MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fluoridation | 2025-10-13 22:32:18+00:00
>They never were terribly cheap

Not really, no. Not if all you need is "a computer". They're more interesting if you want a cheap ARM computer, or a tiny computer, or a server that sips power. Although for that last one they're also kind of dubious. If you can somehow get away with running what you need off a phone, that's way better value.
by zbowling | 2025-10-13 22:32:20+00:00
I hacked together a new MCP server this weekend that can significantly cut down the overhead with direct tool calling with LLMs inside different agents, especially when making multiple tool calls in a more complex workflow. Inspired by the recent blog post by Cloudflare for their CodeMod MCP server and the original Apple white paper, I hacked together a new MCP server that is a lot better than the Cloudflare server in several ways. One of them being not relying on their backends to isolate the execution of the tool calling but also just generally better support around all the features in MCP and also significantly better interface generation and LLM tool hinting to save on context window tokens. This implementation can also scale to a lot more child servers more cleanly.

Most LLMs are naturally better at code generation than they are at tool calling with code understanding being more foundational to their knowledge and tool calling being pound into models in later stages during fine tuning. It can also burn an excessive number of tokens passing data between tools via LLMs in these agent orchestrators. But if you move the tool calling to be done by code rather than directly by the LLMs in the agents and have the LLMs generate that code, it can produce significantly better results for complex cases and reduce overhead with passing data between tool calls.

This implementation works as an MCP server proxy basically. As an MCP server, it is also an MCP client to your child servers. In the middle it hosts a node VM to execute code generated by the LLM to make tool calls indirectly. By introspecting the child MCP servers and converting their tool call interfaces to small condensed typescript API declarations, your LLM can generate code that invokes these tools in the provided node VM instead of invoking directly and do the complex processing of the response handling and errors in code instead of directly. This can be really powerful with when doing multiple tool calls in parallel or with logic around processing. And since it's a node VM, it has access to standard node models and built in standard libraries there.

One issue is if your tool calls are actually simple, like doing a basic web search or a single tool call, this can a bit more unnecessary overhead. But the more complex the prompt, the more this approach can significantly improve the quality of the output and lower your inference billing costs.
by maxglute | 2025-10-13 22:34:02+00:00
It's substantially cheaper after skipping personel + operational costs of training and associated maintenance etc. Keeping the human bits trained involves flight hours, platform wear and tear etc. Unmanned = do more with less, i.e. same airframes can focus on useful missions. Or sustain more with much less upkeep. Wasting hours wearing down platforms to maintain crew proficiency is SUBSTANTIAL over lifetime of highend platforms. XXLUUV fleet - skipping out on 1,000s of crew, and can be built to lower standards etc. The AI proliferates experience across all hulls simultaneously. For same acquistion you can acquire 2/3x size fleet, have most in storage while a few do day to day operations with significantly cheaper OPEX while maintaining readiness.

XXLUUVs aren't cheap or lowend, they are highend but PRC shipbuilding advantage over US simply monumental, i.e. they can match capabilities and win attrition game on budget. Like UUVs following surface fleet is basically DARPA ACTUV proposal... TLDR is instead of spending 500k-1M per day (US costs) on fleet size ASW you can use a few 10k per day drones that keep tabs on marked targets. PRC has ship building capabilities to execute this at fraction of cost. Once you remove manning, attrition based strategies become even more potent for PRC industrial base.

UKR demonsrates how shitty deindustrialized powers are at generating fires. PRC is has industrial base to make 30m cars and 20m motorcycles annually. This translates to industrial base that can output 5 digit shaheed tier munitions daily. This basically enough satuate any layered defense US+co can prepsition. That's just lowend. Medium end like cruise missiles PRC can probably do ~1000 a day, see their cruise missile gigafactory. The key difference between RU, is PRC (like US) has C4ISR to make efficiently use munitions. RU is closer to Iran level.

ATACMS and Storm Shadow range are functionally toys in IndoPac, i.e. we're talking about different scale of of highend warfare over much greater distances and magazine exchanges. UKR is frankly schoolyard fight and has no worthwhile lessons for Indopac except it's important to have strong industrial base for attrition game, i.e. RU able to sustain very incompetent exchanges vs entire US+NATO support. Incompetent as in wildly inefficient and constrained because they have shit C4ISR that can't dismantal UKR IADs or logistics insulated on NATO soil. There's no "sancturary" in IndoPac.

The useful lesson we learned in last few years relevant to highend peer to peer fight is basically shit tier missiles can penetrate the most sophisticated ABM in the world (Iran vs Israel), more than carrier groups has magazine depth. XXLUVs basically another layer of massing fires in quantities current surface fleet composition can't survive, but strips out ambiguity around long distance / standoff kill chains by parking satuation sized salvos always in terminal range. Again these are not cheap low end solutions, these are HIGH END solutions that PRC simply can build cheaply at scale.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-10-13 22:34:26+00:00
Anybody with a brain knew this was never going to work and Tesla was obviously lying about the 2 million reservations (okay not lying, omitting some 'small' details - like that the reservations were meaningless, much like their 'Robotaxi' is public, where by public they mean an app that lets you join a waitlist...).

Electreck article though is suggesting xAI / SpaceX are buying them not only to help Tesla, but the timing suggested that it was also to extract as much of subsides as possible. As this is a significant transaction between releated entities, there should be some documentation on that in quarterly financial statements. Quite curious how many they bought - based on Tesla influencers posts, at least for SpaceX it looks like a lot:

https://x.com/JoeTegtmeyer/status/1977422203810414807#m
by rootusrootus | 2025-10-13 22:35:20+00:00
That is a good thing to hear from someone as reputable as Karpathy. The folks who think we're on the cusp of AGI may want to temper their expectations a bit.

I do love Claude Code, because one thing I periodically need to do is write some web code, which is not my favorite type of coding but happens to have incredibly good coverage in the training data. Claude is a much better web developer than I am.

But for digging into the algorithmic core of our automation tooling, it doesn't have nearly as much to work with and makes far more mistakes. Still a net win I'm happy to pay for, even if it's never anything more than my web developer slave.
by simonw | 2025-10-13 22:36:29+00:00
H100s are expensive NVIDIA GPUs, each costing about $30,000. 8XH100 means you have 8 of those wired together in a big server in a data center somewhere, so around a quarter of a million dollars worth of hardware in a single box.

You need that much hardware because each H100 provides 80GB of GPU-accessible RAM, but to train this model you need to hold a LOT of model weights and training data in memory at once. 80*8 = 640GB.

~$24/hour is how much it costs to rent that machine from various providers.
by user68858788 | 2025-10-13 22:37:10+00:00
The article is well written and shows why dynamic typing can be so compelling.

This is how I’ve been writing web services for the last decade. It was a style that came from being frustrated with the experience of using many all-in-one frameworks.

Frameworks take time to learn and the skills are generally non-transferable. Any complex application still requires you to know the underlying languages frameworks attempt to abstract. Frameworks often make testing more difficult due to adding layers of abstraction between what the application does and how the code is written.

Writing actual SQL/CSS/etc in a dynamically typed language to be used in a template is so much easier to understand, debug, and validate.
Show HN: The small startup with nothing to sell and everything to lose
by ModernMechanic | 2025-10-13 22:37:15+00:00
Hi my name is Jordan. This was all written by hand without AI, for you? me? idk.

I know attention spans are short now, but I want to share how I want to share. If you're reading this, know it was written by a fellow human for a fellow human.

Over a year ago, I started working on Modern Mechanic after being frustrated with my Matco scanning tool that I spent over $2,000 on. I got a small amount of funding and convinced my investors to let me release it completely free. No ads, no pro version, no subscription. Just a useful tool for anyone who owns a car.

What makes it different? It was built to help you, not just translate bits.

Natural language input – describe what you're hearing, smelling, or feeling

AI-powered diagnosis that goes way beyond just reading codes

Works with ANY OBD2 reader you already own (or no reader at all) – no proprietary hardware

Supports any year/make/model – even custom builds and engine swaps

Plain English explanations, repair guides, cost estimates, and video tutorials

Access to real mechanics if you get stuck or need extra help

We'll literally find a trusted local mechanic and book a repair for you at the lowest possible price

TONS of other features

We hand built everything inhouse, including CAN bus bit parsing, which means there might be occasional bugs. But it also means we can keep it free forever.

Now I'm here and I need your help. Please support a small startup. I'm not trying to bill you monthly. I don't have a course or a program to sell you. I don't have anything that will help you get rich.

BUT if you own a car and are sick and tired of businesses that don't care about their consumers, maybe join my waitlist and help me prove you can make it by providing value to people for free.

Download/Waitlist: [modernmechanic.us]

Happy to answer any questions about the tech, the business model, or anything else. I've also done VC pitching, product design, and run a few other companies – glad to help anyone else on their startup journey. Currently if you want to support us and get a foudners package its on the link, there is no requirement, the app will release free but it helps us fund it and you get cool perks :P
by matt_daemon | 2025-10-13 22:37:23+00:00
> On the other hand, it’s missing what I think is a major problem. Much of academic systems work already seems bottlenecked on selecting which problems to pursue. This appears to be two reasons. The short-term reason is disconnection from the problems that the customers of systems (in industry and the wider world) face. The longer-term, and more important, reason is that coming up with a vision for the future is just much harder than hill climbing. It takes more experience, more insight, and more vision to choose problems than to optimize on them. It takes more taste to reject noise, and avoid following dead ends, than to follow the trend.

While this is certainly inarguably true, I think the whole point is that AI-Driven Research for Systems as the authors put it, makes this much less critical. The sheer volume of problems we'll be able to solve will drastically minimise selection paralysis.
by shkkmo | 2025-10-13 22:37:56+00:00
Looks like this is just misinterpretation of poor public communication by the BLM.

> UPDATE: The U.S. Bureau of Land Management responded to 8 News Now on Friday afternoon to clarify the meaning of a “canceled” notice on the Esmeralda Seven Solar Project. A decision to combine the environmental reviews for the seven projects is being changed to give each project the option of submitting their proposal separately. The BLM’s statement: “During routine discussions prior to the lapse in appropriations, the proponents and BLM agreed to change their approach for the Esmeralda 7 Solar Project in Nevada. Instead of pursuing a programmatic level environmental analysis, the applicants will now have the option to submit individual project proposals to the BLM to more effectively analyze potential impacts.”

> The “Cancelled – Cancelled” notice on BLM’s NEPA website applies only to the environmental review stage. The entire project has not been canceled.

https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/massive-esmeralda-s...
by gsf_emergency_4 | 2025-10-13 22:38:17+00:00
In the past the material resources of opposing forces were evenly matched: french revolution happened because the state had tenacious control over arms. Today armies do sometimes side "with the people", but mostly to prevent the politicians from going too far.

Real revolutions today have to be quiet. Besides NLnet, which I personally find trustworthy, and to which anybody can try to apply for funding, there's also Linux and FreeBSD. Those are real techno revolutions, but I'm optimistic that they can be taken to the next level. (2% support)

Be the change you want to see in the world, like Gandhi says. It's simple, though not easy. Join NLnet, or contribute to F-droid, or work on reverse engineering advanced proprietary tech. Find and learn and think about how revolutionary tech orgs are run. Most important thing to learn: how they can survive on support from only 1% of humanity. Thinking like that, it's actually easier now than any point in history.

(In another sense 1% is already a sweet spot, see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45572427

World domination is a bug not a feature. The Linux kernel is the revolution. Desktop Linux is not)
by trhway | 2025-10-13 22:38:20+00:00
I lived in USSR, and know first hand that it means to be separated from common technological space. USSR wasn't that small, especially if one adds Eastern Block, yet it was falling behind the world becoming fully incapable to produce their own comparable computers, cars, etc.. If world get to split into such islands, the speed of technological progress will fall dramatically while social progress may go fully backwards. If you look at some ideologies rising around the world - they are straight medieval, and in many cases only connectedness to outside world has been preventing them from taking over their "islands".
by johncolanduoni | 2025-10-13 22:38:56+00:00
I’m not advocating WireGuard’s transport be replaced with QUIC (they’re solutions for very different problems), but that doesn’t mean QUIC is saddled with legacy junk. Most applications want protocols that are connection-based and optionally offer retransmit - that’s not legacy junk, that’s just what is called for in most cases. L3 encryption is an unusual application in that it doesn’t call for these properties.
by ryandrake | 2025-10-13 22:39:42+00:00
As you alluded to, the answer is they don't care. Car companies look at software like it's any other line item on the BOM. Like a bolt or a gasket: Source it as cheaply as possible and spoon it onto the product somewhere on the assembly line. I see fit-and-polish mistakes all the time in car infotainment. Text that can't handle unicode, icons that are misaligned by 1 or more pixels, connections dropping and coming back, audio mixing problems, things drawing outside their "windows." Nobody cares--they get to the drop dead date when the software needs to be on the assembly line, hand it over, and start flashing devices.
by epistasis | 2025-10-13 22:40:03+00:00
This is not idealized comparison, it's the most immediate choice: continue running as you are, or build something new.

In that comparison, coal loses. Coal loses much harder if you're talking about investing in a brand new facility.

> That sort of wishy-washy language is classic political sales pitch stuff.

There's nothing wishy-washy about concrete numbers with specifics. Saying something like "clean coal" or whatever the heck is going on here:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...

is political and wishy washy.

The only coal supporters are those with the wishywashy politics. No hard-nosed quantitative type that runs numbers and is connected to reality supports coal. That would be comical.
by imiric | 2025-10-13 22:40:22+00:00
> The Claude agent running in a different CLI session (as an example) also now has access to my GitHub token. Or, any extension I've ever loaded in VS Code also has access.

If you're giving untrusted software full access to your system, you're not in a position to complain about the system not being secure enough. Security starts by making mindful decisions according to your threat model. No system can keep you secure from yourself. I mean, it can, but it wouldn't be a system you have control over (see Apple, etc.).

There are many solutions that can mitigate the risks you mention. They might not be as convenient as what you're doing now, but they exist. You can also choose to not use software that siphons your data, or exposes you to countless vulnerabilities, but that's a separate matter.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-13 22:40:36+00:00
You mean like all of the ransomware that is being reported on a monthly basis? My mom looked for a printer driver by searching on Google and installed some type of crap that wasn’t the official driver. She is 80. But she has actively been using computers since we had an Apple //e in the house in 1986.

On the Mac, people installed Zoom and it installed a backdoor web server.
by numpad0 | 2025-10-13 22:41:04+00:00
While that might be true, the five whys is notorious for slipping into a destructive "you/I suck and firing you/I solves the problem for good and I believe it makes everyone absolutely happy" style of false conclusions.

Reportedly Toyota has organizational mitigations for that problem or reportedly the working culture there isn't so great after all. The bottom line is, it's a double edged sword to say the very least.
by ok_dad | 2025-10-13 22:42:01+00:00
The scary part is how this is being done, not that immigration laws are being “followed” (they aren’t).

Masked men roaming the streets arresting even US citizens without a warrant.

Going into court rooms and houses of worship to do it.

Using violence on unarmed peaceful protesters, regardless of the protest legality.

Combine it with the Republican inability to follow the law and the current rhetoric about “antifa” and how democrats are terrorists.

That’s why this isn’t good and people are scared. It could turn into civil war at this point, with very little spark.

Thankfully you’re from Canada and your stake in the matter is fairly nil.
by AnonymousPlanet | 2025-10-13 22:43:18+00:00
Android is losing a unique selling point. This will have an impact on what a techie may recommend to a non-techie in the future, because everything is beige now.

I have the feeling Google has given up on using nerds as beachheads. The market is saturated enough and they don't need us anymore to do grass roots spreading of their products. It's the same with Youtube. As long as there were enough people who were unencumbered by ads because of their ad block and kept spreading links, the importance of Youtube was growing. After market saturation that vehicle isn't necessary anymore and they can squeeze them out.
by toofy | 2025-10-13 22:44:30+00:00
> It is literally the only recommendation engine that works.

do you really find this to be true? i find it’s incredibly wrong like 90+ percent of the time. i am not close to interested in most of its recs. i’ve tried for years to tell it what i like and its just wrong so often. i’ve even tried entirely new accounts.

i mean, sure every once in a while im like “whoa, that’s a great rec” but thats pretty rare. it’s definitely better than spotify and the like etc… they’re wrong almost always, but a miss rate of more than 9 times out of 10 is so bad.

recommendations from people is so much more accurate.

when i get a music recommendation from someone who works at the record store the positive hit rate is so high, same with movies and music recommendations from friends, etc… if it works for you that’s great but my feed is overflowing with video after video where i’m like “why in tf do you think i’d want to watch this?”
by johncolanduoni | 2025-10-13 22:44:42+00:00
The main reason to use TLS is that you can get a bunch of off-the-shelf implementations that are (post-Heartbleed) the most heavily scrutinized public cryptographic implementations in existence. Plus if anyone finds a practical exploit of TLS (or a major implementation), they’re more likely to go steal credit card numbers being typed into Amazon than to attack your particular use of it. Noise is cool but if you don’t need the same flexibility that Wireguard does (or have the expertise to implement a concrete protocol on top of it correctly), something built on TLS 1.3 is a better bet.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-13 22:45:25+00:00
> You can’t rerun the economy under controlled conditions, so “experiments” are mostly natural or quasi experiments

...you can't rerun the universe under controlled experiments. That's the whole point of the "controlled" part. It's an artificially isolated environment designed to model a specific phenomenon.

If you want examples of thoroughly experimental economic disciplines, look to auction, bargaining and game theory.

> Macroeconomics isn’t like astronomy :-) Stars don’t change behavior when you model them. Economies do

Stars don't change, but the ways we look at them do. This sort of endogeneity in data collection and research methods is a constant source of noise and errors in the physical sciences.

You're correct in that it's much more pronounced in economics, since humans are agents. That puts boundaries on how much one can predict. But that doesn't make it unknowable through the scientific method.

> DSGE models are equilibrium sandcastles calibrated to past data. In physics that’s failure while in macro it’s tenure

I'm not going to defend DSGE any more than I will string theory. (I know a lot more about the former to be able to properly critique it than I do the latter.)

> Economics is interesting and sometimes useful but calling it an experimental science is self-flattery

I'm not an economist. But I apparently know more economics than a lot of people who make confident statements on this board about the field.

Several fields of economics are rigorously empirical. Others are strictly observational. And others are total nonsense. The fill of nonsense is higher than other fields, but that's mostly due to the relevance of the work. If the rise and fall of nations rode on the spectral pattern of Sagittarius A*, you'd probably have a lot of nonsense work around that, too.
by rictic | 2025-10-13 22:45:45+00:00
I've just published v1.0.1. It's about 2x faster, and should have no other observable changes. The speedup is mainly from avoiding allocation and string slicing as much as possible, plus an internal refactor to bind the parser and tokenizer more tightly together.

Previously the parser would get an array of tokens each time it pushed data into the tokenizer. This was easy to write, but it meant we needed to allocate token objects. Now the tokenizer has a reference to the parser and calls token-specific methods directly on it. Since most of the tokens carry no data, this keeps us from jumping all over the heap so much. If we were parsing a more complicated language this might become a huge pain in the butt, but JSON is simple enough, and the test suite is exhaustive enough, that we can afford a little nightmare spaghetti if it improves on speed.