MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zkiihne | 2025-10-12 22:13:25+00:00
Automated website feedback with browser use + LLMs

I am building a tool that gives automated qualitative feedback on websites. This is the early and embarrassing MVP: https://vibetest-seven.vercel.app/product

You provide your URL and an LLM browses your site and writes up feedback. Currently working on increasing the quality of the feedback. Trying to start with a narrower set of tests that give what I think is good feedback, then increase from there.

If a tool like this analyzed your website, what would you actually want it to tell you? What feedback would be most useful?
by dotnet00 | 2025-10-12 22:13:29+00:00
Taking the example of egyptian archeology, if you're reading the work of someone who is well regarded as an expert in the field, you can trust their word a lot more than you can trust the word of an AI, even if the AI is provided the text you're reading.

This is a pretty massive difference between the two, and your narrative is part of why AI is proving to be so harmful for education in general. Delusional dreamers and greedy CEOs talking about AI being able to do "PhD level work" have potentially ruined a significant chunk of the next generation into thinking they are genuinely learning from asking AI "a few questions" and taking the answers at face value instead of struggling through the material to build true understanding.
by phatfish | 2025-10-12 22:13:42+00:00
I'm pretty sure all the people claiming moral superiority will be begging for more AI drones (and blaming their government for not having them) when an enemy starts targeting where they live.

It is also disingenuous for millionaire artists to take this stand while they have the means to sit a war out in their mates bunker in New Zealand, and we die for them.
by strcat | 2025-10-12 22:13:59+00:00
They're talking about devices known to be extraordinarily insecure, which are still closed source hardware with closed source firmware. Having schematics for the board does not avoid trusting the hardware. It's still a closed source SoC and the same for the other components such as the SSD, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, etc. but those components are much less secure without proper updates and security protections. The whole point of an SoC is that it has the complexity of a traditional CPU, GPU, motherboard and other components merged into a single chip, and that's entirely closed source with closed source firmware on those devices.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-12 22:14:00+00:00
I'm not proposing and end of history, but things can remain in stable equilibrium for longer than you'd expect (just look at sharks!). If we slide into stable dystopia now, my guess is that there will be a black swan at some point that shakes us out of it and continues evolution, but we could still be in for 50 years of suffering.
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-12 22:14:24+00:00
Comparing to China is tricky because Chinese investment is almost by default bubbley in the sense of misallocating capital. That's what heavily state-directed economies tend to do and China's still a communist country. Especially they tend to over-invest in industrial capacity. China's massively overbuilt electricity grid and HSR network would be easily identified as a bubble if it were in the west, but when it's state officials making the investment decisions we tend to not think of it as a bubble (partly because there's often never a moment at which sanity reasserts itself).

I read an article today in which western business leaders went to China and were wowed by "dark factories" where everything is 100% automated. Lots of photos of factories full of humanoid robots too. Mentioned only further down the article: that happens because the Chinese government has started massively distorting the economy in favor of automation projects. It's widely known that one of the hardest parts of planning a factory is figuring out what to automate and what to use human labour for. Over-automating can be expensive as you lose agility and especially if you have access to cheap labour the costs and opportunity costs of automation can end up not worth it. It's a tricky balance that requires a lot of expertise and experience. But obviously if the government just flat out reimburses you 1/5th of your spending on industrial robots, suddenly it can make sense to automate stuff that maybe in reality should not have been automated.

BTW I'm not sure the Kuppy figures are correct. There's a lot of hidden assumptions about lifespan of the equipment and how valuable inferencing on smaller/older models will be over time that are difficult to know today.
by jsnell | 2025-10-12 22:14:48+00:00
There are multiple ways to do the computation. All of them will show LLMs having unit economics that are at least an order of magnitude better than search engines for the search engine use case[0]. Not multiple orders of magnitude worse like you claim. You're off by at least three orders of magnitude.

Ad-supported LLM Chatbots will be one of the most lucrative businesses ever.

[0] https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch...
by StackRanker3000 | 2025-10-12 22:15:03+00:00
And are more or fewer people able to put in that time now than before piracy and streaming became a thing? The answer to that question is not obvious to me, but I lean towards ”more”, or at least ”roughly the same”

Even if the answer is ”fewer”, and we thought that was such a horrible thing that we had to have a massive social movement or introduce strict regulation to move away from streaming, how would you put the genie back in the bottle when piracy is so easy, and people have become used to the technological advancements we’ve made?
by wakawaka28 | 2025-10-12 22:15:12+00:00
Sex is not "assigned" at birth so much as "observed". Since you can change the way you look to a large extent, but probably can't easily fool anybody into thinking you are the other sex, sex is the thing that matters.

I will grant one thing. If people are actually getting surgery to change their genitals, then that could be a separate designation.

>Fresh? Again, you're likely interested in male/female presenting. Sex assigned at birth can also be confusing here. It's really not simple for some people.

There might be 1 in 1000 (or less) people for whom it is legitimately confusing to others. Also, DNA is much more accurate than that.

>"Biological sex" isn't a well defined thing. You'd have to start from what does it even mean. The ratio that doesn't fit in either category may be tiny, but country-wide it still covers millions of people.

Literally nobody is actually confused about what "biological sex" means. And no way the corner cases cover millions of people in the US or other countries where this mental breakdown is common. Virtually everyone has normal sex chromosomes and characteristics, even the trans people. If some burly dude with a giant ass pecker thinks that putting on a dress makes him a female, I'm not entertaining that madness.
by grafmax | 2025-10-12 22:15:18+00:00
Im not convinced the geopolitical rivalry between US and China is a given. To a large degree it’s been manufactured - Friday’s antics a case in point.

The US indeed seems destined to fall behind due to decades of economic mismanagement under neoliberalism while China’s public investment has proved to be the wise choice. Yet this fact wounds the pride of many in the US, particularly its leaders, so it now lashes out in a way that hastens its decline.

The AI supremacy bet proposed is nuts. Prior to every societal transition the seeds of that transition were already present. We can see that already with AI: social media echo chambers, polarization, invading one’s own cities, oligarchy, mass surveillance.

So I think the author’s other proposed scenario is right - mass serfdom. The solution to that isn’t magical thinking but building mass solidarity. If you look at history and our present circumstances, our best bet to restore sanity to our society is mass strikes.

I think we are going to get there one way or another. Unfortunately things are probably going to have to get a lot more painful before enough people wake up to what we need to do.
by schoen | 2025-10-12 22:15:30+00:00
It's quoting people who say that it has won because of extensive adoption. However, that adoption doesn't mean that most people are allowed even in principle to change most of the software in embedded devices they own, or even on most of the computing devices they own.

I've also found this really weird. Like, we have Linux kernels on most cloud instances, and most data center servers, and most academic and research computing systems, and probably lately on most embedded microprocessors that are big enough to run it. (And various ecosystems for computing infrastructure and software development are mainly using free software userspace and tools.) Meanwhile, almost all user-facing software that almost all people interact with almost all of the time is proprietary. Why would someone say it's "won"? Thinking really small?
by danpalmer | 2025-10-12 22:15:37+00:00
This really emphasises the Just Use Django (or Rails) advice.

Database indexing by default, check. Working, good, auth systems, check. Test framework, check.

> honestly just spend 2 weeks on architecture before writing code

This is true, or just import an existing architecture and stick to it. My previous company was all Django from day 1, and we mostly didn't have these issues. It's not a full replacement for thinking about architecture, but if you always think "where would Django put this" and do that (should it be in the form, the view, the model, etc), it'll get you a long way. Past the 24 months.

Does this work for all software? No obviously not. But even though most SaaS businesses will have a complicated non-web app sort of component, you can build that bit separately and keep it simple, while having the bulk of your accounts, billing, CRUD, etc, in a basic web app.

Importantly, there are very few frameworks that actually do this. Django, Rails, maybe Spring (I have no experience in that) do it, but composing a bunch of Node packages together is not a replacement, it never works that well. Flask, etc in the Python ecosystem are the same, every Flask app that gets big becomes a custom mess.
by famouswaffles | 2025-10-12 22:15:42+00:00
>No. I see AI people use this reasoning all the time and it's deeply misleading. "You can't explain how humans do it, therefore you can't prove my statistical model doesn't do it" is kinda just the god of the gaps fallacy.

No, this is 'stop making claims you cannot actually support'.

>It abuses the fact that we don't understand how human cognition works, and therefore it's impossible to come up with a precise technical description.

Are you hearing yourself ? If you don't understand how human cognition works then any claims what is and isn't cognition should be taken with less than a grain of salt. You're in no position to be making such strong claims.

If you go ahead and make such claims, then you can be hardly surprised if people refuse to listen to you.

And by the way, we don't understand the internals of Large Neural Networks much better than human cognition.

>It's perfectly fine to use a heuristic for reasoning

You can use whatever heuristic you want and I can rightly tell you it holds no more weight than fiction.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-10-12 22:16:52+00:00
Which GPUs have been running for decades that you're referring to? The A100s that are 4 years old? MTBFs for GPUs are about 5-10 years, and that's not about fans. AWS and the other clouds have a 5-8 year depreciation calendar for computers. That is not "decades."

You can keep a server running for 10-15 years, but usually you do that only when the server is in a good environment and has had a light load.
by sunscream89 | 2025-10-12 22:16:56+00:00
Check out the declassified the CIA Stargate reports. I call this cargo cult indoctrination, yet Power (to travel among and manipulate minds) is real.

All of these years the US has been pouring “trillions”, paid for in post 9/11 “debt cards”, right off the nations debt. All into a failed now white middle American wet dreams godhead of collective consciousness Power. There are ~500,000 Americans who will do explicit evil deeds over the voices in their heads. Some of them are in the Presidential inner circle.

Undeceive the self, the signs are there, America is going crazy from within. America is thought controlled.
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-12 22:17:25+00:00
There's a gazillion use cases for these things in business that aren't even beginning to be tapped yet. Demand for tokens should be practically unlimited for many years to come. Some of those ideas won't be financially viable but a lot will.

Consider how much software is out there that can now be translated into every (human) language continuously, opening up new customers and markets that were previously being ignored due to the logistical complexity and cost of hiring human translation teams. Inferencing that stuff is a no brainer but there's a lot of workflow and integration needed first which takes time.
by Anamon | 2025-10-12 22:17:51+00:00
I don't think that's a fair characterisation. I gave these tools the benefit of the doubt and many genuine tries, and still do occasionally. My judgment that they're unfit for the task is based on finding that they objectively don't help me work. There are studies showing that LLM use slows experienced developers down, even as they believe the opposite. I used to be the only one in my immediate work environment who thought LLMs are of jack use in my development work. Over the past year, most devs who used LLMs heavily have now switched over to my view.

Translation is natural language in, natural language out. That has very little to do with programming. Dijkstra knew back in the 70s that the very concept of natural language programming was bullshit, and that fancy new tech is never going to change the fundamental issues with the idea. In my opinion, his argument is as valid as ever.

Edit: I wasn't trying to imply that natural to natural language translation is trivial. The best LLM tools can be pretty shit at that even today, too. Tried using localised Microsoft developer documentation lately. It's unintelligible.
by neobrain | 2025-10-12 22:18:30+00:00
LineageOS includes Seedvault for backup and restore. It's not 100% reliably across devices apparently, but should typically work: https://github.com/seedvault-app/seedvault/discussions/331#d...

This requires both phones to use Seedvault though, so it's not an option when moving from the stock OS to LineageOS.
by stingraycharles | 2025-10-12 22:19:06+00:00
> What picture does this paint? Things programmers care about directly, like the OS and the kernel, are quite well covered. Whatever we need, there's an open version.

I think this is the wrong conclusion. It’s rather the opposite: when there’s money to be made (applications, device drivers), businesses have came in and managed to dominate it with proprietary versions (music, video, etc).

When they don’t, it’s because of strategic business interests: you’re probably going to want to make your programming language open source in order to gain developer interests, but the applications you make on top of that closed source.
Show HN: Seeklex – Better domain search with automation
by eldarsyzdykov | 2025-10-12 22:19:10+00:00
I often look for domains when brainstorming new projects, but most domain marketplaces are full of gibberish names or already-taken domains. So I built SeekLex — it preprocesses over 1M aftermarket domains to filter out nonsense, detect meaningful words, and generate creative domain hacks when your preferred names are taken.

The goal is to make domain discovery smarter and faster, using automation and (soon) AI. I’m planning to add an API, MCP integration, and an LLM agent to help you find the best domain for your next project.

Would love your feedback and ideas.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-12 22:19:38+00:00
I think prior to Trump, Europe could have been mediator to a benevolent China. Now the hawks are ascendant in Beijing. Trump has shown that his ego pushes him to escalate to try and show others who the "big man" is, this will not end well with China, and I'm not sure he's wise enough to accept that.

Do you really prefer brutal serfdom to the AI supremacy scenario? From where I sit, people have mixed (trending positive) feelings about AI, and hard negative feelings about being in debt and living paycheck to paycheck. I'd like to understand your position here more.
by xwowsersx | 2025-10-12 22:19:40+00:00
I think this post overstates the "loss" of free software. Yes, closed firmware and locked hardware are real gaps...but that doesn't erase the fact that open software has completely reshaped the modern stack. From Linux and K8s to Postgres and Python, it is the infra of the internet. "Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor; it means setting the norms and powering most of what's built.

I tend to see this kind of absolutist, binary tone a lot from people deeply involved in FOSS... and sometimes I think maybe that mindset is necessary to push the movement forward, but it also feels detached from how much open software has already changed reality.
by strcat | 2025-10-12 22:19:45+00:00
You have it backwards. It's smartphones other than iPhones and Pixels with the front door open due to lack of basic security patches and protections. You're making unsubstantiated claims about backdoors not backed by any evidence. Those claims can be made about ANY available hardware. Using devices without basic privacy/security patches for firmware/drivers, an end-of-life Linux kernel and lack of important hardware-based security features is the opposite of being serious about security.

The reason GrapheneOS has an OEM partner we're working with towards their at least one of their upcoming devices meeting our requirements is because Pixels are the only currently viable options. If other OEMs were making reasonably secure devices with support for using another OS on their own, we wouldn't need OEM partnerships. The currently available devices from our OEM partner don't meet our security features or update requirements, but a subset of their future devices will. GrapheneOS will be officially supported so it will be easier to provide a fully production quality OS and we'll be able to do lower level privacy and security improvements at a hardware, firmware and driver level.
by chermi | 2025-10-12 22:20:47+00:00
Well, I only ever cleaned them fully in grade school. In undergrad I TA'ed on whiteboard, in grad school it was unfortunately all whiteboards. Except for the rare literal "chalk talk" mini-conferences I was fortunate to attend, where I just erased what I had at the end, no full cleaning. So, I guess I just never "saw how the sausage was made" and implicitly assumed the worst.

Or my grade school never knew better, which is quite possible given its size/location. Or they thought it was funny to make kids deal with all the dust?
by pixl97 | 2025-10-12 22:22:03+00:00
> of _the next bubble_ and how it will form

This is how humans have worked with pretty much every area of expansion in at least the last 500 years and probably longer. It's especially noticeable now because the amount of excess capital in the world from technological expansion makes it very noticeable and a lot of the limitations we know of in physics have been ran into, so further work gets very expensive.

If you want to stop the bubbles you have to pretty much end capitalism, if which capitalists will fight you about. If AI replaces human thinking and robots human labor that 'solves' the human capital problem but opens up a whole new field of dangerous new ones.
Show HN: Run PyTorch locally with a remote GPU backend
by alyxya | 2025-10-12 22:22:45+00:00
I integrated a remote GPU execution backend into PyTorch through the same system that custom hardware accelerators get integrated into PyTorch. You can create a remote machine and obtain its CUDA device whenever you want to create or move tensors onto the remote GPU.

machine = mycelya_torch.RemoteMachine("modal", "A100") cuda_device = machine.device("cuda") x = torch.randn(1000, 1000, device=cuda_device) y = torch.randn(1000, 1000).to(cuda_device)

I made it reasonably performant by having most operations dispatch asynchronously whenever possible. For cases where slow performance is unavoidable such as uploading many GB of weights onto the GPU, I added a decorator that can be applied to functions to turn it into a remotely executed function. For the most part, the function should behave the same with or without the decorator; the main difference is whether the function code is executed locally or remotely.

import mycelya_torch from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer @mycelya_torch.remote def load_model(model_name: str): tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name) model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained( model_name, torch_dtype="auto", device_map="auto" ) return model, tokenizer

You can only use it with Modal as the cloud provider right now, and it's free to use with their free monthly credits. I appreciate any feedback and bug reports :)
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-12 22:22:50+00:00
All fair points, and it's hard to know exactly how robust the Chinese system will turn out to be, however I would argue that their bets are paying off overall, so even if there is some capital misallocation, overall their hit rate in important areas has been good, while we've been dumping capital in "Uber for X, AirBnB for X, ..."
by strcat | 2025-10-12 22:23:36+00:00
Most banking apps work on GrapheneOS. Around 10% ban using any alternate OS, but a small subset of those specifically permit GrapheneOS now in addition to Google certified devices with the stock OS.

It's nearly the same permission model as Android 16 beyond having Storage Scopes and Contact Scopes as easy to use alternatives with fine-grained control along with Sensors and Network toggles. It's otherwise the same.

If you're talking about the exploit protection features with toggles, that's not part of the permission model and the defaults don't break any apps without serious bugs. Apps with memory corruption bugs can be broken by the defaults, which only requires turning on the compatibility toggle for the app. People don't need to understand the finer grained settings.

The default 4x5 icon grid has the same icon sizes as the stock Pixel OS, which can't be adjusted there either.

The vast majority of issues people have with GrapheneOS are issues with Android and Android apps which are not specific to GrapheneOS.
by cryptoz | 2025-10-12 22:23:38+00:00
I'm working on Code+=AI: https://codeplusequalsai.com/

It's an AI-webapp builder with a twist: I proxy all OpenAI API calls your webapp makes and charge 2x the token rate; so when you publish your webapp onto a subdomain, the users who use your webapp will be charged 2x on their token usage. Then you, the webapp creator, gets 80% of what's left over after I pay OpenAI (and I get 20%).

It's also a fun project because I'm making code changes a different way than most people are: I'm having the LLM write AST modification code; My site immediately runs the code spit out by the LLM in order to make the changes you requested in a ticket. I blogged about how this works here: https://codeplusequalsai.com/static/blog/prompting_llms_to_m...
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-12 22:23:41+00:00
There's some telephone game being played here.

The three year number was a surprisingly low figure sourced to some anonymous Google engineer. Most people were assuming at least 5 years and maybe more. BUT, Google then went on record to deny that the three year figure was accurate. They could have just ignored it, so it seems likely that three years is too low.

Now I read 1-3 years? Where did one year come from?

GPU lifespan is I suspect also affected by whether it's used for training or inference. Inference loads can be made very smooth and don't experience the kind of massive power drops and spikes that training can generate.