17:32:08+00:00
That's a non-sequitur. Election manipulation is orders of magnitudes easier with voting machine manipulation and might not even be traceable. With paper ballots, you have to swap thousands of ballots that are handled by thousands of people, corrupt or prohibit independent observers, deal with election commissions and overseers, and so on. You can have recounts. With voting machines, you just have to push a software patch to these machines or manipulate the software that interfaces with them. No recount will help.
by everforward | 2025-10-21 17:32:08+00:00
Vector search isn't full blown AI and should be inherently less prone to bias. It just converts words/phrases into vectors where the distance between the vectors represents semantic similarity.

It doesn't encode value judgements like whether a policy is good or bad, it just enables a sort of full text search ++ where you don't need to precisely match terms. Like a search for "changes to rent" might match a law that mentions changes to "temporary accommodations".

Bias is certainly possible based on which words are considered correlated to others, but it should be much less prone to containing higher-level associations like something being bad policy.
by tromp | 2025-10-21 17:32:34+00:00
A blockchain can use Merkle trees in several ways. First, the block header usually contains the Merkle root of all transactions. This makes the header, and in turn the Proof-of-Work, commit to all txs, which helps make the chain immutable. Second, the header can also directly commit to the UTXO set, simplifying the design of light clients (sadly, Bitcoin doesn't do this).
by MountDoom | 2025-10-21 17:32:35+00:00
The regulatory landscape here is pretty funny. In all likelihood, the worst RFI offenders in your home are LED lights, followed by major appliances. Both of these are regulated less than something like a computer mouse. For lightbulbs, I think the manufacturers just self-certify.

I guess there are two ways to look at it. Either the regulation was wildly successful, so the problems persist only in the less-regulated spaces. Or we spend a lot of effort chasing the wrong problem.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-10-21 17:33:06+00:00
Wikipedia is not a company.

They should mainly be worried about their reliability and trustworthiness. They should not worry about article length, as long as it's from exhaustiveness and important content is still accessible.

Serving perfectly digestible bits of information optimized for being easy to read must not be the primary goal of an encyclopedia.

By the way, "AI summaries" routinely contain misrepresentations, misleading sentences or just plain wrong information.

Wikipedia is (rightly) worried about AI slop.

The reason is that LLMs cannot "create" reliable information about the factual world, and they can also only evaluate information based on what "sounds plausible" (or matches the training priorities).

You can get an AI summary with one of the 100 buttons for this that are built into every consumer-facing product, including common OS GUIs and Web browsers.

Or "ask ChatGPT" for one.
by BeetleB | 2025-10-21 17:33:10+00:00
> It is nearly impossible to live without a phone,

There's a whole continuum.

Other than 2FA, text messaging is easy to get rid of.

You still use it to make calls, so yeah, they can track you that way. You can keep the phone off most of the time, though. People close to me know that they're more likely to reach me by calling my home phone.

What else does one really need a phone for?

Navigation? Do what I did: Get another phone that never has a SIM card and use an offline app.

Camera? The same. But really, life is very doable without a camera to begin with!

The only reason I need a phone is 2FA.
Show HN: OpenJobHub – A Free and Open Job Board
by jasper_go | 2025-10-21 17:33:32+00:00
Hey everyone,

I recently built OpenJobHub, a free and open source job board for engineers.

My goal is simple: in these tough times, I hope more people can find good jobs, and that job information can be more open and transparent.

Feel free to share it with any recruiters, HRs, or friends who are hiring.

Let's build a healthier job ecosystem together.

GitHub: https://github.com/junminhong/jobs

Website: https://jobs.wowkit.net
by mlsu | 2025-10-21 17:33:48+00:00
yeah the custom GPT announcement was literally a carbon copy of steve jobs announcing the app store down to the mannerisms and tics. You could tell they were doing it to give VC and private equity the pavlov bell "ring ring! this company is apple!" and remember the sora announcement just a couple weeks ago? oh you guys are tiktok and instagram reels now too? cool...

everything that openAI does is laser focused on valuation valuation valuation

of course it's a weird form of valuation because like remember when these guys are a non profit? lol

It is weird though, the "I'm a bigtechco dance" seems to be working, even though the economics on providing LLM services do not in any way justify the valuation.

they have like five five credible competitors who are right behind them BTW
by asa400 | 2025-10-21 17:33:52+00:00
Agreed. If you can find one.

I bought a new vehicle in 2023 after years of not owning a car. I was trying to buy used, but the delta between new and 1-3 year old used was so small it made no sense to go used. I was giving up a warranty for often times $500-$1500, total.

This is still true, and especially true for brands whose used vehicles command a price premium, like Toyota. Used values are still high relative to historical norms because a lot of the market that normally buys new vehicles is priced out of buying new, and some of that demand has been absorbed by the used market (some of it has dropped out of the market and/or deferred a purchase until later).

The idea of buying a relatively low miles 3-year old Toyota for materially less than a new one doesn't really exist, currently. Now, if you want to go for a 3 year old car with 150,000+ miles, sure, you can save some money, but that's a ton of miles per year. You're counting on the previous owner(s) being _really_ on top of their basic maintenance.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-10-21 17:33:53+00:00
Websites are terrible from a security, usability, accessibility, privacy, and mental health perspective. These tools could be used to fix all of those things. Instead they're just being used to do the same old junk, but like... faster.

I want an AI browser that digs into webpages, finds the information I want and presents it to me in a single consistent and beautiful UI with all of the hazards removed. Yes, I even want the stupid machine to filter content for me. If I tell it "no politics on Tuesdays" it should be able to go find the things I'm interested in, but remove the references to politics.

I understand that there are new risks to this approach, but it could be built with those things in mind. I'm aware that this would give a lot of power to the developers, but frankly trusting thousands/millions of individual weirdos on the open web hasn't turned out to be any better at this point and it's all become consolidated by near monopolies in user-hostile ways anyhow.
by kragen | 2025-10-21 17:33:59+00:00
They spoke Old French, which had a decent phonetic orthography. Due to a series of successful spelling reforms, even modern French orthography is almost phonetic, with a few exceptions like Duras and fils, but the rules are complicated. English, by contrast, is halfway to hanxi — it's full of etymological spellings for most words, false-etymological spellings for a few, and a general spelling system that primarily reflects the pronunciations before the Great Vowel Shift. We can't blame this on the Franks.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-21 17:34:24+00:00
> That's simply not true, and pointlessly derogatory.

That same critique should first be aimed at the topmost comment, which has the same problem plus the added guilt of originating (A) a false dichotomy and (B) the derogatory tone that naturally colors later replies.

> It's reasonable for even good writers to not know how or not care

The text is true, but in context there's an implied fallacy: If X is "reasonable", it does not follow that Not-X is unreasonable.

More than enough (reasonable) real humans do add em-dashes when they write. When it comes to a long-form blog post—like this one submitted to HN—it's even more likely than usual!

> the extra keystrokes

Such as alt + numpad 0150 on Windows, which has served me well when on that platform for... gosh, decades now.
by mentalgear | 2025-10-21 17:35:07+00:00
Indeed the "no-moat" (weight exfiltration of any openly accessible model) is something that makes me optimistic. That, and the fact that most tasks have "capacity thresholds" which on-device models will increasingly be able to saturate. One example is SQL query generation from text (example: duckdb-text2sql https://motherduck.com/blog/duckdb-text2sql-llm/).