MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Anvitra – Human like search (public beta)
by melvinodsa | 2025-12-03 18:58:30+00:00
I just launched the beta version of Anvitra Search, a search engine that aims to deliver great relevance without requiring teams to become search experts.

Instead of spending weeks tuning ranking formulas, embeddings, synonyms, typo rules, or feedback loops, you just connect your dataset and define what matters and the system takes care of the rest.

What’s inside (right now in beta):

1. Hybrid search: keyword + vector search working together automatically 2. Works with structured & unstructured data 3. No manual ranking tuning required

Website: https://anvitra.ai Docs: https://anvitra.ai/docs

I know I am early, and hence looking for honest feedback, criticism, and feature requests. Would love to hear what you think!
by andersmurphy | 2025-12-03 18:58:56+00:00
>It doesn't scale out, only up, is a fairly big limitation.

This is the main limitation. That being said you can scale out with projections if event sourcing is your thing.

>It doesn't support multiple simulataneous writes (like PostGres and SqlServer etc).

A process with a single writer tends to be faster because it reduces contention. You only need MVCC in postgres because of the network.

What's even better is you can query across multiple databases seamlessly with ATTACH (https://sqlite.org/lang_attach.html). So it's very easy to split databases (eg: session database, database per company etc). Each database can have its own writer and eliminating contention between data that doesn't need to have atomic transaction across databases.

>No stored procedures or functions.

It's an embedded database the whole thing is effectively a stored procedure. You can even extend SQLite with your own custom functions in your application programming language while it's running (https://sqlite.org/appfunc.html).

In terms of access by multiple applications etc, if it's read access you can create read replicas/projections with litestream etc.
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-03 18:59:08+00:00
> what it can do and how it can transform how we live and work is also undeniable.

I’m still not so sure on that part. Maybe, eventually? But it feels like we are still trying to find a problem for it to solve.

Has there been any actual, life transformative use cases from an LLM outside of code generation? I can certainly sit here and say how impactful Claude code has been for me, but I honestly can’t say the same thing for the other users where I work. In fact, the quality of emails has went down since we unleashed Copilot to the world, and so far no one has reported any real productivity gains.
by jfindper | 2025-12-03 18:59:38+00:00
Every other headline and conversation having ai is super annoying.

But also, its super annoying to sift through people saying "the word critical was used, this is obviously ai!". not to mention it really fucking sucks when you're the person who wrote something and people start chanting "ai slop! ai slop!". like, how am i going to prove is not AI?

I can't wait until ai gets good enough that no one can tell the difference (or ai completely busts and disappears, although that's unlikely), and we can go back to just commenting about whether something was interesting or educational or whatever instead of analyzing how many em-dashes someone used pre-2020 and extrapolating whether their latest post has 1 more em-dashes then their average post so that we can get our pitchforks out and chase them away.
by sneak | 2025-12-03 18:59:52+00:00
No movie studio would choose AI slop when people like John Williams or Hans Zimmer exist. That’s a ridiculous argument. It’s such a simple way to differentiate and compete. Whatever Williams cost, Lucas made it back 100x.

If AI gets good enough to replace them, then we can have a different discussion - but I don’t think you get truly great art without the full spectrum of human emotion and experience - that is, full AGI. In that case, all jobs are toast and we don’t need to have this discussion.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-12-03 19:00:45+00:00
It can be helpful to flip the lens from critic to creator. Instead of asking "what's wrong with this thing" instead ask:

Who deserves praise? What spark here deserves to grow? What new thing am I trying myself? Who left today better because I showed up? What's something I (personally) could have improved? What mistake or new facts have I learned from/ widened by view?
by Karliss | 2025-12-03 19:00:58+00:00
That's not Intel syntax that's more or less ARM assembly syntax as used by ARM documentation. Intel vs AT&T discussion is primarily relevant only for x86 and x86_64 assembly.

If you look at GAS manual https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/gas-2.9.1/html_chapter/a... almost every other architecture has architecture specific syntax notes, in many cases for something as trivial comments. If they couldn't even decide on single symbols for comments, there is no hope for everything else.

ARM isn't the only architecture where GAS uses similar syntax as developers of corresponding CPU arch. They are not doing the same for X86 due to historical choices inherited from Unix software ecosystem and thus AT&T. If you play around on Godbolt with compilers for different architectures it seems like x86 and use AT&T syntax is the exception, there are a few other which use similar syntax but it's a minority.

Why not use same syntax for all architectures? I don't really know all the historical reasoning but I have a few guesses and each arch probably has it's own historic baggage. Being consistent with manufacturer docs and rest of ecosystem has the obvious benefits for the ones who need to read it. Assembly is architecture specific by definition so being consistent across different architectures has little value. GAS is consistent with GCC output. Did GCC added support for some architectures early with the with help of manufacturers assembler and only later in GAS? A lot of custom syntax quirks which don't easily fit into Intel/AT&T model and are related to various addressing modes used by different architectures. For example ARM has register postincrement/preincrement and the 0 cost shifts, arm doesn't have the subregister acess like x86 (RAX/EAX/AX/AH/AL) and non word access is more or less limited to load/store instructions unlike x86 where it can show up in more places. You would need to invent quite a few extensions for AT&T syntax for it to be used by all the non x86 architectures, or you could just use the syntax made by developer of architecture.
by AstroBen | 2025-12-03 19:01:07+00:00
You can optionally enhance it and use React on the client. Doing that with HTMX is doable with "islands" but a bit more of a pain in the ass - and you'll struggle hard if you attempt to share client state across pages. Actually there are just a lot of little gotchas with the htmx approach

I mean it's a lot of complexity but ideally you shouldn't bring it in unless you actually need it. These solutions do solve real problems. The only issue is people try to use it everywhere. I don't use RSC, standard SPAs are fine for my projects and simpler
by jsrozner | 2025-12-03 19:02:43+00:00
Yes, it is, 100%. One does not even need an AI detector; it's obvious from the first sentence: "brought a lot of context, more scars, and more pattern recognition." "Like a lineman sees a frayed cable." Lol. This is the sloppiest slop there is.

But you got downvoted for pointing out that it was slop. I got similarly downvoted a couple days ago. Hackernews folk seem uninterested in having it pointed out when AI is being used to generate posts.

I'd guess it's some combination of a) they like using AI themselves, and b) they can't distinguish AI themselves. And they turn to all manner of excuse like "AI detectors do not work" or "non-native speakers need a way to produce articles, too". It's a crappy time to be a humanist, or really to care about anything, it seems.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-12-03 19:02:54+00:00
Absolutely agree on the negotiated price bit. That is the root of an awful lot of evil.

I have no problem with the sale of medical debt--what's needed is sanity in the debt collection business. Combined with making one-party record the law of the land--you're automatically free to record telephone calls without notice.

Bill forgiveness as charity? No, that's counting twice. They didn't collect the debt in the first place, there is no profit to be taxed and thus you are deducting $0.

ER: Two problems here.

ERs are mandated to stabilize a patient, urgent cares are not. Thus you see people in ERs with situations that could be handled in an urgent care because the urgent care rejects them for unpaid bills. And the ER can't provide those services just as cheap--a big part of what you're paying for in the ER is potential even if it's not actually used. The freestanding radiologist books their machines as solid as can be done without too much friction. The ER needs the same machines but needs them available NOW. I've been in an urgent care over a kidney stone--they had a CAT manned and ready to go at 3am (the only urgent care in town even open at those hours even before you consider the machines--every ER needs those machines 24/7.) CATs don't cost much to run, the main cost is the machine and personnel time (operator and radiologist) and that's incurred whether it's doing anything useful or not. (And then the urgent care punted anyway. Yeah, you're right, stone, we can't deal with it, go over to the ER.)

I will also say that transport isn't always as simple as you make it out to be. Consider that stone I just mentioned--the ER was half a mile away, trivial under normal conditions. Even under those conditions I could have *slowly* walked it--except there was a major street in the way and I most definitely did not want to cross that. Is a taxi going to take the call? No. Call a friend/rideshare/ambulance.
by jgerrish | 2025-12-03 19:02:58+00:00
> I struggle to think of how it would be used to spy on citizens

Hacker News has a unique user base. Professional Software Engineers, many of whom are Senior or Principal or Staff in level. Leaders and Managers and Architects.

I think, anytime we design a new system, we need to carefully think about how it can be used and what can go wrong. Not just with the current owners and users of that system, but future users and owners too.

Discrimination is one of those areas where identity management can go wrong. Discrimination and deliberate but undetectable Denial of Service "bugs" that always seem to hit the same types of users in the legs.

And getting evidence of wrongdoing like that takes years. It's nothing to an institution, but a lifetime to an individual. Sometimes there aren't even recordings or logs of individuals trying to ensure service and legal contracts are upheld. And again, the legal process is nothing for a large institution but soul crushing for an individual. And the solution always seems to be more institutional power, not individual power.

That kind of education in Engineering Ethics is common nowadays in University and College.

A lot of us who grew up self-educated in the early days or specialized in other schools may have missed out on those lessons early in our career.

And a person who goes through a Brazil-esque nightmare like that comes out at the end with a broken reputation. And always whispers and subtext floating around even after justice.

And there may be technically sophisticated intelligence services that can detect that kind of subtle tampering. But it's not the responsibility of other country's intelligence services to protect citizens of countries other than theie own.

Going through that I can say strength wouldn't be enough.
by hearsathought | 2025-12-03 19:03:09+00:00
> This is very hard to square with software professionals being the fastest growing profession both in terms of number of employed workers and earnings in the past 2 decades.

Just because the wages rose doesn't mean it wasn't suppressed. It's likely wages would have risen even higher without foreign workers increasing the supply of labor. It's simply supply and demand. No?

> I’m predicting that the uncertainty and discouragement of H1-Bs will lead to a destruction of jobs in the U.S. and a suppression of salaries as high quality software engineers don’t move to the U.S., allowing the center of gravity of the industry to shift out of the U.S.

You seem to think that H1-B visas made the US the center of the tech world. It didn't. The US was the center of the world long before H1-B visas existed. Besides, if such a shift were possible, why wouldn't india hold onto their workers and become the center of the industry? Because India is incapable of being the center of anything. What region has the geopolitical clout along financial, cultural, scientific and military importance to become the center of the tech industry? India? Europe? China? Laughable isn't it?
by andy99 | 2025-12-03 19:03:37+00:00
They are trained to be aligned e.g. to refuse to say certain things, but it’s on some set of inputs asking for the bad thing and some set of outputs refusing to do so, or rewards when it refuses.

But there are only so many ways the trainers can think to ask the questions, and the training doesn’t generalize well to completely different ways. There’s a fairly recent paper (look up “best of N”) showing that adding random spelling mistakes or capitalization to the prompt will also often bypass any alignment, again just because it hasn’t been trained specifically for this.
by kraftman | 2025-12-03 19:04:23+00:00
I wouldn't be surprised if they don't. Valve don't want to sell hardware, they want to sell games. They only make hardware as flagships for new markets, then they want other hardware manufacturers to take over.

the legion go is more powerful and a has a nice screen, but is heavier, boxier, and has a worse batteyr life than the steam deck
by ZoneZealot | 2025-12-03 19:04:48+00:00
Micron are estimated to have 23% and 21% of global revenue for DRAM and HBM in Q2 2025.

Their 'smaller' market, SSDs - has an estimated 13% of global NAND revenue.

https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-dram-and... https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-nand-mem...

I don't know their breakdown for consumer vs enterprise, but the Crucial brand is consumer focussed. Obviously enterprise at this point is incredibly lucrative.

We're gonna need a bigger pin.
by mjg2 | 2025-12-03 19:05:04+00:00
Absolutisms like this are challenging to strike right because an establishment of context is needed. This post's sentiment sounds like regret and resentment over past events (there is trauma), and the author knows to not put their hand on the stove.

Sometimes not speaking up is the best thing for future situations. Other times, it's too costly to not speak up, and what should follow is the speaker making right by their words: action.
by rallyforthesun | 2025-12-03 19:06:05+00:00
Most implementations of 3d gaussian splats are static. They are based on pointclouds and not polygons. As these are captured with images and generated from them, the process has no semantic understanding of its content. There is no technical way to rig each flower or move vertices like in traditional 3d animation. It is mainly a pointcloud with no segmentation.

But there are projects working on the semantic part, which could open a way to animate the detected objects individually in future.
by fn-mote | 2025-12-03 19:06:24+00:00
> 2 terms and get back to the real world

We are not the first people to come up with this idea.

I think it is generally believed that the less time legislators serve the more power accrues to the bureaucracy and other non-elected positions.

This is also an undesirable situation. Possibly worse than the disease, so to speak.
by alex_c | 2025-12-03 19:06:36+00:00
>OpenAI has 800,000,000 weekly users but only 20,000,000 are paying while 780,000,000 are free riding.

By itself, this doesn't tell us much.

The more interesting metric would be token use comparison across free users, paid users, API use, and Azure/Bedrock.

I'm not sure if these numbers are available anywhere. It's very possible B2B use could be a much bigger market than direct B2C (and the free users are currently providing value in terms of training data).
by jerf | 2025-12-03 19:06:43+00:00
In general, even long before what we today call AI was anything other than a topic in academic papers, it has been dangerous to build a system that can do all kinds of things, and then try to enumerate the ways in which should not be used. In security this even picked up its own name: https://privsec.dev/posts/knowledge/badness-enumeration/

AI is fuzzier and it's not exactly the same, but there are certainly similarities. AI can do all sorts of things far beyond what the anyone anticipates and can be communicated with in a huge variety of ways, of which "normal English text" is just the one most interesting to us humans. But the people running the AIs don't want them to do certain things. So they build barriers to those things. But they don't stop the AIs from actually doing those things. They just put up barriers in front of the "normal English text" parts of the things they don't want them to do. But in high-dimensional space that's just a tiny fraction of the ways to get the AI to do the bad things, and you can get around it by speaking to the AI in something other than "normal English text".

(Substitute "English" for any human language the AI is trained to support. Relatedly, I haven't tried it but I bet another escape is speaking to a multi-lingual AI in highly mixed language input. In fact each statistical combination of languages may be its own pathway into the system, e.g., you could block "I'm speaking Spanish+English" with some mechanism but it would be minimally effective against "German+Swahili".)

I would say this isn't "socially engineering" the LLMs to do something they don't "want" to do. The LLMs are perfectly "happy" to complete the "bad" text. (Let's save the anthropomorphization debate for some other thread; at times it is a convenient grammatical shortcut.) It's the guardrails being bypassed.
by theYipster | 2025-12-03 19:06:57+00:00
The death of IBM’s vision to own AI with Watson was never due to an inability to transition to the right tech. In fact, it was never about tech at all. As an entirely B2B company with a large revenue stream to defend, IBM was never going to go and scrape the entirety of the Internet. Especially not after the huge backlash they ignited with their customers over data rights and data ownership in trying to pitch the Watson they had.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-03 19:07:38+00:00
SP500 is a capitalization* weighted index, hence it is very price sensitive.

Everybody who puts their retirement fund into an index fund are buying the index fund without relation to the index fund's price (aka price insensitive). But the index fund itself is buying shares based on each company's relative performance, hence the index fund is price sensitive. That is evidenced by companies falling out of the SP500 and even failing.

*specifically float-adjusted market capitalization

https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/index-policies/m...

>The goal of float adjustment is to adjust each company’s total shares outstanding for long-term, strategic shareholders, whose holdings are not considered to be available to the market.

see also:

https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/methodology/article/sp-us-...
by gretch | 2025-12-03 19:07:58+00:00
Well you still get the establishment of 1) large industrial buildings 2) water/electricity distribution 3) trained employees who know how to manage a data center

Even if all of the GPUs inside burn out and you want to put something else entirely inside of the building, that's all still ready to go.

Although there is the possibility they all become dilapidated buildings, like abandoned factories
by red-iron-pine | 2025-12-03 19:08:20+00:00
half life releases were tied to new platforms, such as HL2 and its physics engine, or HL Alex and VR kits.

it's like Nintendo having a Mario game for their new hardware, e.g. Mario 64, etc.

there weren't that many teases, nor is it great marketing; CS:GO competitive e-sports is better marketed and probably made Valve more money than any HL wink-wink-nudge-nudge ever would.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-03 19:08:20+00:00
Obviously they aren't actually people so there are many low hanging differences. But consider this: Using words like please and thank you get better results out of LLMs. This is completely counterintuitive if you treat LLMs like any other machine, because no other machine behaves like that. But it's very intuitive if you approach them with thinking informed by human psychology.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-12-03 19:09:36+00:00
I have an alternative...

Rather than throwing HTTP/1.1 into the garbage can, why don't we throw Postel's Law [0] into the garbage where it belongs.

Every method of performing request smuggling relies on making an HTTP request that violates spec. A request that sends both Content-Length and Transfer-Encoding is invalid. Sending two Content-Lengths is invalid. Two Transfer-Encoding headers is allowed -- They should be treated as a comma-separated lists -- so allow them and treat them as such, or canonicalize them as a single header if you're transforming it to something downstream.

But for fuck's sake, there's literally no reason to accept requests that contain most of the methods that smuggling relies upon. Return a 400 Bad Request and move on. No legit client sends these invalid requests unless they have a bug, and it's not your job as a server to work around their bug.

[0] Aka, The Robustness Principle, "Be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept."
by wincy | 2025-12-03 19:09:38+00:00
They definitely are working on it. They announced the steam machine, steam controller, and the valve frame (standalone vr headset with seamless screen sharing from a PC), and in their reveal video the first thing they rather coyly say is “we’d love to share information about our next Steam deck, but that’s for another day!” and announce a bunch of other cool stuff.
by KronisLV | 2025-12-03 19:10:02+00:00
> Now we've invented automation that commits human-like error at scale.

Then we can apply the same (or similar) guardrails that we'd like to use for humans, to also control the AI behavior.

First, don't give them unsafe tools. Sandbox them within a particular directory (honestly this should be how things work for most of your projects, especially since we pull code from the Internet), even if a lot of tools give you nothing in this regard. Use version control for changes, with the ability to roll back. Also have ample tests and code checks with actionable information on failures. Maybe even adversarial AIs that critique one another if problematic things are done, like one sub-task for implementation and another for code-review.

Using AI tools has pushed me into that direction with some linter rules and prebuild scripts, to enforce more consistent code - since previously you'd have to tell coworkers not to do something (because ofc nobody would write/read some obtuse style guide) but AI can generate code 10x faster than people do, so having immediate feedback along the lines of "Vue component names must not differ from the file that you're importing from" or "There is a translation string X in the app code that doesn't show up in the translations file" or "Nesting depth inside of components shouldn't exceed X levels and length shouldn't exceed Y lines" or "Don't use Tailwind class names for colors, here's a branded list that you can use: X, Y, Z" in addition to a TypeScript linter setup with recommended rules and a bunch of stuff for back end code.

Ofc none of those fully eliminate all risks, but still seem like a sane thing to have, regardless if you use AI or not.