MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tamimio | 2025-10-09 16:15:57+00:00
> Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode

As someone who worked in the robotics industry, 90% of the demos and videos are cherry-picked, or even blatantly fake. That's why for any new robot in the market, my criteria is: Can I buy it? If it's affordable and the consumer can buy it and find it useful in day to day life, then this robot is useful and has potential; other than that, it's just an investor money grab PR hype.
by refulgentis | 2025-10-09 16:16:03+00:00
A healthy two‑way exchange isn’t the issue, as you note, partners routinely buy from each other. The problem critics flagged here is that this particular arrangement starts to resemble “vendor financing” or a circular funding loop. Nvidia commits up to $100 billion to OpenAI. OpenAI then uses that money to buy Nvidia’s chips. Nvidia books the revenue and likely earns equity or upside in OpenAI. On paper, both sides look like they’re growing dramatically. But it’s the same capital being passed around, and it makes it harder to tell how much real, third‑party demand is driving those numbers.

Why people worry:

• Real demand vs. vendor financing: When the supplier is effectively fronting the cash for the customer’s purchases, it’s not the same as independent spending from end users. Investors and regulators want to see whether OpenAI could buy all those chips without Nvidia’s financing.

• Confusing financials: Nvidia appears to rack up huge sales, while OpenAI’s balance sheet swells with cutting-edge hardware financed by Nvidia. Untangling how much of each company’s “growth” is externally driven versus funded by the other side becomes tricky.

• Risk concentration: Nvidia’s fortunes would hinge on OpenAI delivering an multi-trillion-dollar scale business to justify the investment. If AI demand doesn’t materialize as hoped, Nvidia isn’t just missing chip sales, it’s directly exposed to OpenAI’s downside.

• Governance & optics: When vendor and customer roles blur, people question whether decisions are being made to satisfy true market demand or to juice financial metrics and valuations.

So it’s not that reciprocal deals are bad; it’s that circular, high-dollar deals can obscure what’s actually happening under the hood. That’s why folks are raising eyebrows.

It’s like Sam giving Pat a $20 “investment,” and Pat immediately spending that same $20 to buy Sam’s lunch vouchers. Sam says, “I sold $20 of lunches!” Pat says, “I’ve got $20 in lunches!” But really, it’s one $20 bill just doing a lap.

I'm generally of the same take as you: this reads much more to me like 2009-2013 Apple where they fronted cash to suppliers to do build outs and get to the 10x scale Apple needed ASAP. People looking at this as "proof" there's a "bubble" scare me.
by orbital-decay | 2025-10-09 16:16:13+00:00
Not sure about this. All OSes were janky and buggy, Linux desktop up until at least late 2000s (I've been using it since ~2000), early Mac OS X, I don't even want to talk about classic Mac OS which was an abomination. Software quality and user experience was notoriously worse than it is today. This applies to everything - I've lost a ton of work to bugs in ZBrush, Maya, Word, FL Studio, backup software, and more.
by sciencejerk | 2025-10-09 16:16:39+00:00
You make a strong point, but now we also have smartphones, ioT devices and cloud networks EVERYWHERE and there is tons of shared open source code (supply chain attacks), and there are tons of open-source attacker tools,vuln databases and exploits (see nuclei on github).

Yes, many/most systems now offer some form of authentication, and many offer MFA, but look at the recent Redis vulns -- yet there are thousands of Redis instances vulnerable to RCE just sitting on the public internet right now.
by zahlman | 2025-10-09 16:16:42+00:00
> Someone should make a social media site with inverted dynamics- users who only spend a few minutes per day on the site and post once every few weeks should be treated as the influential power users, while the people lurking and scrolling for 10 hours per day are deprioritized.

The problem is most users are the "casuals", by a wide margin, in general; and a lot of them are also "weirdos" in different ways. Some of them will be obsessed with a different site; others have serious issues in spite of all the forms of social proof you describe.
by WorldMaker | 2025-10-09 16:16:43+00:00
No, for many of the same reasons I don't think it made sense for them to invest in cars.

But also, yes, for the same reasons I appreciate that Walt Disney invested in trains and monorails. While Disney's train-oriented Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow vision never got properly built, it was still such a cool disruptive vision to explore. Also, not just the Epcot theme park that borrows the name but not the concept/ideals, all of the Disney Parks owe their existence to Disney's interests in trains. (The first theme park ride Walt Disney was involved with was building a rideable model train in his own backyard.) I don't expect Apple to build theme parks either, but if investments in train technology and vision pay off with similar secondary effects that maybe the trains don't get built but other cool things do, Disney offers the precedent that an interest in trains by a company that isn't supposed to be in the train business can produce interesting results.
by BryantD | 2025-10-09 16:16:46+00:00
I have a different opinion of Twitter than you do, but that’s not actually the case I was making. I was pointing out that Twitter’s terms of service were modified to be less aggressive about calls for violence. If you’re correct and Twitter succeeds at not promoting hate and violence… why wouldn’t James Comer want to understand why?

My explicit hypothesis is that he’s not holding these hearings out of a desire to investigate, he’s holding them for other reasons.

Also you’re slipping down a slope here. Originally the question was about promoting violence yet you keep referring to hatred or even being glad someone’s dead. Promoting violence is not the same as being glad someone has passed away.
by otikik | 2025-10-09 16:17:37+00:00
Depends on where you are. There's food additives that are used in the US that are forbidden in Europe [1]

> The E.U. says that if they can’t dismiss the possibility of harm, they can’t find an additive safe,” Galligan says. In the U.S., the bar is much lower; companies can add new ingredients to their foods without even informing the FDA. “In the U.S., it feels like the FDA is waiting to act until harm is definitely proven,” says Galligan.

[1] https://time.com/7210717/food-additives-us-fda-banned-europe...
by amiga386 | 2025-10-09 16:17:51+00:00
Yes, but how will you get the word out? The moderator can delete all your promotion of the breakaway subreddit within their subreddit. How are you going to get eyeballs?

And the truly vindictive moderators will start spamming your new subreddit with e.g. child pornography, and then immediately reporting it to the admins. You had best have your own moderator team running 24/7 to cope with intentional sabotage coming from a person who lives their whole life on Reddit, and will stop at nothing to keep control of the little power that they have. You won't be able to pin this sabotage on the moderator, unless you're in their private Discord channel where they coordinate the attack, which you obviously won't be as you're an outsider. Then they will openly gloat about doing it, because they're on the Right Side Of History, and you are Nazis and deserve everything you get.

Reddit also has default subreddits, or rather had them, but they still hold significant first-mover advantage and enjoy network effects. There's a reason that /r/pics is full of insipid drivel, but there's not a more popular /r/pics2
by epiccoleman | 2025-10-09 16:17:52+00:00
Dude, this is so cool! I've had something like this floating around my cluttered headspace for ages, and it always sort of floats to the surface during the rare times when I do some light sysadmin work via Termux on my phone.

Another thing that jumps to mind is the minichord[1], a nominally open-source synth/instrument.

I just love seeing these little devices people can come up with given the proliferation of the necessary devboards and tools. Nice project.
by belthesar | 2025-10-09 16:18:00+00:00
For use cases like attaching to an SBC or really any other computer, I'm sure this is great, but there are also USB crash cart consoles that can be gotten pretty cheaply like the NanoKVM-USB[0] or Cytrence's KIWI[1]. This gets you both video, keyboard and mouse.

[0] https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/kvm/NanoKVM_USB/introduc...

[1] https://www.cytrence.com/product-page/cytrence-kiwi
by throwaway77385 | 2025-10-09 16:18:07+00:00
For all my criticisms of it, I built two commercial apps in it. I worked around the issues and it was fine.

I've also built commercial apps in other stacks and they also have their warts.

What I've noticed from the other stacks, however, is that the frequency of entirely unnecessary issues is simply lower. React and NextJS aren't going anywhere and one can hope that these things will improve over time.

Ultimately, it's also a great employment guarantee, as companies will need people to maintain the apps that are constantly changing.

I think applying scepticism to Vercel and its motives is healthy, still.
by tptacek | 2025-10-09 16:18:26+00:00
The commit access thing is a joke. I think it's a joke. It's mostly a joke.

MFA is not in general phish-resistant. But Passkeys, U2F, and FIDO2 generally are, because they mutually authenticate; they're not just "one time passwords" you type into a field, but rather a cryptographic protocol running between you and the site.
by peterlk | 2025-10-09 16:18:52+00:00
Counterargument: I can learn things at record speed (for me) because I can learn things in the order that makes sense to me. I find it much more motivating to start with: “why is AI bad at playing video games?”, than to start with “what is the chain rule?”

I will certainly need to learn about the chain rule eventually, but I find that I get lost in the details (and unmotivated to continue) without an end goal that is interesting to me.

AI loves to make vibe charts (sometimes with lots of extra steps), but that’s part of the process. It is nontrivial to wrangle LLMs through larger projects, and people need to learn that too
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-10-09 16:19:17+00:00
It's in fact the opposite. If the user has to manually write/fix endless configuration files, they are likely to make a mistake and have gaps in their security. And they will not know because their settings are distinct from everyone else.

If they `apt-get install` on a standard debian computer, and the application's defaults are already configured for high-security, and those exact settings have been tested by everyone else with the same software, you have a much higher chance of being secure. And if a gap is found, update is pushed by the authors and downloaded by everyone in their automatic nightly update.
by Teknomadix | 2025-10-09 16:19:35+00:00
From the Figure Master Plan:

"Today, manual labor compensation is the primary driver of goods and services prices, accounting for ~50% of global GDP (~$42 trillion/yr), but as these robots “join the workforce,” everywhere from factories to farmland, the cost of labor will decrease until it becomes equivalent to the price of renting a robot, facilitating a long-term, holistic reduction in costs.”

Renting a robot? What are the chances of robot rent-seeking becoming a drop in replacement for today's increasing costs of labor. A high likelihood potential outcome.
by TuxSH | 2025-10-09 16:20:25+00:00
For self-use author has a point, but for public-facing sites not so much, because:

- infra work is thankless (see below)

- outages will last long because you're unlikely to have failovers (for disk failures, etc.), plus the time to react to these (no point in being paged for hobby work)

- more importantly, malicious LLM scrapers will put your infra under stress, and

- if you host large executable you'll likely want to do things like banning Microsoft's IP address because of irresponsible GH Actions users [1] [2] [3]

In the end it is just a lot less stress to pay someone else to deal with infra; for example, when hosting static sites on GH Pages or CF Pages, and when using CF caching solutions.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/microsofts_github_gmp...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36380325

[3] https://github.com/actions/runner-images/issues/7901
by potatolicious | 2025-10-09 16:20:43+00:00
Moore's Law has been dead for a long time. The doubling rate of transistors is now drastically below Moore's prediction.

We're adding transistors at ~18%/year. That's waaaaay below the ~41% needed to sustain Moore's law.

Even the "soft" version of Moore's law (a description of silicon performance vs. literally counting transistors) hasn't held up. We are absolutely not doubling performance every 24 months at this point.
by czhu12 | 2025-10-09 16:21:10+00:00
This is why I built https://canine.sh -- to make installing all that stuff a single step. I was the cofounder of a small SaaS that was blowing >$500k / year on our cloud stack

Within the first few weeks, you'll realize you also need sentry, otherwise, errors in production just become digging through logs. Thats a +$40 / m cloud service.

Then you'll want something like datadog because someone is reporting somewhere that a page is taking 10 seconds to load, but you can't replicate it. +$300 / m cloud service.

Then, if you ever want to aggregate data into a dashboard to present to customers -- Looker / Tableau / Omni +$20k / year.

Data warehouse + replication? +$150k / year

This goes on and on and on. The holy grail is to be able to run ALL of these external services in your own infrastructure on a common platform with some level of maintainability.

Cloud Sentry -> Self Hosted Sentry

Datadog -> Self Hosted Prometheus / Grafana

Looker -> Self Hosted Metabase

Snowflake -> Self Hosted Clickhouse

ETL -> Self Hosted Airbyte

Most companies realize this eventually and thats why they eventually move to Kubernetes. I think its also why often indie hackers can't quite understand why the "complexity" of Kubernetes is necessary, and just having everything run on a single VPS isn't enough for everything.
by jmmv | 2025-10-09 16:21:25+00:00
> digging up an HDMI monitor, finding somewhere to put it, and connecting it to the device is an annoying process. Furthermore, if I’m on the go I almost certainly don’t have easy access to an external monitor.

This has annoyed me many times as well with the headless computers I run... until recently, when I bought a USB-powered 7-inch HDMI monitor for an embedded project that didn't go anywhere. But now I have a spare little monitor that I can easily use in these situations and even carry it around if necessary.
by rob_c | 2025-10-09 16:21:41+00:00
Cost, experience and for the paranoid (right or not) control.

The biggest downside is initial cost in time, effort and cash compared to typing in a credit card.

Ok other downsides include lack of power redundancy and decent networking which are more common in data-centers.

Other side of this is, why buy 8xa100 for that project to stick them on eBay to recoup cost when you can rent them?
by derbOac | 2025-10-09 16:22:06+00:00
Can anyone comment on the translations of Krasznahorkai's works into English?

Every time I read a translation of highly regarded literature I can't help but wonder if I'm getting some inadequate rendition that is missing something critical to why the originals are so highly regarded. This isn't meant to be a criticism of translators, just that I think their job is very difficult.

Of course, I still happily read and enjoy translations; there's just this shadow cast for me all the time by the originals.
by ewoodrich | 2025-10-09 16:22:25+00:00
> When the agents needs to run commands like 'npm test' in a sub-directory, they almost never get it right the first time)

I was running into this constantly on one project with a repo split between a Vite/React front end and .NET backend (with well documented structure). It would sometimes go into panic mode after some npm command didn’t work repeatedly and do all sorts of pointless troubleshooting over and over, sometimes veering into destructive attempts to rebuild whatever it thought was missing/broken.

I kept trying to rewrite the section in CLAUDE.md to effectively instruct it to always first check the current directory to verify it was in the correct $CLIENT or $SERVER directory. But it would still sometimes forget randomly which was aggravating.

I ended up creating some aliases like “run-dev server restart” “run-dev client npm install” for common operations on both server/client that worked in any directory. Then added the base dotnet/npm/etc commands to the deny list which forced its thinking to go “Hmm it looks like I’m not allowed to run npm, so I’ll review the project instructions. I see, I can use the ‘run-dev’ helper to do $NPM_COMMAND…”

It’s been working pretty reliably now but definitely wasted a lot of time with a lot of aggravation getting to that solution.
by nkko | 2025-10-09 16:22:30+00:00
1. The option to leave an email for those who are interested is a huge plus, obviously without forcing it in any way. Maybe I should word it differently. 2. I’m not suggesting just slapping logos on the site, which has become the norm these days even if someone only tried the product once. But seeing an endorsement from someone like Mitchell Hashimoto on ampcode.com is a plus for me. 3. Yes, “visible founders” can absolutely backfire if it becomes performative or ego-driven. But handled with humility and substance, founder presence can actually accelerate trust-building.
by jmull | 2025-10-09 16:22:44+00:00
> JSX aligns directly with how JavaScript itself works...

Why javascript, though? That preference, again, seems based on what you’re used to.

The actual goal is to manipulate the DOM based on state changes using a declarative representation.

Javascript seems more like something that was available rather than a good fit. (In fact, they felt like it was a bad enough fit that JSX had to be added to the mix.)

Setting aside any particular framework, HTML seems like a better fit to me… it’s inherently declarative and, of course, has a well understood, well supported relationship with the DOM. Extensions to bind state can be pretty well contained.
by tialaramex | 2025-10-09 16:22:44+00:00
At least that much remaining. For both Vec::reserve and Vec::reserve_exact the parameter is an unsigned integer representing how many more items you expect to need space for.

So reserve(1) 10 times in a row will just repeatedly ensure there's enough space for at least 1 more item, which after the first time there certainly is†

There's an excellent chance the capacity check in particular got inlined, so the optimized machine code will not "actually" call a function ten times, it'll call it once and then maybe emit a single capacity check inline, the subsequent checks even a crap 1980s optimiser will go "We do not need to check that again" and skip it.

† If the Vec is full and can't grow, which really can happen for Zero Size Types in particular, then this panics, and what happens next is a compile time choice, in debug likely it just tells you what went wrong and suggests how to make a backtrace. In the ordinary case that we instead got to keep running then it succeeded.
by wongarsu | 2025-10-09 16:22:45+00:00
The last example they show (pick up package from pile, put it label-down on conveyor, repeat) seems to be the most realistic. They even have an uncut video of their previous model doing that for an hour on twitter [1].

I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot, but the ability to grab and manipulate all those packages and recover from failures is pretty good

1: https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1931391783306678515
by gregsadetsky | 2025-10-09 16:23:09+00:00
Fully agreed that any rough edges/onboarding can be solved (with a lot of work, care, etc.).

I just have one main question: what would you like to self-host? Limewire was about file sharing, so the "value proposition" was clearly-ish defined. The "what does Limewire do" was clear.

Are you interested in hosting your own web site? Or email? Or google cal/drive/photos-equivalent? Some of it, all of it?

I'm genuinely curious, and also would love to know: is this a 80% of people want X (self-hosted file storage? web serving?), and then there's a very long tail of other services? Does everyone want a different thing? Or are needs power-law distributed? Cheers
by kristopherleads | 2025-10-09 16:23:10+00:00
Yeah, exactly! What's so funny to me is that people who think they want no-code really don't want no-code. Because no-code is built for that - but even novices in coding will really quickly outstrip a no-code native environment, whereas low-code will scale with your learning,

No-code: "I don't need code, this is so easy!" 2 weeks later "I wish I had access to literally any code system to make this work."

Low-code: "I don't need code, this is so easy!" 2 weeks later "Oh awesome I can actually use code here!"
by lesuorac | 2025-10-09 16:23:11+00:00
More importantly you keep the portfolio semi-balanced.

Just using Google / Gold as a comparison [1].

Assume you have 100 units of each.

In late 2021, Googs gone up ~100% so you have to rebalance because you have $200 in Goog and $92 in Gold. So lets say you rebalance to 80 Goog (160$) and 144 Gold ($130).

In late 2022, Googs gone down ~40% so you have to rebalance because you have $96 in Goog and $141 in Gold. So lets say you rebalance to 100 Goog ($120) and 118 Gold ($112).

So over the course of 2 years Goog has gone up 20% and Golds gown down 5% but your investments are overall up 16%. Obviously a 100% Goog investment is higher but with more risk.

If you didn't do any rebalancing then you have a gain of 7.5% (100*1.2 + 100*0.95 = 215)

[1]: https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/PHYS:TSE?compariso...
by taylodl | 2025-10-09 16:23:12+00:00
My point is the EV is the mundane vehicle. Apple can pack features into their watch all day, but the Swiss mechanical watch - despite doing far less - is still seen as superior.

That’s the same reason people buy high-end ICE cars. It’s not about utility or noise - it’s about engineering excellence. ICE vehicles showcase mechanical mastery in a way EVs simply don’t.
by seer | 2025-10-09 16:23:14+00:00
While n8n is amazing for the odd office automation and giving semi-technical people an enormously powerful tool to get things done, it seems it can’t really replace a real backend, and mostly because of the n8n team choices than any technology.

We were trailing it and wanted to essentially switch our entire backend to it - and technically it seemed to be able to do the job, but their licensing turned out to not be a fit.

For a moderately used app we very quickly burned through their “executions” that were allotted by our license - and that’s where we host it ourselves, configuring and paying for the servers, load balancers, key value store and database, with its failovers and backups.

So the license was to use it on top of all that, and even their highest enterprise license was cutting it close, and if you “run out” of these executions, the service just stops working …

And all of that would have been fair if it was hosted, but sounds ludicrous to me for something we self host.

I think it is an incredible piece of tech, but just not suited for a dynamic startup, and once we spent the time to code up the alternative paths for our use cases, it no longer made sense to use n8n at all, as we mostly solved all the problems it was helping us with.