MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Tepix | 2025-10-21 18:33:32+00:00
One part that's kind of boring when playing a text adventure is trying things the original authors did not anticipate and getting a boring standard response. LLMs could make this part more interesting by adding more playful, hopefully even witty responses. If you're playing in the browser, this could even be using the Prompt API utilizing a small LLM that's running locally!

Also you could use LLMs for NPCs and for certain areas of the game, like mazes.

I'm sure there are way more possibilities. We're still at the very beginning. Just think about it: Everyone is complaining about LLMs hallucinating. Text adventures are an area where such hallucinations are desired.
by pas | 2025-10-21 18:33:48+00:00
this is a bad framing. he did put in a lot of work, he did mercilessly churn through engineers to get results, cajoled various power-brokers to get subsidies and financing necessary to keep on keeping on.

he is the ultimate right place right time person, managed to turn innovative historically doomed-to-fail ventures into very highly valued mature(ish) businesses.

it's unlikely that someone without his micromanagerial madness could have done these. (and of course in a better world he would have gotten help, employees wouldn't have been fired on a whim, and the market wouldn't reward liars. not to mention that ideally the market would price in the consequences of enriching someone with so loose morals.)
by Breza | 2025-10-21 18:34:06+00:00
Why not host in house? If you have an application with stable resource needs, it can often be the cheaper and more stable option. At a certain scale, you can buy the servers, hire a sysadmin, and still spend less money than relying on AWS.

If you have an app that experiences 1000x demand spikes at unpredictable times then sure, go with the cloud. But there are a lot of companies that would be better off if they seriously considered their options before choosing the cloud for everything.
by bink | 2025-10-21 18:34:12+00:00
From the article:

> OT cybersecurity specialists interviewed by CSO say that KCNSC’s production systems are likely air-gapped or otherwise isolated from corporate IT networks, significantly reducing the risk of direct crossover. Nevertheless, they caution against assuming such isolation guarantees safety.

This was also not a nuclear facility, however. The article says it makes "non-nuclear components".

In my experience auditing critical infrastructure, most facilities are "air gapped". I put that in quotes because while you can't browse the Internet from the control network(s), there are ways to exfiltrate data. The managers, engineers, regulators, and vendors need to know what is going on in real-time. Back in the day this could've been a serial port connecting two systems for a one-way feed. Now I imagine it's something far more sophisticated and probably more susceptible to abuse.

As an example, you might have a collection of turbines manufactured by GE and GE needs to have real-time data coming from them for safety monitoring and maintenance. The turbines might have one connection for control traffic and another for monitoring. How to secure these vendor connections was always a debate.

Btw, there are strong cybersecurity regulations around critical infrastructure. CIP-005-07 covers security perimeters. You can view them here: https://www.nerc.com/pa/Stand/Reliability%20Standards%20Comp...
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-21 18:34:17+00:00
Haha no. Voting machines caused absurd amounts of political instability here in Brazil. It's essentially become wrongthink to question the system.

Our elected representatives have tried to add a paper trail to the machines twice now and it was ruled unconstitutional for total bullshit reasons. Our former president was banned from future presidential races because he questioned the machines. We have a judge loudly proclaiming that the machines are UNQUESTIONABLE with such unwavering pride you'd think he'd have the balls to start a billion dollar bug bounty and post it here on HN. He only allows you to "audit" the system by appointment behind closed doors and the only tools you're allowed to bring with you is a pen and a piece of paper. People found issues even with these restrictions. There are people protesting to this day, laymen asking for source code, completely unaware of the existence of supply chain attacks and the fact the source code would prove nothing and serve only to humiliate them. We have former US president Biden's top CIA guy telling our former president to stop questioning the machines, wouldn't be surprised if they had access to this shit.

Germany did it right: voting machines are unconstitutional because citizens do not understand it. Elections must be fully auditable by the average person. This is the correct stance.
by sindriava | 2025-10-21 18:34:53+00:00
Take this attitude somewhere else, this isn't Reddit.

To set the record straight:

- "CoT reasoning- stolen from Chinese AI labs" I should really hope this point doesn't need correcting. Accusing anyone from stealing of stealing from "Chinese AI labs" is laughable at this point.

- "Codex is a ripoff of Claude Code" Claude Code wasn't the first CLI agent and you could just as easily "accuse" Anthropic of stealing the idea of chatting with an LLM from OpenAI.

- "Sora is a low quality clone of Google’s Veo3." Do you realize video models existed BEFORE you were born, which was apparently yesterday?

- "another Perplexity ripoff." Wait until you hear how Perplexity came to be.
Show HN: MTOR – A free, local-first PWA to automate workout progression
by vmcallsm | 2025-10-21 18:34:54+00:00
Hi HN,

My motivation for this came from frustration with existing workout trackers. Most felt clunky, hid core features like performance graphs behind a paywall, or forced a native app download. A few people close to me who take their training seriously shared the same sentiment, so I decided to build my own.

I'm working on mTOR, a free, science-based workout tracker I built to automate progressive overload. It's a local-first PWA that works completely offline, syncs encrypted between your devices using passwordless passkeys, and allows for plan sharing via a simple link.

The core idea is to make progression easier to track and follow. After a workout, it analyzes your performance (weight, reps, and RIR), highlights new personal records (PRs), and generates specific targets for your next session. It also reviews your entire program to provide scientific analysis on weekly volume, frequency, and recovery for each muscle group. This gets displayed visually on an anatomy model to help you learn which muscles are involved, and you can track your gains over time with historical performance charts for each exercise.

During a workout, you get a total session timer, an automatic rest timer, and can see your performance from the last session for a clear target to beat. It automatically advances to the next incomplete exercise, and when you need to swap an exercise, it provides context-aware alternatives targeting the same muscles.

It's also deeply customizable:

* The UI has a dark theme, supports multiple languages (English, Spanish, German), lets you adjust the UI scale, and toggle the visibility of detailed muscle names, exercise types, historical performance badges, and a full history card. * You can set global defaults for weight units (kg/lbs), rest times, and plan targets, or enable/disable metrics like Reps in Reserve (RIR) and estimated 1-Rep Max. The exercise library can be filtered by your available equipment, you can create your own custom exercises with global notes, and there's a built-in weight plate calculator. * The progression system lets you define default rep ranges and RIR targets, or create specific overrides for different lifts (e.g., a 3-5 rep range for strength, 10-15 for accessories). * Editing is flexible: you can drag-and-drop to reorder days, exercises, and sets, duplicate workout days, track unilateral exercises (left/right side), and enter data with a quick wheel picker.

I'll be here all day to answer questions. I'm also thinking about making the project open-source down the line and would be curious to hear any thoughts on that. Thanks for checking it out!
by moritzwarhier | 2025-10-21 18:34:58+00:00
I agree that car analogies should be taken seriously.

Sure, cars are useful. But aiming to sell as many cars as possible is no more ethical than selling as many yachts as you can, especially if it involves making the living conditions worse for anyone who doesn't own a yacht, for example by bribing politicians, or destroying non-yacht-capable waterways.
by amthewiz | 2025-10-21 18:35:06+00:00
It has puzzled me why someone hasn't already done this yet, given LLMs are so good at language now.

Probably the short answer is that is it hard to get this to actually work. There were many open questions that one has to tackle simultaneously -

- What is the right balance between relying on LLMs to do the right thing vs the runtime around LLMs? For example, I went back and forth a few times getting LLMs to manage stack as you call one playbook from another one. Finally decided that it is most reliable to let the runtime take care of that.

- Context engineering - What to put in the prompt, in what order, how to represent state, how to handle artifacts, how to make sure that we use LLM cache optimally as context grows, how to "unwind" context as playbook calls return, how to compact specific types of information, how to make sure important context isn't lost, etc

- LLMs today have vastly different capabilities than 2 years ago. I have had to rewrite the whole stack from scratch 4 times to adjust. Wasn't fun, but had to be done.

- Language(s): How to represent the pseudocode so that it is both fluid natural language and a capable programming language? How to transform it so that it can be executed reliably through LLMs? How to NOT lose the flexibility and fluidity in the process (e.g. easy to convert to a graph like LangGraph, but then you are stuck with control flow), how to create a semantic compiler for that transition, what primitives to use for the compiled language that I call Playbooks Assembly Language [1].

- Agents and multi-agent system considerations - How to represent agents, how they should communicate. Agents are classes and they expose public playbooks that other agents can call). Agents can send natural language messages to each other and engage in conversations. Agents can call multi-party meetings. How can the behavior across all these interaction patterns be defined so it remains intuitive. For example, lifetime of a meeting is tied to "meeting: true" playbooks so the agent simply returns from the playbook to exit a meeting and meeting lifecycle is tied to the host returning from its meeting playbook.

- Which LLMs to support? Go for "Bring your own LLM" or restrict the set? Which LLM? LLM selection impacts how all the internal prompts are implemented so prompt building had to occur simultaneously with LLM selection.

It felt like playing an N-dimensional game of chess!

[1] https://playbooks-ai.github.io/playbooks-docs/reference/play...
by sethhochberg | 2025-10-21 18:35:08+00:00
I don't know if they're available in other markets, but in the US I've been very happy with Lutron Caseta switches for that sort of "smart enough" use case. It generally all works like normal dumb switches if the hub is offline or doesn't exist, and you only need the hub to manage configuration or enable the remote control (outside home) features. The fact that the switches look like, act like, and install like traditional dimmers and control traditional light fixtures is really what sold me: I've never liked the idea of the smart parts being in something like a light bulb thats basically a replaceable wear item.
by whynotminot | 2025-10-21 18:35:35+00:00
Why would someone who likes solving problems choose a very lucrative career path solving problems… hmmm

You can also solve problems as a local handyman but that doesn’t pad the 401K quite as well as a career in software.

I feel like there’s a lot of tech-fetishist right now on the “if you don’t deeply love to write code then just leave!” train without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to pay bills, not because it’s our burning passion.
by tonymet | 2025-10-21 18:36:20+00:00
I wouldn't go that far. The SLA is a contract, and they are clear on the remedy (up to 100% refund if they don't hit 95% uptime in a month).

Just like reading medication side effects, they are letting you know that downtime is possible, albeit unlikely.

All of the documentation and training programs explain the consequence of single-region deployments.

The outage was a mistake. Let's hope it doesn't indicate a trend. I'm not defending AWS. I'm trying to help people translate the incident into a real lesson about how to proceed.

You don't have control over the outage, but you do have control over how your app is built to respond to a similar outage in the future.
by dang | 2025-10-21 18:37:10+00:00
We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments and ignoring our request to stop.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

(Not a defensive of clown billionaires. Just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck.)
by NickC25 | 2025-10-21 18:37:20+00:00
>would a 499 billion cap make you happy?

Yeah. No single individual needs that much money. especially in this day and age where politicians are cheap as fuck to buy and the markets will reward any and all regulatory capture in the name of increasing short-term value of stock....while not giving a damn about the long-term ramifications of how it perverts our entire economic system.

>100 Billion?

That would too. Let me ask you - if you had $99 billion USD, would you whine that you don't have $100 billion, or would you, y'know, go out and use the money to enjoy your life and take care of people?

I know which I'd do. Hint: I'd be extremely fucking happy with what I'd have and I'd do all I could to spread the wealth around as far as I could. I wouldn't whine, I'd be overjoyed that I'd have more wealth than all but approximately 30 people on the planet.

The only "work" I'd do at that point is to figure out which diseases could likely be eradicated with enough money, and figure out how to give enough money to get it done. Gates, for all his faults, did pretty much just that. His money kicked malaria's ass.

>Also, it is not as simple as taxing profits. Almost all of this value is simply equity in controlled companies. What is the mechanism here? If you are too successful, the government seizes your company? Dont you think that would be disruptive to investment and growth?

It most certainly is quite easy.

If you have over a certain number in net worth (say, $100 billion), you can't take out loans against your stock portfolio - you have to sell stock or assets. The loans-against-portfolio system was designed to help middle class individuals buy homes, not to help centibillionaires buy $500mm yachts. If you are the sole founder of a multi-trillion dollar organization, your business expenses should cover quite literally anything you could ever need.

The mechanism isn't the government taking away a company, and it's certainly not disruptive to investment nor growth. In fact, as a founder myself, I'd take it as a badge of honor if the government came in and said "hey bro you are now worth a hundred billion dollars, you've won capitalism, go enjoy time with your friends and family". My investors, who invested small amounts of capital at a valuation in the low single digit millions, would be thrilled at a 100 billion dollar exit. That's nearly a 100,000x multiple ROI. If you, say, as an investor, dropped $10,000 on an investment. It gave you a return, after a decade, of 100,000x, or a billion dollars. Your reaction to that would be to complain that the government is discouraging and disrupting growth?
by photochemsyn | 2025-10-21 18:37:29+00:00
The timeline here is interesting. Microsoft releases info and instructions for mitigation on July 19, and a more complete report on July 22nd, here's a copy of that:

https://archive.ph/plNZU

Then according to this report, 'sometime in August' the exploit is used against the Honeywell-managed nuclear facility, since it wasn't patched, if I read correctly? So it really could have been anyone, and it's hardly just Russia and China who have a record of conducting nuclear espionage in the USA using their nation-state cybercapabilities (Israel?). As the article notes:

> "The transition from zero-day to N-day status, they say, opened a window for secondary actors to exploit systems that had not yet applied the patches."

Also this sounds like basically everything that goes into modern nuclear weapons, including the design blueprints. Incredible levels of incompetence here.

> "Located in Missouri, the KCNSC manufactures non-nuclear mechanical, electronic, and engineered material components used in US nuclear defense systems."
by dennisy | 2025-10-21 18:37:38+00:00
I absolutely loved this piece.

I also agree with comments on this thread stating that problem solving should be the focus and not the code.

However my view is that our ability to solve problems which require a specific type of deep thought will diminish over time as we allow for AI to do more of this type of thinking.

Purely asking for a feature is not “problem solving”.
by hypeatei | 2025-10-21 18:37:53+00:00
> Not to mention much easier to keep updated OTA.

I think I'd prefer not to have easier over-the-air updates. As we saw with Jeep recently, the chance of turning your car into a brick are non-zero with these updates.

> cheaper to build than a bunch of buttons and dials

Tesla's are already quite expensive, how much more would some buttons and dials add to the price?
by Yizahi | 2025-10-21 18:37:57+00:00
I heard this concern and looking at the MAGA it is totally believable. But really, how can a country disenfranchise anyone, if they will issue a mandatory national ID? If it is not national (state or lower) or if it not mandatory (voluntary and/or paid for), then I can see parth for corruption. But if it is mandatory national document, issued to every citizen without exception and only to citizens, then I honestly don't see where the corruption may happen. If anything, USA SSNs are much bigger vector of corruption, a proven vector of corruption, but again, like with FPTP no one bats the eye.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-10-21 18:38:02+00:00
These are contradictory claims:

>In essence, my salary is a retainer. It's payment to keep my expertise availalbe, and working for my employers instead of someone else.

>It's not payment for activity or time.

If the latter statement is true, then you must not have any mandatory hours to be present.

If you do have mandatory hours to be present, then the latter statement is not true.
by illiquid | 2025-10-21 18:38:06+00:00
OpenAI’s app-use/router mechanism represents a fundamental step in compressing the emergent superintelligence of the global economy into a steerable, self-improving coordination system.

“OpenAI, with app-use/the router has taken a major leap in compressing this existing economic superintelligence into a legible, queryable, steerable system that gets better over time, and eventually one where improvements to the underlying system approximate improvements in actual total factor productivity.”

“Taken together, you can look at LLM chatbots that deeply integrate service providers as the Manhattan Project of economics, a radical experiment in expending huge sums of capital to crush transaction costs and then capture some of the resulting upside.”
by FaradayRotation | 2025-10-21 18:38:17+00:00
Oh man, the integrated problems this will cause for the manufacturing engineers will be of nightmare level. You wont really get to properly test how well you made the heat pipe network until end of line! Hopefully they will be able to drum up some inline metrology to test the heat pipes before then...

This on top of all the through-silicon-vias and backside power delivery would make even the crustiest of engineers weep...
by ghaff | 2025-10-21 18:38:29+00:00
Exactly. My electrician did a bunch of simplification--kitchen/dining had 3 different switches for historical/random reasons--and one room which never had a switch (originally an overhead pull-chain light) was redone for a variety of reasons given extensive down-to-the-studs work was needed anyway. Used a fair bit of X10 at one point and that one remaining room had an Alexa-controlled plug for a wall-mounted light.

(He also took out a ton of knob and tube wiring which gives you some idea of when the original wiring dated to even if a lot had been incrementally upgraded over the years.)
Show HN: WordPress SEO AI Autoblogging – Republish AI
by domid | 2025-10-21 18:38:39+00:00
I built RepublishAI for three reasons.

First, AI content quality. With the rise of AI, we needed a reliable content generation solution that creates well-researched content. I'm tired of businesses using AI to generate bad content: articles produced without context or research. RepublishAI AI Agents analyze top-ranking content, identify gaps competitors miss, and write comprehensive articles that actually compete in search results.

Second, true automation with optional oversight. Real autopilot means setting it once and never touching it again. We're moving towards full automation across the entire content pipeline: planning, keyword research, content gap analysis, outline creation, content writing, image generation, featured image creation, SEO meta tags, and publishing. But you're always in control. Each article can be quickly reviewed, edited, and updated in our app before or after publishing. Full automation when you want it, human refinement when you need it.

Third, a faster content editor for WordPress. The existing WordPress CMS is painfully slow for editing and updating marketing blogs. We needed an editor that's fast and allows us to manage multiple blogs quickly. You shouldn't have to click around just to navigate to a different post. Our editor works with one click. Everything can be done with one click, including working with our smart AI agents that can refresh underperforming content in just a few minutes. All of your WordPress blogs can be managed from our editor.
by ianbutler | 2025-10-21 18:38:54+00:00
But why? The AI can go off and search and I can do other stuff while it does.

The point is the multiply how much you can get done, simple searches still require me to be present and to do the work of compiling the list myself, this type of busy work seems much better suited to tools like this that take a sentence or 2 to kick off
by lovich | 2025-10-21 18:38:56+00:00
Buddy, be careful of going down the ai psychosis path.

No one is 100% correct all the time. Leaning on an AI model because it glazes you 24/7 and does tell you that you are correct 100% of the time doesn’t mean it right about you, its just a seductive trap to fall into and the models are very good at telling you the next thing you want to hear
by guptadeepak | 2025-10-21 18:38:57+00:00
I’ve spent years selling and evaluating cybersecurity solutions from both sides of the table. This post dissects why traditional outbound tactics almost never land with CISOs and what actually drives buying behavior.

Two key observations: trust is built through peer networks and practitioner validation, not polished outreach; and most CISO buying decisions emerge from internal problem framing long before vendors contact them. Interestingly, data shows over 80% of deals start from an internal referral or known tech stack gap.

Question to the readers: ow have your enterprise sales or procurement experiences aligned—or conflicted—with this behavior pattern?