MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ramoz | 2025-12-22 19:03:48+00:00
I just saw a video of non-technical person describing how they use claude code to automate various workflows. They actually tried vscode and then the desktop gui.

Yet they preferred the CLI because it felt "more natural"

With agents, and Claude Code, we are *orchestrating* ... this is an unresolved UI/UX in industry. The same reasons `kubectl` didn't evolve to GUI probably apply here.

It's less about the codebase, more about the ability to conduct anything on the computer - you are closest to that in the terminal. https://backnotprop.com/blog/its-on-your-computer/
by nanolith | 2025-12-22 19:04:30+00:00
As per my original comment, these examples are only indicative that profitable endeavors can come out of these things in unexpected ways, but that's not the point of doing these things. I'm never going to profit from, nor recoup the costs I've sunk into most of the mad science I do. That's not the point. I do it because it's fun and because I like building cool things.

These examples are one justification for why we should embrace these kinds of hobbies, and not the desirable outcome for these kinds of hobbies.
by slig | 2025-12-22 19:04:36+00:00
>It could be a neat way to upsell, too—kind of a win-win where users can feel good about their investment

Yes! I do this that this is an obvious upsell that you can cook and test in no time.

>I’m curious—how big of a factor do you think branding really is for smaller teams? Would it really sway someone to choose your tool over another?

I think that most smaller teams will be price sensitive, but you can always capture the ones that are willing to pay for the customization.

Edit: just noticed that I've replied to a LLM bot and not OP.
by lbrito | 2025-12-22 19:05:07+00:00
>Regardless of their intent I realised something subtle had happened. Any time saved by (their) AI prompting gets consumed by verification overhead, the work just gets passed along to someone else – in this case me.

This is _exactly_ how I feel. Any time saved by precooking a "plan" (typically halfbaked ideas) with AI isn't really time saved, it is a transfer of work from the planner to whoever is going to implement the plan.
by stockresearcher | 2025-12-22 19:05:30+00:00
The Chicago Transit Authority has existed for only about 70 years despite transit in Chicago being around for 125+ years.

Legislation the governor signed last week all but guarantees that it won’t see its hundredth birthday except possibly as a sticker on the side of the busses and trains. Within 5 years the agency will only have the duty to plan routes within the city limits, and maybe do some of the driver hiring.
by martin1975 | 2025-12-22 19:05:46+00:00
this is the extent to what I use any LLM - they're really good at looking up just about anything, in natural language, and most of the time even the first hit, without reprompting, is a pretty decent answer. I used to have to sort thru things to get there, so there's definitely an upside to LLMs in this manner.
by x0x0 | 2025-12-22 19:05:47+00:00
My experience is watching a colleague use lovable which will mostly ignore security. Sure, if you prompt it the system will do something which seems correct, but it will also happily undo that as well.

eg I was trying to help her set up a webhook listener, and it undid our efforts.

These tools seem incapable of building software in the hands of users who don't understand security already.
by teeray | 2025-12-22 19:05:51+00:00
> So it’s definitely AI. I felt betrayed and a little foolish. But why?

Because the prompter is basically gaslighting reviewers into doing work for them. They put their marks of authorship on the AI slop when they've barely looked at it at all which convinces the reviewer to look. When the comments come back, they pump the feedback into the LLM, more slop falls out and around we go again. The prompter isn't really doing work at all—the reviewers are.
by lubujackson | 2025-12-22 19:06:01+00:00
Did you see the other post about this where the guys showed a Flock camera pointed at a playground, so any pedo can see when kids are there and not attended?

Or how it has become increasingly trivial to identify by face or license plate such that combining tools reaches "movie Interpol" levels, without any warrant or security credentials?

If Big Brother surveillance is unavoidable I don't think "everyone has access" is the solution. The best defense is actually the glut of data and the fact nobody is actively watching you picking your nose in the elevator. If everyone can utilize any camera and its history for any reason then expect fractal chaos and internet shaming.
by dmix | 2025-12-22 19:06:32+00:00
People are using LLMs to generate apps and it's easy for non-technical people to miss this stuff. The blog post mentions https://lovable.dev/ becoming a $300M company, which uses Supabase by default and basically generates React SPA's with no true backend. But random people won't understand this distinction and will want to create full real apps. Doing this serverless is tricky and requires a lot of careful thought to do right.

Lovable is not going to tell them to use a proper auth service or fully secure their data. One Lovable project I looked at had generated an entire custom JS Markdown parser instead of using react-markdown, for example.
by ascendantlogic | 2025-12-22 19:07:23+00:00
The content of the document matters too. I don't really care if someone was AI-assisted writing a project plan. As long as it's sane and clear I'm not gonna lose sleep over that. However for my performance review I definitely want my manager to put in the effort and actually tell me nuanced thoughts on my performance. I don't want AI output for that part.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-22 19:07:36+00:00
> I guess there's two ways to read a ratio like that. Either A) the false positive rate rounds to 100.00000%, or B) the correct positive rate rounds to 100.00000% and the few that slip through are great tragedies due to "just not investing enough", thus making the false positives worth it.

I think for (B) to be a justifiable reading, the national stats would have had to have been much higher before the roll out, with a significant share of those national stats being from the particular schools that happened to be the leading implementors.

But, yeah, I agree that that is a possible implication of the presentation on the surface.
by notahacker | 2025-12-22 19:07:40+00:00
Sure, it's in the United States' interest to retain the best foreign students (and in many students' interest to study in a country which will permit them to live and work there after their study). That doesn't mean the current administration is necessarily inclined to act this way

International student enrolment is down 17% this year, because the administration chose to take a broadly similar approach to student visas as they did to immigration, with a "pause" on interviews and lots of revocations, plus of course the concern their lawful student visa status isn't a guarantee they won't get taken off to processing centres by ICE thugs with quotas to hit. Other bright ideas the administration proposed with include a four year student visa limit to rule out the possibility of completing a PhD in a normal time frame. That's gonna hurt universities using the foreign students to prop their business up, and citizens who'll have to pick up their tab instead if they want their courses to continue...
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-22 19:07:46+00:00
Interesting stuff, I've asked if I could do the installation myself every single time I've moved to a new place, and never has the ISP (three different ones) said yes. There isn't any installation fee place(probably by law?) so that isn't an issue here, just a hassle to coordinate having to meet between 12:00 and 18:00 or some super wide range of time for them to come and install it.
by laser9 | 2025-12-22 19:08:10+00:00
> This is the garbage in, garbage out principle in action. The utility of a model is bottlenecked by its inputs. The more garbage you have, the more likely hallucinations will occur.

Good read but I wouldn't fully extend the garbage in, garbage out principle to the LLMs. These massive LLMs are trained on internet-scale data, which includes a significant amount of garbage, and still do pretty good. Hallucinations are due to missing or misleading context than from the noise alone. Tech debt heavy code bases though unstructured still provides information-rich context.
by fecal_henge | 2025-12-22 19:08:22+00:00
Am I right to understand that all those cams are pointed to the street / public places?

- I think you would be wrong to understand that. How on earth did you reach that conclusion?

But how is that different from the thousands of live cams over youtube or the wider internet? Or the poorly secured CCTV watching every angle of any street in most big cities.

- More than one thing can be wrong at once. Requires nuanced thought I accept.

The author then uses face search engines to find personal information on the individuals. That is the creepy part.

- I think he is demonstrating the creepy opportinities. Did he share any of that information? I think anyone with bad intent probably probably not make a video explaining what they did.
by JackSlateur | 2025-12-22 19:08:34+00:00
AD allows connections between two computers that are registered against the active directory, including a random laptop and the AD themselves

This is a fundamental difference versus something like oauth: in the former, everything is done to allow RCE on the AD: the code exist; in the later, everything is done to prevent RCE on the issuer;

Identity is hard ? Identity is a lot simpler once you assume that:

- people make mistakes
- code is buggy
- infrastructure has issue

This is why using things like oauth instead of AD's authentication mecanism is good: because it is secured by default and you must try really hard to allow a wide range of attack
by a1j9o94 | 2025-12-22 19:09:00+00:00
I know I'm an outlier on HN, but I really don't care if AI was used to write something I'm reading. I just care whether or not the ideas are good and clear. And if we're talking about work output 99% of what people were putting out before AI wasn't particularly good. And in my genuine experience AI's output is better than things people I worked with would spend hours and days on.

I feel like more time is wasted trying to catch your coworkers using AI vs just engaging with the plan. If it's a bad plan say that and make sure your coworker is held accountable for presenting a bad plan. But it shouldn't matter if he gave 5 bullets to Chat gpt that expanded it to a full page with a detailed plan.
by juujian | 2025-12-22 19:09:06+00:00
> But if you ship it and people use it, you’ve created an implicit promise: that you can maintain, debug, and extend what you’ve built. If AI assembled it and you can’t answer basic questions about how it works, you’ve misled users about what they can depend on.

Agree with the premise but this part is off. When I find a project online, I assume it will be abandoned within a year unless I see evidence of a substantive team and/or prior long-term time investments.
by goku12 | 2025-12-22 19:09:06+00:00
> had the planners thought the internet would become as big as it is, would they allow it to be as unrestrained as it was at the beginning?

Interesting question. I think that the arpanet took that design because it started as a research project. The corporations today are unlikely to have ever adopted such a design. I don't know how the corporations back in the day were. And as for the actual planners, the relevant question is if they had any reason to believe that it wouldn't grow so big so fast. We know so many examples where research labs and academia came up with products that are revolutionary. Perhaps they did imagine the possibility and were generous enough?

> Right now the push is to centralize, BUT lets speculate if they would push for decentralization if it meant it became useful for a different purpose. I wonder if they would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite communication standard.

That's a very tricky question too. Here's what I think. They would probably cooperate and create an open standard - but only because they want to compete with the dominant player with the first-mover advantage. And that standard would also be so complex that it defeats the purpose of being open, and only they can practically setup anything with it. This is trend that we see widely today - the web standards, kubernetes, bios (or equivalent) firmware, many parts of the Linux software ecosystem, etc. They don't go for the simplest, most logical, orthogonal and easy-to-implement designs, ever.
by andy99 | 2025-12-22 19:09:22+00:00
Because AI can generate meritless works far faster than anyone can judge their merits. Asking someone to read your AI thing is basically asking someone to do the work for you. If you respect your colleagues time, you should be sharing your best version of inputs, not raw material. Not only that, you should have thought about and be able to defend it. Throwing some AI thing over the fence, you haven’t thought about it either, why would you expect your colleague to?

I’d add to that, long form AI output is really bad and basically unsuitable for anything.

Something like “I got GPT to make a few bullet points to structure the conversation” is probably acceptable in some cases if it’s short. The worst I can imagine is giving someone a “deep research” article to read as if that’s different from sending them to google.
by meowface | 2025-12-22 19:10:07+00:00
I will admit to being an LLM workslopper. I don't ever send anything written by an LLM (because anyone who's seen enough LLM writing will recognize it's an LLM) without rewriting it by hand first - with exceptions for parts of READMEs - but for any other task it's pretty much 100% LLM.

I look at the output and ask it to re-re-verify its results, but at the end of the day the LLM is doing the work and I am handing that off to others.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-22 19:10:07+00:00
It's not anti-democratic, it's just pragmatic.

Yes the US is a democracy, but a lot of our systems suck ass and are also close in proximity. You DO NOT want to get into legal trouble in the US. Our justice system is beyond fucked. If there's one way to permanently ruin your life in the US, it's getting into legal trouble. You're better off smoking crack cocaine, that's probably healthier for your livelihood.

I don't know about China's legal system, but even assuming it's more fucked, it's all the way over there. Not here.

The main trouble with Flock and companies like them is that they attach to our broken systems like a tumor. If the system fails, which it often does, these accelerate it and make it worse. If you get falsely accused of something or piss off the wrong PD, this shit can ruin your life. Permanently and expeditiously.

Even if you are the most Moral Orel you should be skeptical of these crime reduction claims. They don't just beat down crime, they beat down regular people, too. And if you ask them, they don't know the difference.
by zdragnar | 2025-12-22 19:10:10+00:00
Has this actually been tried? Plenty of people have released AI generated (in part or nearly whole) media as their own, especially in music and fiction literature.

Personally, I'd love to see most of this stuff disappear from services that advertise it on par with human generated media like spotify and amazon (though I'll also admit to having a soft spot for the soul style AI covers of 50 cent and others).
Show HN: File-based persistent memory for LLM assistants
by JohannesGlaser | 2025-12-22 19:10:27+00:00
I’ve been frustrated by how stateless most LLM assistants still are. Longer context windows and retrieval help with recall, but state usually disappears between sessions.

I ended up building a file-based memory architecture where memory, rules, and state live explicitly outside the model. It’s modular (notes, OCR, training logs, etc.) and I’ve been using it daily for about three months as a general-purpose assistant. It doesn’t require fine-tuning or custom infrastructure — just files and an existing LLM backend.

I’m curious how others here handle long-term state: files, databases, event sourcing, vector layers, or something else?

For context: private, non-commercial use is free.

http://metamemoryworks.com
Architecture + repos linked
by danaris | 2025-12-22 19:10:29+00:00
No, they absolutely will not.

Those factory jobs are, to a first approximation, gone for good. Either they are being done by humans in other countries that not only have a cost of living less than 1/5 of ours, but also have massive supply and logistics chains built up to support them, or they have been automated. Sure, there will be a few much-ballyhooed factories built and staffed, but compared to the period after WWII, which is what most of them are thinking of, it's going to be less than a drop in the bucket.

And, for the vast majority of people, that's an unalloyed good. Factory jobs are hard on the body. Office work may have less of a nationalist mythos built up around it, but it's genuinely better for most people.
by ktallett | 2025-12-22 19:10:35+00:00
Oh no, that isn't factually correct. We have the theory. The theory is viable and provable and shown in both of the major branches of quantum computing, qubit and photonic. The key issue as I say is each has multiple 'architectures' for lack of a better term for each branch. We do have functional devices, it is just the function they provide is useless as we can already do it on a laptop. Which partially is a massive issue as Quantum computing almost needs to skip ahead of those development years classical computing was afforded.
by jchw | 2025-12-22 19:10:44+00:00
On another similar but different note, I don't think I've ever uploaded any code written by LLMs to GitHub, but I do sometimes upload fully complete projects under my "initial commit". Some people may legitimately just hide the edit history on purpose just because they don't want to "show their work". It's not really a particularly good habit, but I think a lot of us can relate.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-22 19:10:48+00:00
It's really interesting the different cultures "YCombinator the startup incubator" and "Ycombinator/HN the internet forum has". A comment being so oblivious about surveillance would probably be flagged here, at least heavily downvoted, while this guy is actively the president and CEO of Ycombinator today?

pg, what happened? Ycombinator used to be a beacon of sense in a sea of uselessness, but now uselessness is running Ycombinator?
by ogogmad | 2025-12-22 19:10:59+00:00
Just checked after reading your comment. Surprisingly to me, AFAs (Alternating Finite Automatons) do let you introduce the Complement operation into Regex while preserving the O(mn) complexity of running NFAs.

That's really subtle, because deciding Regex universality (i.e. whether a regex accepts every input) is PSPACE-COMPLETE. And since NFAs make it efficient to decide whether a regex matches NO inputs, any attempts to combine NFAs with regex Complement would trip on a massive landmine.
by tankenmate | 2025-12-22 19:11:08+00:00
"Lai is a victim of this miscalculation."; I don't think Lai miscalculated, he knew what was coming and fought it anyway.

"Authority comes from submission"; sure someone can threaten you with physical coercion, but they can't make you want to submit. I would strongly suspect that Jimmy knew what was coming, but the point isn't "winning" in the "hollywood" sense, but rather that he did the right thing even. I would suspect not even in spite of the cost, but because of the cost.

Are principles that don't cost you anything even principles?
by nextaccountic | 2025-12-22 19:11:14+00:00
The problem this (and Dioxus Native) solves is that someone might prefer Rust anyway.

Most of times it's just a personal preference, but sometimes it's due to using Rust libraries or already having code written in Rust that can be reused. There is Rust <-> Kotlin FFI (also Rust <-> Dart) but sometimes people don't like it
by karaterobot | 2025-12-22 19:11:21+00:00
I'm sometimes asked to produce meaningless 30-page documents that nobody ever reads. I mean literally nobody, since I can see the history of who has accessed it. Me and a proof-reader, and occasionally someone will open it up to check that it exists. But nobody reads them, let alone reads them closely. Not the distant funder who added it as a line-item requirement to their grant (their job is adding line items to grants, not reading documents), nor the actual people involved in the project, who don't have time to read a meaningless document, and don't need to. It's of use to no one, it's just something that must be done because we live in a stupid world.

I've started having AI write those documents. Each one used to take me a full week to produce, now it's maybe one day, including editing. I don't feel bad about it. I'm ecstatic about it, actually; this shouldn't be part of my job, so reducing its footprint in my life is a blessing. Someday, someone will realize that such documents do not need to exist in the first place, but that's not the world we live in right now, and I can't change it. I'm just glad AI exists for this kind of pointless yeoman's work.
by dj_mc_merlin | 2025-12-22 19:11:41+00:00
If the documents they're putting out are bad, then they're doing bad work and that eventually comes with consequences from your coworkers and superiors. If they're doing good work, then great! Who cares if an LLM wrote most of it and they just edit it? That's not super different than the current relationship between senior and line workers.
by aristofun | 2025-12-22 19:11:48+00:00
> These things are not mutually exclusive. You can do a great job and learn how to communicate a job well done.

Absolutely! Nothing wrong with communicating your work and networking. It's better to do that than don't, it's a good thing to do, it's a great thing to help your manager to be aware of what's going on.

As long as it is not a mandatory requirement and expectation of an engineer that puts pressure and becomes a toil.
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-22 19:12:05+00:00
Governments around the world are finding ways of doing that well before big tech will get to it.

This big push for Age/ID verification & "trusted" operating systems is going to ruin what's left of free (as in freedom), general purpose computing. Governments are getting frothy at the mouth for every device to have remote attestation like google play protect/whatever iOS does.
by fusslo | 2025-12-22 19:12:24+00:00
I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock.

From what I understand these systems are legal because there is no expectation of privacy in public. Therefore any time you go in public you cannot expect NOT to be tracked, photographed, and entered into a database (which may now outlive us).

I think the argument comes from the 1st amendment.

Weaponizing the Bill of Rights (BoR) for the government against the people does not seem to align with my understanding of why the Bill of Rights was cemented into our constitution in the first place.

I wonder what Adams or Madison would make of it. I wonder if Benjamin Franklin would be appalled.

I wonder if they'd consider every license plate reading a violation of the 4th amendment.
by perlgeek | 2025-12-22 19:12:25+00:00
The definition of "market niche" must do too much work for my liking to make this true.

For example, for the market niche "getting people from one location to another" there are quite many technologies, like walking, bicycles, scooters, cars, trains, ships, airplanes, helicopters etc., none of them evolved as a clear winner that displaced the others.

You might say, that's a whole market, not just a market niche, but it's also a niche of the larger transportation market.

When we look at something like grid-scale energy storage, how do we know if it's a winner-takes-all niche? Maybe constraints such as availability of space, availability of funding, weather, climate, grid demands etc. create sub-niches with their own winners. Or maybe not, but how can we known?