MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aquariusDue | 2025-11-29 15:09:33+00:00
Ah yes, language is the guise the rationally irrational wears. /s

I mostly agree with you but I always find it a bit funny how we are the only things/beings that seem to be aware of their own (meta)cognition yet I can't actually pop up my hood like a car so to speak to understand what actually goes on. It gets funnier when we generally can't agree what goes on in our heads by just talking about it with each other. I don't suppose the fox thinks about why did it enter the hen house after the meal, what led it to such an act.

More related when I wrote this comment I still can't tell if I engaged my inner monologue and wrote by dictation as it were or if I let my fingers do the thinking and I read back what they wrote.

Discussions about the mind's eye and inner monologue and so on are always fun but most of the time I never get that much out of them other than satisfying curiosity.

As an aside I remember reading somewhere that some speed reading techniques involve not speaking in your mind the words you're reading (forego your inner monologue) and just internalizing their form and their associated meaning that you already know or something like that.
by aranelsurion | 2025-11-29 15:10:40+00:00
Also ads in LLM can be perfectly merged with the content, it'd be impossible to know if LLM tells you something because that's the most likely useful answer or the most profitable one for its owners. Can't be just ad-blocked either, it might be the ultimate channel for ads.

> how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.

None of the above requires OpenAI to be around though. Google, Apple and Microsoft each have much stronger brands, and more importantly they each own large platforms with captive audiences where they can inject their AI before anyone else's and have deeper pockets to subsidize its use if need be. Everywhere OpenAI opens up shop (except for Web) they're in someone else's backyard.
Ask HN: I want to build my own query language
by bewal416 | 2025-11-29 15:10:46+00:00
Our product is starting to get more and more requests for custom reports. I’ve built some basic tables with filters and exports to Excel/PDF, but they fall short of the nuance our customers need, especially those in regulated markets.

One customer needs full first names but only the first letter of the last name. Another needs a very specific JOIN with an entity almost no other customer cares about. To accommodate, I’ve been building custom Looker reports for each customer, which won't scale well.

I started looking into how other SaaS companies solved this. Many built their own SQL-like query languages:

- Salesforce -> SOQL - Shopify -> ShopifyQL - Stripe -> Sigma

All of them seemed to address the same problem I’m seeing: customers have unique reporting needs that no-code GUIs can’t handle. A drag and drop builder is great for non-techies, but most real requests require joins and transformations, and I’m trying to avoid becoming a consulting shop for every customer.

I'm particularly impressed by Stripe Sigma because of how they combine SQL with an LLM layer. Users can ask for a report in plain English, customize it in a lightweight BI tool, and edit the query only whenever needed.

Has anyone gone through this or have advice on alternative approaches? I’m open to any direction here.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-11-29 15:10:57+00:00
Almost all of the problem is PM2.5 but its not the only pollution problem. For PM2.5 a simple N95/FFP2 mask will drop the particles you breath in to basically zero and remove the health consequences of them and as we saw in 2020-2021 you can happily run in them they don't restrict breathing much at all. You do not have to put up with the damage from polluted air alongside the exercise.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-29 15:11:02+00:00
It’s an entirely different skillset to create technology $x than it is to create a successful ad network. Yahoo is the canonical example. It has been one of the most trafficked websites in the world through most of its history and still wasn’t able to successfully sell ads after the dot com bust.

ChatGPT’s revenue means nothing if reports are to be believed that it loses money on each paying customer on just inference. It’s definitely not enough to support its training costs.

Also, I think I remember estimates that it costs 10x as much to serve a ChatGPT result than it does for Google to serve a search result. Not to mention that Google uses its own hardware including TPUs.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-11-29 15:11:27+00:00
> (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are)

They just use Google, with "AI Overview" at the top. Google's in a strong position still.

Claude, I agree. IMO that's why Anthropic is so heavily focused on coding and agentic tasks -- that is its best option (and luckily, not ad-based)
by inglor_cz | 2025-11-29 15:11:34+00:00
About 14 thousand people move to Prague yearly (netto), but construction hasn't kept pace by any means; Czech building permits are a bureaucratic hell on Earth - hello fighting a 10 year paper war over a banal block of flats!

By pure mathematics, there must be a shortage, and there indeed is.

There isn't any shortage in Ostrava where I am from, because the city lost 40 thousand people since the 1990s. But there is a shortage of well-paid jobs.
by ethmarks | 2025-11-29 15:11:42+00:00
There's no air and negligible thermal medium to convect heat away. The only way heat leaves is through convection from the extremely sparse atmosphere in low Earth orbit (less than a single atom per cubic millimeter) and through thermal radiation. Both of which are much, much slower than convection with water or air.

Space stations need enormous radiator panels to dissipate the heat from the onboard computers and the body heat of a few humans. Cooling an entire data center would require utterly colossal radiator panels.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-11-29 15:11:54+00:00
Folks born before the www might see this as another high traffic website with nothing to sell^1 fails to find a business model. They might recognise this pattern today as a "solution" looking for problems to "solve"

Folks born after the www might see data collection, surveillance and ads as a "business model". They might see "Big Tech" as some sort of Holy Grail

In either case, like other high traffic websites before it, there was an initial reluctance to adopt this "business model" and, for at least some, or perhaps many, it may come with a sense of dread

1. OpenAI does not produce physical or tangible goods or services, whatever it produces is not something people are willing to pay for in sufficient volume and/or at prices to yield sufficient profits
Ask HN: B2B SaaS founders: what are (or have been) your biggest problems?
by Vaxind | 2025-11-29 15:12:19+00:00
I'm curious to hear from founders working on B2B SaaS. What feels like a constant pain point or bottleneck for you?

Could be distribution, demo scheduling, leads, onboarding, customer success, integrations — whatever consistently gets in the way.

I’m not trying to pitch anything. I’m 18 years old and just want to build a useful service to help SaaS founders.

Really appreciate any input or stories you can share!
by berdario | 2025-11-29 15:12:37+00:00
Rooney is Irish, not British (nor a resident in Britain), so it's perfectly normal for her to try to avoid the consequences of a foreign regime trying to oppress its population.

In the same way, someone who supports the Azov brigade, would be expected to face consequences in Russia (and find difficulties in getting their books distributed) since Russia proscribed the Azov brigade, but precisely because of that... we wouldn't be asking of them to travel to Russia "to face the consequences"
by ufmace | 2025-11-29 15:13:01+00:00
Exactly what "rolling over" would that be?

Maybe you don't believe Durov's statement[0] about it. But is there any actual evidence anywhere that they've ever violated the secrecy of non-e2e private groups or messages for anyone? I've yet to find any.

[0] https://t.me/durov/342
by aurareturn | 2025-11-29 15:13:23+00:00
ChatGPT’s revenue means nothing if reports are to be believed that it loses money on each paying customer on just inference. It’s definitely not enough to support its training costs.

Sam Altman: We're very profitable on inference. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/17/sam-altman/#:~:text=Su...

Independent analysis: Inference is very profitable. https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re... https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch...
by rayiner | 2025-11-29 15:14:16+00:00
https://www.awrestaurants.com/press/press-release/101921-aw-... ("In the 1980s, A&W tried to compete with the immensely popular McDonald’s Quarter Pounder by offering a bigger, juicier ⅓ Pound Burger at the same price. Unfortunately, Americans aren’t so great at math. Confused consumers wrongly assumed that ¼ was bigger than ⅓ (You know, because 4 is bigger than 3) and the whole experiment went down in history as a huge marketing fail.").
by nunobrito | 2025-11-29 15:14:31+00:00
The root of the word "crypto" goes all the way in history as "to hide".

Monero has since many years been the only option worthy of truly being called a cryptocurrency. Doesn't even make sense to use anything where anyone can see all the value in your private wallet and where you are spending them.

The rest should really be designated as "virtual coins" or just call them "casino coins" because that is their use case.
by state_less | 2025-11-29 15:15:05+00:00
Chatgpt is a proprietary eponym[1], like kleenex, or Google for search. That's a relatively strong attractor based on their first mover status. I nevertheless use tissues, and search engines like brave search, sometimes duckduckgo, and claude or openrouter for my LLM models.

I think there are too many good alternatives for Chatgpt to turn the screws too hard on their users, but we'll see where it settles out. As usual, the most vulnerable will be squeezed the hardest (the ignorant and tech feeble). Hopefully competition and some oversight will keep the wolves at bay.

The finance people were chatting about the OpenAI's ad play a while back, glad to see it finally dawning on this crowd.

1. Not all jurisdictions have granted OpenAI the Chatgpt trademark.
by DisruptiveDave | 2025-11-29 15:15:22+00:00
May I suggest "Man And His Symbols" by Car Jung? It was his final writing and, I believe, his only one that focused on the common(ish) reader as the audience. The basis of the book (and generally his studies and beliefs) is that the subconscious is as meaningful as the conscious, it just communicates in ways that are harder to access in modern society, and therefore it's been pushed away and ignored.
by Aperocky | 2025-11-29 15:15:37+00:00
It can both be Business Process Optimization and an AI strategy.

In fact, if an AI strategy becomes business process optimization, I'd say that AI strategy for that company is successful.

There are too many AI strategy today that isn't even business process optimization and detached from bottom line, and just being pure FOMO from the C suite. Those probably won't end well.
by 0_____0 | 2025-11-29 15:16:07+00:00
Sci-fi isn't even really about the tech. It's about what happens to us, humans, when the tech changes in dramatic ways. Sci-fi authors dream up types of technology that create new social orders, factions, rifts, types of interpersonal relationships, types of fascism, where the unforseen consequences of human ingenuity hoist us upon our collective petard.

But these baffoons only see the blinky shiney and completely miss the point of the stories. They have a child's view of SF the way that men in their teens and 20d thought they were supposed to be like Tyler Durden.
by lazide | 2025-11-29 15:16:37+00:00
They make it a habit to use them, by offloading that part of their thinking/process to them. It’s similar to Google Maps, or even Google itself.

When was the last time you went to an actual physical library, for instance? Or pulled out a paper map?

Gemini is a competitor, yes. But most people still go to Google at this point, even if there are a ton of competitors.

That is what the race is about (in large part), who can become ‘the norm’.
by stego-tech | 2025-11-29 15:17:54+00:00
I could, but I'd rather not enable HTTP on devices that don't need it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm keenly aware there's easier ways to accomplish such a goal, but that's not the point. I have discovered something new and, as a way of practicing multiple other skills at the same time, am musing over homelab projects I could do to put it into practice and cement that knowledge.

It's just like my internal-only emoji DNS resolver: goofy, amusing, and ultimately impractical outside of the homelab, but still a great way to learn several new things together.
by bewal416 | 2025-11-29 15:18:18+00:00
Finding a co-founder, plus making those first few hires, is easily the most challenging part. You're going to realize you can't solve every problem, and you'll need help. Finding your team is like finding a life partner- a great one that complements your strengths and weaknesses could set you up for life. The wrong one will result in mismatched effort, finger-pointing, and time spent away from the customer. It's one thing to ask a user to give you $20/mo. It's another thing to ask another human to wake up with you every day and spend their prime working on your vision in opportunity cost of working on something else. It's going to be the most important sell of your life!
Show HN: Open-source agent learning layer: 30% to 100% success on browser agents
by kayba | 2025-11-29 15:18:28+00:00
I built and improved an open-source implementation of Stanford's Agentic Context Engineering paper.

The idea: agents can improve just by reflecting on their own execution traces.

How it works: Agent runs → reflects on what worked/failed → curates strategies into a "playbook" → injects playbook on next run.

No fine-tuning, no training data.

Results on browser-use: 30% → 100% success rate, 82% fewer steps, 65% token savings.

Also works with local models and really helps them punch above their weight to match closed-source models.
by inglor_cz | 2025-11-29 15:18:57+00:00
I would expect the competition to work the same way it does in laptops, cars or food: producing everything from cheapest-still-legal options to outright luxury. We have this sort of choice in most sectors of the economy.

BTW A mediocre apartment in your name is still an apartment. I grew up in one, but in our then-relatively-precarious family situation, the fact that we weren't renting and no one could just throw us out made a lot of other problems and crises way, way more bearable. Even though the bathroom was subpar and the kitchen horribly old.

We shouldn't be dismissive of lower quality products if they still can provide value to their owners.
by kevinsync | 2025-11-29 15:20:21+00:00
Weirdly, I think Perplexity is getting a lot of mainstream name recognition because of podcasts. All the big slop pods like Rogan, Theo Von, etc are sponsored by Perplexity and the hosts constantly name check it by asking to “look stuff up on Perplexity”. Honestly pretty smart marketing all things considered.
by aranelsurion | 2025-11-29 15:20:57+00:00
I wish it'd be so obvious then I could ask another LLM to read and remove the ads. :)

I fully expect it to be more shady like you ask for help with your hair, and it manipulates you into first thinking you need a specific kind of product, and then bringing up only the products that have paid for being there. Ideally you don't even know you've been advertised to.

(unless regulation prevents them from doing this in some regions)
by pimlottc | 2025-11-29 15:21:09+00:00
There used to be a mirror of the Wayback Machine [0][1] hosted at the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt [2]. Sometimes you could pull pages from them that otherwise errored out on the main archive.org site. Sadly, it seems the mirror has been offline [3] for some years now.

0: https://www.bibalex.org/en/News/Details?DocumentID=1550&Keyw...

1: https://www.bibalex.org/isis/frontend/projects/ProjectDetail...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina

3: http://web.archive.bibalex.org
by skeledrew | 2025-11-29 15:21:10+00:00
Well they should coexist, as all string formatting syntaxes have over the years. And though I think macros would be nice to have, there's a valid concern raised in the discussion: readability. Having macros opens the door to extremely unpythonic code bases, which could be very hard for anyone outside of the primary audience to understand, let alone meaningfully modify or contribute to. And one of the things that keeps me hooked to Python is that if I install a package and it has some issue or doesn't do something I'd like, it's almost trivial for me to find the relevant section in the installed code, edit it and have the desired behavior on next invocation.
by xg15 | 2025-11-29 15:21:31+00:00
He wasn't wrong, but I also think this an example of "professional blindness", where experts in a topic can lose the ability to imagine the POV of a layman/novice.

I was thinking this was parody for a moment, because the "bad" formulations (0) and (2) seem obviously easier to understand than the "good" formulation (1).

I needed some attempts to parse what (1) even wants to say. (Minimum, maximum and average of what? I imagine the counts per unique item in the bag, but it doesn't say that anywhere)

It's also not obvious at all that (1) is true, so you'd need to see at least a proof.

But what's true is that (1) is more versatile and easier to apply to new problems - it's just harder to teach. So maybe the right solution would have been to start with (0) and (2), then show how those actually imply (1) - and then go on using (1) as a tool, like the quadratic formula.

It's a bit like "If I have two apples and get three more apples, I have five apples" is easier to understand for someone learning addition than "2+3=5", but you still don't want to spend the rest of your life imagining metaphorical apples whenever you have to calculate something.
by notpachet | 2025-11-29 15:21:35+00:00
How is what you linked a business process? Cancer identification is a step in a larger process, specifically the "analyze unstructured data" part that the author alludes to.

AI won't take a shoddy process (say, your process for reviewing and accepting forms from patients) and magically make it better if you don't have an idea of what "better" actually entails.

"Improving a system requires knowing what you would do if you could do exactly what you wanted to. Because if you don't know what you would do if you could do exactly what you wanted to, how on earth are you going to know what you can do under constraints?"

- Russ Ackoff
by elevenapril | 2025-11-29 15:21:39+00:00
This is really helpful, thank you.

You're right — the value is in quantifying something we can mostly intuit. That's a high bar.

Honestly leaning toward just making it $1.99 upfront, no freemium. Simpler and more honest.

The beach-goer angle is interesting too. Hadn't thought of that.

Appreciate you taking the time.
by demetris | 2025-11-29 15:22:42+00:00
Do you know what user agent the browsers send?

I tried with Windows 7 (Firefox 115) and it reports Windows 7.

It seems though that it cannot distinguish between Windows 10 and Windows 11, so, without looking further, I suppose the detection is based on the User-Agent string? (The OS version browsers report on Windows is frozen, so Windows 10 and Windows 11 have the same version there.)
by neutered_knot | 2025-11-29 15:22:45+00:00
I took my model Y in to the Tesla dealer yesterday for some minor repairs. It was taking longer than expected so they gave about 4 or 5 customers loaner cars so we could go do other stuff. Each of us got a Cybertruck.

It sort of speaks to the fact that it isn’t selling well that they are using them for loaners.

It’s a pretty unappealing car.
by aquariusDue | 2025-11-29 15:23:22+00:00
Thanks for the tip, it might work if I can figure out where the certificate is stored on Windows because I am forced to go through an application first.

The application I mentioned: https://www.certsign.ro/en/products/eidas-trust-services/pap...

Also back on Windows the website I needed to access didn't work with Firefox so I had to resort to Chrome sadly but maybe I'll have better luck now.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
by fn-mote | 2025-11-29 15:23:50+00:00
> ads might simply not be profitable when integrated in LLM answers.

This is wishful thinking.

Companies are using LLMs for development. The ads are not for a $50 throw pillow, they are for a $10k monthly business-critical service.

Consumers might not be worth advertising to (although I doubt it), but B2B ads - absolutely.
by stateofinquiry | 2025-11-29 15:23:57+00:00
Impressive how nice this looks, and I am also impressed by how quickly it runs. I don't know who did this (could not find any "about" info), but kudos on a job well done.

However: Aside from the above, and doing it "because one can", I don't understand why anyone would spend the effort to make this. R is FOSS software, if you can run a web browser, you can run R itself. R is not hard to install or maintain. Running in a web browser requires network, and resources on someone else's machine.

So, I am a strange combination of impressed with this site and confounded trying to figure out why it exists. I'm probably missing something.
by onion2k | 2025-11-29 15:24:10+00:00
they just need to know Google, which they most definitely do

The way that Google is rolling out AI is confusing, and I imagine a lot of people who can access Gemini don't actually know they can or how to use it. Among those that do know, many won't know what it's capable of and will believe that they need to pay for a service like ChatGPT in order to get what they want.
by maxi-k | 2025-11-29 15:24:14+00:00
This is an awesome project. We recently used it to build a statically hosted EC2 instance comparison website, using this for plotting (ggplot2) and DuckDB-Wasm for querying the instance data. Only the first page load is slow b/c of all the wasm and R packages, but it's fast for interactive querying and plotting and was really easy to create.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-29 15:24:23+00:00
It’s not that they don’t care - the current administration is targeting people that they specifically don’t like.

And Trump has a cult of personality where many Republican politicians are literally afraid for their lives if they stand against him because they get death threats.

Romney said other Republican politicians won’t stand against Trump because they can’t afford security like he can. Majorie Green Taylor said her family has started getting death threats and the Indiana legislators who were first opposed to redistricting are now holding a vote because they also got death threats
by ck2 | 2025-11-29 15:25:19+00:00
I am hoping by the end of the decade smartphones start having pm2.5 and co2 sensors built-in

and then next decade smartwatches

Once EVERYONE starts seeing air-quality on their phones every hour of the day everywhere they are, they will start to care and then eventually, maybe do something about the politics to improve air-quality

Imagine the game-changer if air-quality was in the next iPhone

They already make sensors that can go on a keyring so inside a phone is not implausible within a few years