MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Embedded conversational AI that personalizes responses on your site
by denizhdzh | 2025-10-20 14:21:44+00:00
I’ve been building an embeddable AI agent that makes any website interactive and context-aware. It doesn’t just answer questions from your PDFs or docs, it also learns from how visitors interact with your site and adapts its responses or suggestions accordingly.

I started this because I noticed that most websites still rely on static FAQs or generic chatbots that treat every visitor the same. That often leads to confusion, lower engagement, and unnecessary support load.

This agent runs entirely on your site and: • References your own PDFs, documentation, or content base • Learns from visitor behavior to personalize answers or offers • Works without external API calls or backend dependencies • Can be styled and placed anywhere on the page

Early results from SaaS testers: • Trial signups increased by ~25-30% • Support tickets dropped by ~20% • Self-serve setup takes under 2 minutes

I’d love feedback on the technical side, how it handles embeddings, personalization logic, or UX flow. Happy to answer any implementation questions.
Ask HN: What level of news do you need and not need?
by bwb | 2025-10-20 14:21:47+00:00
I've been thinking a lot lately about the news I receive versus the news I need to function as a voting member of my city/region/country/planet.

I am really frustrated by a few things:

News doesn't put the story into context. i.e., 5 clowns murdered at party, but it never puts the overall murder rate to understand if this really matters as a trend.

Does anyone know a news website putting the big picture in context?

I also do not like that stories don't allow you to get followups. For example, on court cases, I want to know what ends up happening, how those SC or Fed court rulings actually impact businesses, etc.

Anyone know any news organizations tracking that type of stuff so that interested peeps can keep getting updates?

And finally, are there any news websites that are screening out day to day stuff and just posting monthly status on what is going on to help put the trend in context?

Everything just seems like 100 voices in a room screaming for attention and no context or decision on what is really important or fascinating...
by username223 | 2025-10-20 14:21:50+00:00
I don't think there's a unifying reason why programming languages languish in obscurity; it's certainly not because they're "too powerful." What does "powerful" even mean? I used to care more about comparing programming languages, but I mostly don't these days. Actually used/useful languages mostly just got lucky: C was how you wrote code for Unix; Python was Perl but less funny-looking; Ruby was Rails; JavaScript is your only choice in a web browser; Lisp had its heyday in the age of symbolic AI.

Forth and (R4RS) Scheme are simple to implement, so they're fun toys. Some other languages like Haskell have interesting ideas but don't excel at solving any particular problems. Both toy and general-purpose programming languages are plentiful.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-20 14:22:13+00:00
> her colleague was a little too nonchalant about it ( 'it is on her to do her due diligence' ).

I’m always fascinated by victim blaming culture, which has been pervasive long before generative AI.

You see it most frequently in cases where the victim is thought to be a safe target: Someone wealthier, an office rival, a corporation. On HN it appears in every thread about someone being scammed, but it was most obvious in the recent threads where JPMorgan was defrauded by a startup they acquired. Seemingly 1/3 of the comments were from people commenting that JPMorgan was actually at fault for allowing themselves to be scammed. Some even declaring that the fraudster shouldn’t be prosecuted because JPMorgan was entirely to blame for allowing themselves to be scammed.

I don’t know what drives it. The victim blaming people always seem to believe they would not fall prey to similar scams. They also seem to see the world as full of faceless scams everywhere and that allowing yourself to fall victim to them is a moral failing. Many of them just like to be contrarian, snide, and judgmental, so heaping scorn on the victim they know checks more of those boxes than going along with the obvious consensus that the party who committed the crime is the one to blame.

This happens with every new generation of scams. The victim blamers read the news and think it would never happen to them because they’re too smart, therefore any victims deserve blame.
by Yizahi | 2025-10-20 14:22:29+00:00
Oh, I'm not arguing that Macbooks are bad. I'm arguing that they are not midrange. Midrange is a plastic Acer with low res display and mid range CPU, the thing for getting things done without fancy design. Macbooks are top tier, expensive devices (double so outside of USA). And when considering utilizing their unmatched integration, customer would want to buy in into other top tier devices, like Apple made phone, headphones, chargers etc.
by codeforafrica | 2025-10-20 14:22:42+00:00
It depends on the level of risk. I generally accept what people say as truth, but if you start asking me for money I require evidence. And the more money you ask for, the more evidence is needed.

This is not easy. I help pay the school fees for a few students in East Africa. But, I have been to these students homes. I know their situation first hand. Now I am in a different country, and I can no longer verify if they still need help. All I can do is trust that their situation hasn't changed. And even if they are lying and they can actually afford the school fees, I know they are poor enough that helping them will still make a difference.

But anyone helping me to do this needs to take my word for it. Unless they travel here and get their own first hand impression.

I heard from one organization that was helping an orphanage, and then they found out that half the kids weren't even orphans. It was effectively a boarding school for some of the children. The people were at the location and saw the children in person, but they were fooled about the status of the children, or they didn't pay attention. Maybe it was a translation error, or some misunderstanding.

It doesn't actually matter. The important part is that these children needed help either way. So the money was not misused, just the true reality of these children was misrepresented.

The problem of course on the side of the givers is that you can't tell the difference between a genuine mistake and an intentional deception. You have to assess the risk, and, you have to decide for yourself how much you'll be hurt if it turn out to be a deception.

I don't give money to people I meet on the street, because I know enough people who also need help that I can't help everyone, so I limit my help to people I know well enough to trust them.
by bluGill | 2025-10-20 14:23:10+00:00
You can review - but by the time you really know it is too late. If things are going really bad after one year then start over. However often things that will go well long term are having "growing pains" at 1 year and so "staying the course" despite the pain might be the right decision. Until you have a microservices architecture you don't know the pros/cons of it for your system - you can get insight from others, but their system will be different and so will have different problems.

Your org chart should be tweaked every year - as should your architecture. However major changes should not happen often - if at all.
by bradley13 | 2025-10-20 14:23:27+00:00
I'm sure that some (few) of these NGOs do good work. However, sooner or later, they all seem to succumb to two problems: (1) excessive staff costs, and (2) a failure of incentives.

The second one is more insidious: If they solved the problem they address, they would no longer need to exist. They have no incentive to succeed. So they go around addressing individual problems, taking sad pictures, and avoid addressing systemic problems.

And if the systemic problems are insoluble? Then there is again an argument that the NGO should not exist. If the problem is truly insoluble, then likely the money could be better spent elsewhere.
by rpcope1 | 2025-10-20 14:23:59+00:00
Honestly, when I write forth now, which is usually for embedded targets, I've got a customized version of zforth that I've grafted some stuff like locals into. If it's a small program, it's better to not be afraid of things like globals, and just spend at least twice as much time factoring, writing comments and thinking than writing. It's important to read other people's Forth code and try to understand, as there's a zen and style that looks very different than how you'd write something like Java. It's freeing and enlightening once it clicks, but you have to fight a ton of the way you think about "normal" code.

As far as the codebase, I probably shouldn't say too much (may it's been long enough now, but Idk), but all I'll say is that was a important part of things at a certain disk drive manufacturer.
Show HN: Musevise – AI identifies artworks and enriches them with Wikipedia
by _asako | 2025-10-20 14:24:22+00:00
Hey HN!

I'm excited to share Musevise — a web app that helps you instantly identify and understand artworks from images.

- Why I built this When I look at artworks, I often can’t recall the artist’s name or the title. But without the right keywords, it’s difficult to search online. I wanted to solve this problem and make it easier for anyone to explore and appreciate art without needing to remember exact terms.

- What Musevise does Upload any artwork image or paste a URL AI (Claude 3.5 Haiku) analyzes the image and identifies the artist, title, and visual elements Automatically adds Wikipedia context for deeper understanding Works with paintings, sculptures, and various art forms

- How it works Musevise uses a vision-language model (VLM) to convert an image into descriptive text and retrieve related Wikipedia information. One challenge was that Wikipedia entries often vary in how titles or artist names are written (punctuation, translations, aliases, etc.). To handle this, I added a prompt-engineering layer that lets the LLM reformulate the Wikipedia search query dynamically — absorbing inconsistencies before hitting the API. This approach significantly improved matching accuracy without building a custom search index. Another technical challenge: sometimes the VLM fails to return output in the strict JSON format expected by the backend, causing parsing errors. I’m refining prompts and adding fallbacks to make it more robust.

- What's next Currently, Musevise automatically serves Japanese Wikipedia for Japanese browsers, and I’m working on expanding multilingual support. Try it out and let me know your thoughts!

https://www.musevise.com
by duxup | 2025-10-20 14:24:54+00:00
I used to love Windows as a utilitarian OS I could just get things done on.

But over time the OS felt like it wasn't there for me to use. Rather Windows feels like it is pointed AT ME. Eventually it felt almost like an advertising supported OS than anything else.

Moved to a Mac and haven't looked back. Performance and battery life were big bonuses too, but honestly weren't why I moved. I just hated using Windows that much.
by devilbunny | 2025-10-20 14:25:14+00:00
> it's not a person/org's specific blog post

Yeah, it really is, even if what's linked to is one post rather than the entire blog.

His stuff pops up here often enough. He really does blog at Science. Has for years and years.

If you have a background in chemistry, it's fairly accessible (i.e., he very rarely talks about anything in a depth that an undergrad chem major would have trouble understanding - which, given that most chemists start branching off very quickly in grad school, is roughly the appropriate depth for writing intended for a general chemistry audience, since it's the last common knowledge level).
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-20 14:25:22+00:00
Here on Long Island (NY), most apartments are illegal (addition/remodeled single-family homes). Many of them make you sign a lease, anyway, but they can get dismissed by any law student.

Every now and then, some municipality claims that it will be "fighting illegal apartments," but they die quick deaths. If they got serious about it, the homeless population would explode, and a lot of folks would leave the state.

Also, I believe that most of the rules that apply to apartments, come from municipalities, not states.
by thiht | 2025-10-20 14:25:41+00:00
> stability has been replaced with transitional pains of a new application framework, iOS-ification of much of the system, and inconsistent behavior

I see your point but I kinda disagree. As a daily macOS user (I have a MBP for work and one for personal use), my workflow just doesn't change much (if at all) between updates. If anything, I use less third party software since Sequoia (I replaced Rectangle with native window snapping, which is good enough). Tahoe didn't change anything for me. Working on a MacBook doesn't feel less powerful than before, and everything still "just works". I don't feel like the OS gets in my way at all.
by slightwinder | 2025-10-20 14:26:13+00:00
> The problem isn't necessarily the need for permission, it is excessive bureaucracy.

Certain checks just need time. A lack of qualified experts who are able to evaluation the situation for a permission is in such a case more likely than excessive bureaucracy.

> If I want to build and sell houses, I should be able to do it, but it shouldn't take going to 10 government offices, filling out 50 forms and waiting a year for someone to give me a permit. And then, once I have built it, it shouldn't take another year for someone to check I did it correctly.

That's how you end up with deathtraps who are poisoning their resident and folding down in themselves on the next earthquake or some strong wind.
by busterarm | 2025-10-20 14:26:18+00:00
Nothing I can show you but I still think a notable story:

A non-developer (but PM) friend of mine vibe-coded his own strength-training programming app that he uses daily. He pivoted from that to vibe-coding his own 2d game engine and 4x strategy game he's been working on.

He's effectively used vibe-coding to teach himself how to code and he brings me questions/problems as good as any working junior developer.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-10-20 14:26:19+00:00
> It is defined as fatal, but the origin when everything really has an origin is unpunished until now to commercialize health and medical bureaucracy, cancer does not really exist if it is not caused by an economic benefit.

This feels like one of those sentences that has been run through the English->Japanese->English loop in Google Translate a dozen times. I absolutely have no idea what it's trying to say.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-20 14:27:07+00:00
Lots of crap commenting about these aren't real, dinosaurs aren't real, and so on.

I for one am really impressed with that long, overhead shot of the tracks. That's nothing short of amazing, right down to the one "misstep" that doesn't fit the smooth pattern of the others. I see now why this place is a big deal.
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-20 14:27:13+00:00
I subscribe to The Economist which I think curates things at the weekly period well.

I have roughly 5 blogs I check every day.

I rely on my YOShInOn RSS reader for news on a wide range of topics, with the caveat that it isn't particular fast. For news about science and technology it doesn't matter if it is delayed two weeks, but it is a problem for sports where you don't run to look at an article about what happened in week 6 of the NFL after week 7 goes down.

I am lucky that Ithaca has several weekly papers, both print and web-based, that make up for the fact that our "paper of record" is a zombie. It used to be when a local election happened I would buy an Ithaca Journal the next day to see the results, but now the head office updates that paper around 3pm in the afternoon the next day. Our board of elections usually posts the results around 8pm the night of the election and all the 'alternative' papers run articles on it right away -- the Ithaca Journal used to send reporters to public meetings but no more, no wonder there is a movement to defund it by taking public notices out of it.
by nicoburns | 2025-10-20 14:27:21+00:00
If you don't need JavaScript, then you might be interested in https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz.

It pulls in Servo/Firefox's CSS engine Stylo (and Servo's HTML parser html5ever) and pairs it with our own layout engine (which we are implementing mostly as libraries: Taffy [0] for box-level layout and Parley [1] for text/inline layout) and DOM implementation. Rendering and networking are abstracted behind traits (with default implementations available) and you can drive it using your own event loop.

Minimal binary sizes are around 5mb (although more typical build would be more like 10-15mb).

[0]: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy [1]: https://github.com/linebender/parley
by smitelli | 2025-10-20 14:27:48+00:00
I'm the person who reimplemented Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (DOS, 1992) and my original reasoning was a desire to know how it was able to do some of the graphical tricks it did on such underpowered hardware (it could run on an IBM AT). The game wasn't anything special by any metric, but it was an important piece of my childhood and I felt an attachment to it. I also learned a hell of a lot about the PC platform, the C ecosystem from the 80s, and my own tastes as an engineer.

https://github.com/smitelli/cosmore

https://cosmodoc.org/
by Pxtl | 2025-10-20 14:27:50+00:00
Which is another part of why a space elevator is nifty - by definition it extends out to a distance where you are going fast-enough-sideways.

Now, I have no idea how practical it is to build one (Angela Collier has a video saying it's kinda ridiculous), but it's a cool idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5aHMB4Tje4

Also since rockets have moved away from hydrolox, it would be nice to have a greener launching system.
by Hnrobert42 | 2025-10-20 14:28:18+00:00
Reminds me of the snap judgment podcast about the Belgian Beaver bandit who illegally reintroduced beavers to Belgium to bypass the same kind of bureaucratic roadblocks. It was a really touching podcast.

https://play.prx.org/listen?ge=prx_320_cc65818c-232c-49cb-a8...
by nicoburns | 2025-10-20 14:28:31+00:00
See my comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45644277) about Blitz. Perhaps you might be interested in collaborating :)

Also, we're not using it in Blitz (although it could be added as a backend) but a note that WebRender is maintained. See Servo's most recent 0.68 branch (https://github.com/servo/webrender/tree/0.68) and also ongoing upstream development in the Firefox repository https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/tree/main/gfx/wr
by wduquette | 2025-10-20 14:28:34+00:00
I'd like to see this succeed, but I'm skeptical that a small team can keep up with the major players in this area. Many years ago Dan Kennedy (of the SQLite team) wrote a lovely HTML widget for TCL/TK. It rendered CSS 1.0 quite nicely, and was a pleasure to use, modulo a few font-related bugs; but was soon rendered obsolete and out of date. Not blaming Dan, here; it simply wasn't a one-person job. Meanwhile, I'd rewritten an app to make use of it. Got burned once, don't want to get burned again.
by codegeek | 2025-10-20 14:28:42+00:00
We did a COBOL project in our CS program way back in college (circa 2002). I remember liking it a lot considering it was "mostly write code in Plain English". AI Prompts have nothing on COBOL :). They were doing it way before it was cooler.

Regardless of what we think of it, we must appreciate its longevity and reliability. Sure, it is hard to change and all that but can we really imagine today's modern tooling surviving 50 years and counting ? I don't know.
by rplevy | 2025-10-20 14:29:04+00:00
A friend built this service to solve the following problem: if you’ve ever built a voice agent or chatbot that needs to call into real phone systems, you know how painful testing can be. https://testvoice.ai/ makes that process simple. You can buy a real phone number, build dialplans visually, and make or record real calls in just a few minutes.

It’s designed for developers working on voice AI or IVR traversal. You can map call flows, test how your agent handles prompts, and verify latency or routing. All from a web interface. Under the hood it runs on Freeswitch , postgres, python/ Fastapi, and nextjs, and includes features like call recording, versioned dialplans, and IVR traversal testing.
by pancakemouse | 2025-10-20 14:29:33+00:00
Not at all snarky because I have no idea what the real answer is here, but although this sounds pretty good, it strikes me how in conflict this would be with most peoples' ideals if we tried any sort of system to scale this to larger populations (like a city).

Perhaps we want privacy-but-not-anonymity. Or perhaps society doesn't scale easily.
by n4bz0r | 2025-10-20 14:30:14+00:00
And people who play Chinese retro handhelds must dump their own ROMs. Unless they bought a 10000 in 1 version for $10 extra, in which case it's all perfectly legal!

Sure, you must, I guess, but is anyone really going to jail over this piece of ancient history? I find these disclaimers cute.
by NetMageSCW | 2025-10-20 14:30:32+00:00
If you are willing to forego the GUI development, LINQPad is an amazing interactive environment for creating libraries to help your scripting and then speed up the scripting of small tasks. It is fast and easy enough that I’ve used it for complicated processing of small (a few screens) of text instead of emacs, but powerful enough to run queries against phone systems or import GB of CSV and produce an Excel summary.
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-20 14:30:37+00:00
I suppose it depends on what you are interviewing for but questions like that I assume are asked more to see how you answer than the specifics of what you say.

Most web jobs are not technically complex. They use standard software stacks in standard ways. If they didn't, average developers (or LLMs) would not be able to write code for them.
by mikepurvis | 2025-10-20 14:30:56+00:00
I think the difference here is more that I'm talking about the practical reality of today's display interfaces (both sides have a full frame in memory, typical overall latency is 5-50ms), whereas you're discussing what could be theoretically possible with dedicated emulation hardware that streams out an unbuffered HDMI signal and an HDMI-supporting CRT that operates similar to a modern VRR gaming display.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-20 14:31:37+00:00
For that you need repeated interactions and reputation networks. It requires densely networked communities where defection is punished with ostracism and tainted reputation. It works in small communities that have known each other for generations and are expected to rely on each other in the future.

The ability to move into new circles every few years incentivizes defection and low trust interactions.

However tight knit, reputation based groups will tend towards risk aversion and conformity and tall poppy syndrome and nepotism. Low trust enables outlier performance.
by pseudocomposer | 2025-10-20 14:31:51+00:00
At least for North Carolina, it's wrong/self-inconsistent. The quoted text (and linked NC legislation) says the max is:

> $15 or 5% of rent, whichever is GREATER. 5-day grace period. One-time fee per late payment.

But this site seems to say the legal maximum is whichever is lower (i.e., it won't go above $15).