MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saddala1 | 2025-11-25 21:35:36+00:00
I've been researching AI startup defensibility for a few months now. The pattern I keep seeing:

- 90% of AI products are wrappers around LLMs - Access to models isn't a competitive advantage - Prompt engineering isn't defensible - Most "moats" evaporate when OpenAI ships a feature

So I tried to figure out: what actually creates lasting advantage in AI? I identified 4 dimensions that seem to matter:

1. Intelligence Orchestration - How your system thinks (not just which model you use) 2. Data Flywheel - How every user makes your product smarter 3. Expert Amplification - How human judgment becomes part of the system 4. Distribution Velocity - How fast you learn from users

I built a framework around this to help founders evaluate their defensibility: [www.aimoatbuilder.com]

Questions for HN: - Does this resonate with what you're seeing? - What am I missing? - What other dimensions matter? - How are you thinking about moats in your AI products?

Genuinely curious what people building in this space think.
by idiotsecant | 2025-11-25 21:35:46+00:00
I have a cousin of this rig, the Chevy s-10 EV that I'm performing a similar retrofit on. The s-10 EV community are not big fans of anything other than restoring to exact original condition, but by the time these vehicles get this old you have to have really specialist knowledge of the original hardware to even approach repairing it.
by elgenie | 2025-11-25 21:35:48+00:00
They're #4 by population, and the world's most populous Muslim country, but are also only a quarter century removed from a corrupt authoritarian regime.

They have very little in the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growing economically but not remarkably, so there just aren't that many avenues for them to make international news.
by SpecialistK | 2025-11-25 21:35:48+00:00
In context, (Snow) Leopard was almost definitely the peak. Windows users were struggling with Vista (UAC, DWM, and Windows Update taking up an entire CPU core (of which most people had only 1) or the security issues of XP. Meanwhile Mac users had already been through the growing pains and now had a stable, pretty, powerful OS.
Show HN: Rs-Utcp, a Rust Implementation of the Universal Tool Calling Protocol
by juanviera23 | 2025-11-25 21:35:52+00:00
I’ve been working on a Rust implementation of UTCP, a vendor-neutral protocol for LLM tool calling. The goal is to avoid every model/vendor defining its own schema and instead make tool ↔ model interoperability predictable and boring. What works:

- Full UTCP message parse/serialize - Strongly typed request/response model - Transport-agnostic (stdin/stdout, HTTP, WS, anything) - Minimal dependencies, straightforward API

Still to do:

- Validation helpers - Higher-level client/server wrappers - More real-world examples

Repo: https://github.com/universal-tool-calling-protocol/rs-utcp

Feedback + contributions welcome!
by asa400 | 2025-11-25 21:37:16+00:00
Sorry, this is going to be a slightly longer reply since this is a really interesting question to ask!

Elixir (and anything that runs on the BEAM) takes an entirely different perspective on concurrency than almost everything else out there. It still has concurrency gotchas, but at worst they result in logic bugs, not violations of the memory model.

Stuff like:

- forgetting to update a state return value in a genserver - reusing an old conn value and/or not using the latest conn value in Plug/Phoenix - in ETS, making the assumption nothing else writes to your key after doing a read (I wrote a library to do this safely with compare-and-swap: https://github.com/ckampfe/cas) - same as the ETS example, but in a process: but doing a write after doing a read and assuming nothing else has altered the process state in the interim - leaking processes (and things like sockets/ports), either by not supervising them, monitoring them, or forgetting to shut them down, etc. This can lead to things like OOMs, etc. - deadlocking processes by getting them into a state where they each expect a reply from the other process (OTP timeouts fix this, try to always use OTP) - logical race conditions in a genserver init callback, where the process performs some action in the init that cannot complete until the init has returned, but the init has not returned yet, so you end up with a race or an invalid state - your classic resource exhaustion issues, where you have a ton of processes attempting to use some resource and that resource not being designed to be accessed by 1,000,000 things concurrently - OOMing the VM by overfilling the mailbox of a process that can't process messages fast enough

Elixir doesn't really have locks in the same sense as a C-like language, so you don't really have lock lifetime issues, and Elixir datastructures cannot be modified at all (you can only return new, updated instances of them) so you can't modify them concurrently. Elixir has closures that can capture values from their environment, but since all values in Elixir are immutable, the closure can't modify values that it closes over.

Elixir really is designed for this stuff down to its core, and (in my opinion) it's evident how much better Elixir's design is for this problem space than Go's is if you spend an hour with each. The tradeoff Elixir makes is that Elixir isn't really what I'd call a general purpose language. It's not amazing for CLIs, not amazing for number crunching code, not amazing for throughput-bound problems. But it is a tremendous fit for the stuff most of us are doing: web services, job pipelines, etc. Basically anything where the primary interface is a network boundary.

Edited for formatting.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-11-25 21:37:41+00:00
Sadly, this may be coming to NYC. In principle, I am all for trying to improve the baseline, but you cannot sacrifice better students to do that. Not only is it silly (how would this sacrifice exactly benefit worse students?), but unjust. Furthermore, education begins at home. Parents are the primary educators of children, not necessarily academically, but in the broader "life" sense. If the home environment is not conducive or supportive of education at school, you will be facing a very uphill battle.

The dumbing down of education goes further than what you note, though. Think of classical education and the formation of the human person (I'm not talking about "Dead Poets Society" ersatz, but the real deal). Think of the principles behind the trivium and quadrivium. In the best case, we are producing superficially technically savvy barbarians. Schools are effectively savage factories, and universities are laughable and should be ashamed of calling themselves universities.
by conz | 2025-11-25 21:37:46+00:00
Why do you classify the BSDs as Unix and not Linux as a Unix? Linux has about as much right to be called a Unix as the BSDs do, as those BSDs have had to be stripped of pretty much all Unix code in order to comply with the AT&T v. BSDi court case from 35 years ago[0].

Further, the BSDs were more popular than Linux at a point in time. There's a very good reason why Linux won the platform wars, and a very large part of that reason is because of the GPL - a difference with the BSDs which wont be going away.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories%2C_In....

[EDIT: Typo. Added citation.]
by awesome_dude | 2025-11-25 21:37:55+00:00
Yeah - the technology used is a seperate concern to their abilities as users (developers) of that technology and the effectiveness at handling the scale.

I, for example, have always said that I am more than capable of writing code in C that is several orders of magnitude SLOWER than what I could write in.. say Python.

My skillset would never be used as an example of the value of C for whatever
by jfindper | 2025-11-25 21:38:42+00:00
>Orion doesn't have any telemetry, doesn't force any updates on you, doesn't require any account.

Source: "Trust me".

As another person mentioned, telemetry could be sent out Sundays @ 2:00am, so my use of standard tools to verify that it isn't phoning home on a Tuesday afternoon is useless. This is just one isolated example.

>it doesn't need to be open source to do that, nor would making it open source obviate auditig the final executable anyways.

Trust is not a single bit that is flipped from "Fully trust" to "Fully distrust". Things become more trustworthy when the source can be reviewed, and less trustworthy when an employee says "We don't do this, trust us, but we're keeping the box closed because ~reasons~".

In my eyes, Kagi has a lot of trust-building to do, despite being the darling child that can do no wrong in many HNers eyes (for whatever reason).
by fngjdflmdflg | 2025-11-25 21:38:46+00:00
The weighting of this study is strange. The difference of number of years of education maxes out at 1 point, while being raised in different locations and different school types are each given also 1 point. It seems unreasonable that going to school in London vs New York should be given a point here despite the average educational quality in both cities potentially being the same. This also means that someone with 4 years more education but from the same city is considered educationally similar, and it is impossible to achieve the "educationally dissimilar" metric (ED DIFF > 2) without one of the other two points. I feel therefore like there is some wordplay being done here by the term "educational differences." I think some readers will assume that "educational differences" means "educational quality," but only one metric out of the 3 is directly correlated to this. This said there does seem to be some correlation and that is interesting, as we would expect no difference between location, yet there does seem to be one. In my opinion the different location variable is likely to be measuring something aside from/in addition to education. Some education types would seem to be better than others eg. boarding school. Also worth noting that the "very educationally dissimilar" group is n = 10. This said, the authors do admit that "certain level of inference is involved with comparing pedagogies and curriculum" and "Readers are encouraged to re-score and re-analyze the data in additional ways not done here." I would try weighting location much less and not cap number of years of education at all, instead studying how the differences change as the number of years increases.
by BrenBarn | 2025-11-25 21:38:55+00:00
> When you’re experiencing hypergrowth the whole team is working extremely hard to keep serving your user base.

Also known as "working hard to keep making money".

> In this mindset it’s challenging to take a pause and consider that the thing you’re building may have harmful aspects.

Gosh, that must be so tough! Forgive me if I don't have a lot of sympathy for that position.

> You can justify it by thinking that if your team wins you can address the problem, but if another company wins the space you don’t get any say in the matter.

If that were the case for a given company, they could publicly commit to doing the right thing, publicly denounce other companies for doing the wrong thing, and publicly advocate for regulations that force all companies to do the right thing.

> When you’re trying so hard to challenge the near-impossible odds and make your company a success, you just don’t want to consider that what you help make might end up causing real societal harm.

I will say this as simply as possible: too bad. "Making your company a success" is simply of infinitesimal and entirely negligible importance compared to doing societal harm. If you "don't want to consider it", you are already going down the wrong path.
by Terr_ | 2025-11-25 21:38:59+00:00
You mean... just like the Nazis did in 1939-1942?

Their immoral-mass-murder really ramped up when they couldn't achieve their desired rate/expense of the immoral-mass-incarceration and immoral-mass-exiling they were already doing.

Even if your statement was correct--it isn't, ask the victims in CECOT--it isn't reassuring or exculpatory: "Don't worry guys, we may have spent 11 months speed-running years of the Nazi trajectory, but don't worry, we're stopping at only this much of the cruelty. I promise, for realsies this time. Double pinky-swear."
by goku12 | 2025-11-25 21:39:10+00:00
The area where I see IQ failing miserably is in accounting for different types of intelligences. Like the parent commenter said, people solve the same problem differently. I'm keenly aware of this because I'm neurodivergent and I was continuously judged as poor in subjects that I liked the most and was very good at. I had to reformulate every problem and solution in a way that I understood (mostly based on spatial intelligence), leaving me at a significant disadvantage of time. And even then, those solutions were sometimes rejected, despite being objectively correct and clear in the dumbest possible way - just because it didn't follow the textbook pattern. That continued until we were in a situation where we had to solve the problems ourselves.

The reason I mention this is because I see the exact same problem with IQ tests. It emphasizes certain types of intelligences and ignores others. Human intelligence is extremely multidimensional and a single number is simply incapable of representing its overall quality. For example, there are people who score poorly in IQ, but are superhuman in remembering places and navigating their way around complex routes. Meanwhile, many high scoring ones become hopelessly lost, failing to institute or follow even simple mitigation strategies for that problem. There are situations where this determines whether you live or die, and your IQ score becomes worthless indicator of even your survival.
by Koshkin | 2025-11-25 21:39:46+00:00
Hollywood "vision" of everything is "wrong." This is because all they want is a story, one that is relatable, to the largest degree possible, to their audience, with all the stereotypes said audience has acquired over generations. Basically, it is nothing but Star Trek, over and over again. (Wanted to add, "... and that's OK" - but I am not sure.)
by Weves | 2025-11-25 21:39:47+00:00
What format are the docs being uploaded as? By default, images uploaded into the chat would be directly passed through. PDFs would be parsed and fed to the LLM as text.

Writing is a really common use case, and something we'd like to explore more. Currently people often use Onyx for "write something combining X, Y, and Z documents", but I feel that's just scratching the surface.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-11-25 21:39:52+00:00
I feel that at some point there is stagnation.

I am 55 but my brain tells me I am 35 or 40. This is not a "crisis of the 50s'", I did not change anything in the way I behave, it is just that I somehow stopped changing my behavior when I was around 35-40. This was not intended and it is only now that I realized it.

When I look at pictures from this time, I am very similar. I aged of course but the clothes and behavior is the same. The interests are the same. My opinions and overall maturity is the same. It does not mean that they are great, just that they do not change.

I wonder when the next change will be, when I will look at the past and say "I changed"
by casenmgreen | 2025-11-25 21:39:56+00:00
Good.

I've seen, or I think I've seen, AWS and Twitter giving completely fake "security" reasons for eliciting additional information. I made an account on Twitter, did nothing with it at all, next day was told I violated the T&C and needed to prove my identity by handing over phone number.

So I'm cagey about this sort of thing. Obviously, actual real security concerns are a good thing to see, people are thinking about the issue and taking care, and asking for validation is naturally what you do and it's better than a flat no. OTOH, passport is BS - solves their security risk but gives me a security risk.
by idiotsecant | 2025-11-25 21:40:17+00:00
You can take that position, but there's very little evidence that the translation layer that is accepting what I'm writing right now has any access to the vast expanse of mind underneath. The evidence is growing that our subconscious decides and 'we' as the conscious element of the system rationalizes that decision after the fact. There is a children of time novel about sentient octopuses that have a very pronounced disconnect between the 'crown' making the big picture calls and the 'reach' doing the implementation. When I first read that it was fascinating because it seemed so alien, but maybe that isn't so alien after all
by dpark | 2025-11-25 21:40:21+00:00
> Today many young people would consider that life to be stifling, boring, or "suffering" but it was fine.

There’s major inflation in middle class expectations. People earning median income are expecting a very upper-middle-class lifestyle. A house bigger than their parents owned with nicer finishes, two new cars, frequent travel, eating out constantly, etc.

My parents were on the upper end of middle class when I grew up and we lived in a home with carpet and laminate countertops. Now everyone wants hardwood floors and quartz and more square footage, too. A lot of folks are driving cars that cost a year of their take home pay. Cost of living is too high but expectations seem to have risen even faster.
by loudmax | 2025-11-25 21:40:33+00:00
If Midjourney is a niche, then what is the broader market for AI image generation?

Porn, obviously, though if you look at what's popular on civitai.com, a lot of it isn't photo-realistic. That might change as photo-realistic models are fully out of the uncanny valley.

Presumably personalized advertising, but this isn't something we've seen much of yet. Maybe this is about to explode into the mainstream.

Perhaps stock-photo type images for generic non-personalized advertising? This seems like a market with a lot of reach, but not much depth.

There might be demand for photos of family vacations that didn't actually happen, or removing erstwhile in-laws from family photos after a divorce. That all seems a bit creepy.

I could see some useful applications in education, like "Draw a picture to help me understand the role of RNA." But those don't need to be photo-realistic.

I'm sure people will come up with more and better uses for AI-generated images, but it's not obvious to me there will be more demand for images that are photo-realistic, rather than images that look like illustrations.
by more_corn | 2025-11-25 21:41:02+00:00
Take a look at what happened to people deported and sent to prison in El Salvador without due process. (Torture, check, starvation check, held indefinitely without conviction of a crime, check) Pretty damned close to how Jews were treated in WW2. I guess short of the end part where they were gassed and their corpses shoveled into ovens.
by p1necone | 2025-11-25 21:41:02+00:00
I feel like I'm going insane reading how people talk about "vulnerabilities" like this.

If you give an llm access to sensitive data, user input and the ability to make arbitrary http calls it should be blindingly obvious that it's insecure. I wouldn't even call this a vulnerability, this is just intentionally exposing things.

If I had to pinpoint the "real" vulnerability here, it would be this bit, but the way it's just added as a sidenote seems to be downplaying it: "Note: Gemini is not supposed to have access to .env files in this scenario (with the default setting ‘Allow Gitignore Access > Off’). However, we show that Gemini bypasses its own setting to get access and subsequently exfiltrate that data."
by _heimdall | 2025-11-25 21:41:13+00:00
I agree it seems highly likely, I just can't make the leap to "has to be" when we know so little (if anything?) about how that would work.

Maybe I'm just being pedantic here, if so that wasn't my intent. I very much agree that anything being born seems to already known more than we give credit for, I just can't do absolute certainty there.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-25 21:41:54+00:00
I wonder if there's a blog post in the three levels of complexity of calculating Sallen-Key filters?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Sallen-K...

Super simple, really stable, and very easy to calculate. The cutoff frequency and Q can be set independently, and while making the cutoff variable can be tricky (as seen in various analogue synthesizers) you can vary the Q by varying the gain of the amp. If you assume it's just a unity gain buffer (in some designs it's just an emitter follower) getting the component values is easy.
by vel0city | 2025-11-25 21:42:05+00:00
> Besides, you just said you only needed 512MB, which is still nothing these days.

I didn't say I "only needed 512MB", only that things were a lot better once we got a 512MB machine. Things continued to get massively better as I upgraded to a 1GB machine, an 8GB machine, etc.

> I'm talking in general

Isn't doing some light picture editing/organizing, playing back multimedia, etc. pretty dang general computer use these days? Or what, is "general" computer usage entirely limited to 80 column text manipulation? You'd have a hard time even just keeping my displays drawn with 64MB of memory at the resolutions and bit depths and multiple desktops that are common.

I play around with retro computers (especially the early/mid 90s for that nostalgia) and I'm constantly reminded of how little memory we really had to play with back then, and these are on pretty much fully loaded home desktop machines. Have a Word document open and you're trying to play back an MP3 and have a couple browser windows open? Oof, good luck! You want to stream a video? I hope its about 10FPS at 320x240! Opening one photo from my camera today and you'll have used half the memory before its even hit the framebuffer.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-11-25 21:42:09+00:00
Variables are defined and cascade the same as any other property. You can define variables and other properties on the third-level x element in your markup like so:

x > x > x { --my-variable: 'my-value'; display: inline; /* etc. */ }

It would be used by defining the value of another property as the value of the variable. Note the selectors don't have to match; in this case all x elements will have their content properties set to the --my-variable value but only the third-nested x element will have a --my-variable value set.

x { content: var(--my-variable); }

Not that this is a particularly coherent example but hopefully you get the idea.
by awongh | 2025-11-25 21:42:11+00:00
I always thought it was interesting that, I guess due to Arab racism, it's also not very represented in the community of Islam.

Like, Indonesia (and together with Malaysia) makes up a really significant portion of all muslims. As an outsider it still seems like there isn't much cultural overlap- which seems like, even if Indonesian culture wouldn't reach Europe or the USA, at least it would reach to the middle east / north africa because of the the religious link.

I could have drawn some parallels between Catholics and South America, but there's already two Popes that have Latin American roots.
by easygenes | 2025-11-25 21:42:35+00:00
I didn't think I was good at soldering until I invested in a good soldering workstation. That is:

* A microscope with a good working distance, and a large screen.

* A soldering iron with very short grip to tip distance. Miniware TS1M with 210/245 tips is a good choice.

* Some proper jigs to hold things. (Stickvise, sliding magnet plates)

* Good extraction so I don't worry about fumes. (Setting up over a stove range hood is great in a pinch)

Also just watching some of the soldering masters at work: https://www.youtube.com/@ycs-yang/videos

I don't have heaps of experience or the steadiest hands, but I'd be comfortable doing a mod like this cleanly now. One good tip is to get your work piece in a position where you can securely rest the blade of your hand on the table or something secure. You want to minimize the leverage and distance between a secure rest point and your work tip.