MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ofalkaed | 2025-12-31 10:17:59+00:00
Personally I think AI is going to turn software into a cottage industry, it will make custom software something the individual can afford. AI is a very long ways off from being able to allow the average person to create the software they want unless they are willing to put a great deal of time into it, but it is almost good enough that the programmer can take the average person's idea and execute it at an affordable price. Probably only a year or two from when a capable programmer will be able to offer any small buisness a completely customized POS setup for what the cost of a canned industrial offering today; I will design your website and build you a POS system tailored to your needs and completely integrated with the website, and for a little more I can throw in the accounting and tax software. A bright dishwasher realizing they can make things work better for their employer might be the next billionaire revolutionizing commerce and the small buisness.

I have some programming ability and a lot of ideas but would happily hire someone to realize those ideas for me. The idea I have put the most time into, took me the better part of a year to sort out all the details of even with the help of AI, most programmers could have probably done it in a night and with AI could write the software in a few nights. I would have my software for an affordable price and they could stick it in their personal store so other could buy it. If I am productive with it and show its utility, they will sell more copies of it so they have an incentive to work with people like me and help me realize my ideas.

Programming is going to become a service instead of an industry, the craft of programming will be for sale instead of software.
by irl_zebra | 2025-12-31 10:19:49+00:00
Yeah hate to say it, because I am an AI hater, but I love the AI results in Google and Kagi. I barely click results anymore for basic questions unless it's something important enough for me to need verification to ensure the AI-gen answer wasn't a hallucination. It's been so nice not having to pick through the cesspool that is StackOverflow to find answers to quick cli questions, or wade through SEO-generated, Amazon-affiliate link garbage for more general questions.
by chippiewill | 2025-12-31 10:19:49+00:00
In the UK there's a standard grid used for local-only mapping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey_National_Grid

It's a transverse mercator projection rather than a mercator as you might often see because it minimises distortion over the UK as a whole which means that the distortion is as you move away from the meridian, rather than as you move away from the equator (with a regular mercator I think all points have the grid aligned with true North)

This grid is setup such that it's origin is not on the prime meridian (at Greenwich), but 2deg west so only points on the line 2deg west are aligned with true north.
by lrasinen | 2025-12-31 10:20:48+00:00
For most of Great Britain, the grid north differs from true north because the grid cells are fixed size, so they "fan out" compared to longitude lines. The exception is the 2°W meridian where the grid lines up.

The magnetic north wanders around, and it now happens to match along the 2° meridian.

But really the article is a year early, as the alignment point should make a brief landfall in Scotland late next year (which the article acknowledges later on). Or perhaps they expect Scotland to secede before that.
by baobun | 2025-12-31 10:21:04+00:00
For the sake of argument, let's say you have a check that caps the number of lines per file and that both you and main added lines in the same file. It's not too weird if that check fails only after merge, right?

One benign example of something that can break after merge even if each branch is individually passing pre-merge. In less benign cases it will your branch merged to main and actual bugs in the code.

One reason to not allow "unclean merges" and enforced incoming branches to be rebased up-to-date to be mergable to the main branch.

You probably want to run the checks on each commit to main in CI and not rely on them being consistently run by contributors.

You do you but I find rebasing my branch on main instead of merging makes me scratch mybhead way less.
by soulofmischief | 2025-12-31 10:21:04+00:00
2025 has been a wild year for agentic coding models. Cutting-edge models in January 2025 don't hold a candle to cutting edge models in December 2025.

Just the jump from Sonnet 3.5 to 3.7 to 4.5, and Opus 4.5 has been pretty massive in terms of holistic reasoning, deep knowledge as well as better procedural and architectural adherence.

GPT-5 Pro convinced me to pay $200/mo for an OpenAI subscription. Regular 5.2 models, and 5.2 codex, are leagues better than GPT-4 when it comes to solving problems procedurally, using tools, and deep discussion of scientific, mathematic, philosophical and engineering problems.

Models have increasingly longer context, especially some Google models. OpenAI has released very good image models, and great editing-focused image models in general have been released. Predictably better multimodal inference over the short term is unlocking many cool near-term possibilities.

Additionally, we have seen some incredible open source and open weight models released this year. Some fully commercially viable without restriction. And more and more smaller TTS/STT projects are in active development, with a few notable releases this year.

Honestly, the landscape at the end of the year is impressive. There has been great work all over the place, almost too much to keep up with. I'm very interested in the Genie models and a few others.

For an idea:

At the beginning of the year, I was mildly successful getting at coding models to make changes in some of my codebases, but the more esoteric problems were out of reach. Progress in general was deliberate and required a lot of manual intervention.

By comparison, in the last week I've prototyped six applications at levels that would take me days to weeks individually, often developing multiple at the same time, monitoring agentic workflows and intervening only when necessary, relying on long preproduction phases with architectural discussions and development of documentation, requirements, SDDs... and detailed code review and refactoring processes to ensure adherence to constraints. I'm morphing from a very busy solo developer into a very busy product manager.
by rajnathani | 2025-12-31 10:21:11+00:00
The key point, which at least the top comment here is missing and others may overlook of the article, is that the article states that the USD currency reserve is still the same but that the other currencies being present in the mix have increased and thus the USD proportion has decreased (not that the absolute amount of USD being held decreased). However, the implication is still the same and that is that the rest of the world's central banks are holding relatively less USD.
by jccx70 | 2025-12-31 10:21:28+00:00
"Yes. I can't tell you how many times the ability to just download a goddamn .exe file and run it in WINE has saved my ass. Seemingly every creative project I undertake eventually requires downloading some piece of software which is either impossible or impractical to rebuild myself, and whose Linux and macOS ports no longer work or never existed. There's more than three decades of Win32 software — .exe files! — that can run in WINE or (of course) on Windows. No other ABI has that kind of compatibility record. WINE can even run Win16 stuff too.

The really cool thing about Win32 is it's also the world's stable ABI. There's lots of fields of software where the GNU/Linux and POSIX-y offerings available are quite limited and generally poor in quality, e.g. creative software and games. Win32 gives you access to a much larger slice of humanity's cultural inheritance. "

What a pile of bullshitting.
by vee-kay | 2025-12-31 10:21:29+00:00
You need to compare relative prices and availability too, from a VFM (value for money (price vs quality+quantity)) perspective.

A budget PC today at a certain price point (say, $500) would certainly have a lot more powerful CPU and faster disk storage and faster RAM than a similarly priced PC just 5 years ago.

But as OSes and programs get more bloated and more complex, I feel 1TB+ SSDs are required these days in PCs. Windows OS and programs themselves can take up hundreds of GBs of space.

But you will notice that budget PCs are being launched these days with lower-grade CPUs (i3 or equivalent), lesser RAM (8GB), lesser storage (256 or 500GB) SSD.

We seem to be regressing backwards in specs for PCs and even mobiles (good luck finding features like NFC and wireless charging in budget phones these days; though these features were available in same segment (budget phones) few years ago).

And it is not just due to AI, it is due to hardware manufacturers and assemblers thinking they can hoodwink consumers and sell us less value for more price.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-31 10:21:43+00:00
This applies to any spending Microsoft does. What does it have to do with OpenAI?

Also, classifying business expenses as "cost to the tax payer" seems less than useful, unless you are a proponent of simply taxing gross receipts. Which has its merits, but then the discussion is about taxing gross receipts versus income with at least some deductible expenses, not anything to do with OpenAI.
by nielsbot | 2025-12-31 10:21:45+00:00
> It shouldn't be the job of the US taxpayer to feed someone that doesn't want to work, study, or pass a drug test

What about someone who works and still can’t afford enough housing/food?

> shouldn't be the job of the US taxpayer to feed another country's citizens half a world away.

I mean where’s the profit in that, am i right?
by nosianu | 2025-12-31 10:22:38+00:00
That's where the surveillance and the militarized police force(s) come in. Especially the former now has reached extraordinary levels, given that almost all communication now is easily trackable.

Compare that to when we still had revolutions, where it was very hard for government to know what is going on, and to find individuals without a huge effort.

I think revolutions have become next to impossible, unless it is lead by significant parts of the elite that controls at least part of the apparatus.

That's not even counting the far more sophisticated propaganda methods, so that many of the affected people won't even begin to target the actual culprits but are lead to chase shadows, or one another.
Show HN: PixelPointingBenchmark – Simple tests reveal surprising gaps
by myrausman | 2025-12-31 10:23:48+00:00
We built a small open-source benchmark to test how well vision-enabled LLMs handle pixel-level pointing on screens.
Instead of complex UI screenshots, we use synthetic images with basic shapes and clean backgrounds to isolate spatial reasoning and coordinate accuracy.

The results were surprising:

Many top models miss by tens to hundreds of pixels on trivial tasks (e.g., center of a purple circle or red square).
High run-to-run variance in some models (different answers on the same image/prompt).
Performance flips dramatically with resolution or aspect ratio changes.
Claude Sonnet and Claude Haiku are consistently near-perfect (0–1px error), while others show clear gaps.
We wrote a detailed blog post about the findings:
https://autodevice.io/blog/wheres-the-pixel-part-1

Repo (easy to run, add tests, try new models):
https://autodevice.github.io/PixelPointingBenchmark/

Curious to see how the latest vision LLMs do on this. If you run it, share your results or feedback.

Happy to discuss improvements or extensions!

#VisionLLM #LLM #Benchmark #SpatialReasoning #GUI #ComputerUse #AI
by rcxdude | 2025-12-31 10:23:49+00:00
I dunno, ask India and Jane Street. That's the same basic situation: when the derivative market betting on the price going up or down is much larger than the market that actually sets that price, it's ripe for arbitrage/market manipulation by a player big enough to move the market (which one you think it is depends on whether you're one of the gamblers getting fleeced or the one taking their money).
by npodbielski | 2025-12-31 10:23:52+00:00
If that is true we will live in a funny world when you will loose all your money because you where running some outdated, riddled with holes software written by LLM running on some old router old cheap camera. Or some software will stop working after an update because some fix was written by LLM and nobody checked that nor tested. Or they will 3 outages of big internet services in 2 months.

Oh wait. It is already a thing.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-12-31 10:24:28+00:00
I agree with you on all of this, and found myself wondering if the author had actually studied the Industrial Revolution at all.

The Industrial Revolution created a flywheel: you built machines that could build lots of things better and for less cost than before, including the parts to make better machines that could build things even better and for less cost than before, including the parts to make better machines... and on and on.

The key part to industrialisation in the 19th-century framing, is that you have in-built iterative improvement: by driving down cost, you increase demand (the author covers this), which increases investment in driving down costs, which increases demand, and so on.

Critically, this flywheel has exponential outputs, not linear. The author shows Jevons paradox, and the curve is right there - note the lack of straight line.

I'm not sure we're seeing this in AI software generation yet.

Costs are shifting in people's minds, from developer salaries to spending on tokens, so there's a feeling of cost reduction, but that's because a great deal of that seems to be heavily subsidised today.

It's also not clear that these AI tools are being used to produce exponentially better AI tools - despite the jump we saw ~GPT-3.5, quantitive improvement in output seems to remain linear as a function of cost, not exponential. Yet investment input seems to be exponential (this makes it feel more like a bubble).

I'm not saying that industrialisation of the type the author refers to isn't possible (and I'd even say most industrialisation of software happened back in the 1960s/70s), or that the flywheel can't pick up with AI, just that we're not quite where they think it is.

I'd also argue it's not a given that we're going to see the output of "industrialisation" drive us towards "junk" as a natural order of things - if anything we'll know it's not a junk bubble when we do in fact see the opposite, which is what optimists are betting on being just around the corner.
by hnlmorg | 2025-12-31 10:25:59+00:00
If your walking stick looks like it will be used as a weapon then you can safely assume you’ll have it removed upon entry.

Events like these will have disclaimers like “admittance is subject to the discretion of our security staff”.

The point of the list of prohibited items is to make it easier for attendees to know the kinds of items theyre allowed to bring. What it isn’t, is an exhaustive list of anything that could be used for bad intentions.
by ofalkaed | 2025-12-31 10:26:09+00:00
Sure, that is still a ways off, but being able to hire a programmer to meet my personal modest software needs is almost there. Also, the needs of any company that required a hundred people and millions of dollars is very different from the needs of a small restaurant or the like; anyone with enough ambition to run a small restaurant can manage the accounting and taxes for that restaurant, the same can not be said for the sort of buisness you are describing. You are comparing an apple to an orange orchard.

Edit: Just noticed I said "any buisness", that was supposed to be "any small buisness." Edited the original post as well.
by Deukhoofd | 2025-12-31 10:26:52+00:00
The industrial revolution was constrained by access to the means of production, leaving only those with capital able to actually produce, which lead to new economic situations.

What are the constraints with LLMs? Will an Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, etc, constrain how much we can consume? What is the value of any piece of software if anyone can produce everything? The same applies to everything we're suddenly able to produce. What is the value of a book if anyone can generate one? What is the value of a piece of art, if it requires zero skill to generate it?
by Abh1Works | 2025-12-31 10:27:34+00:00
But I think the important part of this is the reach that the Industrial Revolution had. Consumer facing software, or the endusers who were able to "benefit" from the Industrial Revolution, and individual needs for all of these mass produced goods.

The important thing is that goods =/= software. I, as an end user, of software rarely need specialized software. I dont need an entire app generated on the spot to split the bill and remember the difference if I have the calculator.

So, yes, we are industrializing software, but this reach that people talk about (I believe) will be severely limited.
by chistev | 2025-12-31 10:28:31+00:00
There is no secret.

You either need to have a very valuable skill that people are willing to pay you for, or you start a business selling a product or offering a service (basically having a valuable skill) that people are willing to pay you for.

Or you get lucky like if you had bought Bitcoin back when it was worth a negligible amount and then you check back years later (2026) to find out that forgotten investment is now worth a lot of money. But that's likely not going to be the case for you.

I also wish there was a secret I could learn about to make me rich next year, because I'm not rich.
by jameslk | 2025-12-31 10:29:23+00:00
When people talk about inflation, I don't think they're referring to just CPI, but asset inflation too. Things like equities, real estate, gold/silver/platinum, bitcoin, etc.

These have been outpacing CPI because they're levered by cheap debt, brought to you by central bank actions that keep rates low so governments can play the same levered games with their own runaway fiscal policies.
Show HN: I bootstrapped a podcast search engine in Rust (1 yr update)
by lukaesch | 2025-12-31 10:29:44+00:00
A year ago, I shared my journey bootstrapping Audioscrape in Rust. Back then: 500 users, SQLite, 4k LoC in main.rs, running on a $7/month VM.

Today: 25,000+ transcribed episodes, knowledge graph with AI-extracted entities, and still running lean.

What changed:

Tech evolution: SQLite → PostgreSQL (scale). Added OpenSearch for full-text + semantic search. Self-hosted WhisperX on 2 GPUs (~100 episodes/hour). OpenAI for entity extraction (people, companies, topics). Still Rust/Axum, now ~15k LoC.

New features: Speaker diarization (who said what) using voice fingerprinting. Entity pages linking mentions across episodes. Timestamp-based sharing and deep linking. MCP server for AI agents to search podcasts.

What stayed the same:

Solo developer. Bootstrapped, no VC. Rust for everything backend. Obsessive cost optimization.

Current stats:

25,000+ transcribed episodes. Top podcasts: JRE, Lex Fridman, Huberman Lab, etc. Pipeline processes 100+ episodes/hour. Still under $100/month infra (excluding GPUs).

Learnings from year one:

Rust's async ecosystem is production-ready. SQLx migrations saved me during the PostgreSQL switch. Entity extraction is harder than transcription. SEO matters more than I expected for discovery.

2025 goals:

API access for developers. Real-time transcription for live podcasts. Improved semantic search with custom embeddings.

Try it: https://www.audioscrape.com

Search is free, no account needed. Would love feedback on the search UX and what features would make this useful for your workflow.
by latexr | 2025-12-31 10:30:21+00:00
> Let's ask your friendly local Ukrainian refugee about that.

You understand “basically useless” does not mean “entirely useless”, right? That’s why the word “basically” is there.

I know Ukrainian people. I know Ukrainian people who are in attacked cities right now. They are friendly, and all of them would understand my point.

> So the only permissible technologies are those suitable for use by children and the mentally disturbed. I see.

This is a profoundly bad faith argument. HN rules ask you to not do that and steel man. It is obvious that is not what I said, “permissible” isn’t part of the argument at all. And if you think one needs to be “mentally disturbed” to be affected, you are high on arrogance and low on empathy and information. There are numerous stories of sane people becoming affected.

https://archive.ph/2025.09.24-025805/https://www.nytimes.com...
by gonzus | 2025-12-31 10:31:04+00:00
One of the advantages of doing this seemingly weird projection is that you can treat "local" maps (for some definition of local) as flat rectangular grids without introducing a lot of errors: drawing straight lines between two points, measuring the distance / angle between them, etc., just by dealing with a flat piece of paper. VERY convenient, but the farther you are from the center of the projection, the higher the errors that are introduced.
by acaor | 2025-12-31 10:31:20+00:00
A few days ago, I started my vacation, and what better way to spend my time than to program a new feature. I wanted to continue learning more about Elixir/Phoenix, so I decided to add the ability to expose your localhost to the Internet (in the same way that ngrok tunnels works) to my side project.

The CLI is in Rust, a language I didn't have much experience working with, but I managed to pull it off.

By the way, the tunnels are free; only tunnels with a static domain require a paid plan.

What do you think?

By the way, I wrote about the technical details of this on my personal blog: https://acaor.com/posts/the-beam-and-the-crab/

Thank you for reading.
by esperent | 2025-12-31 10:31:41+00:00
I have no idea, I clicked on the search icon at the top, then typed "translation state" and then opened the first result. It didn't look like a handpicked list, I assumed I was getting the algorithmic recommendation.

If I'd seen a page titled "Susan's List of favorite female scifi authors" or something like that, it would be fine. But the page didn't look like I was on a handpicked list, there was not much to differentiate it from other pages.
by readingnews | 2025-12-31 10:32:07+00:00
Thanks for the links, that is a company I did not know existed, and the woofers are interesting. Really makes you wonder if they have overcome the traditional problems of large woofers. The Fostex super woofer users recommended rotating it once a year due to its own weight possibly deforming the spider structure of the woofer, at only 27" across. 60" or 100" across is back to the future level ridiculous. As another poster said, I can not see this outperforming several smaller units, but I would love to see/hear it in action.
by nosianu | 2025-12-31 10:32:22+00:00
It is beside the point, but

> I think AI will be far more impactful

is not correct IMO. Those are two very different areas. The impact of railroads on transport and everything transport-related cannot be understated. By now roads and cars have taken over much of it, and ships and airplanes are doing much more, but you have to look at the context at the time.
by input_sh | 2025-12-31 10:34:17+00:00
> the vast majority of users won't have an opinion

They're here, they don't care how they get from point A to point B, the tech used to achieve that result is completely irrelevant to them. AI? Great. Not AI such as the Instant Answers era? Also great. Average Joe does not spend his time thinking about the economics of the web.

But you shouldn't confuse them finding "AI" useful now with them being attached to it long term. It's a hip new tool now, but the novelty will fade and Google will have to re-invent themselves all over again. If anything, they kinda screwed themselves over by calling this "AI". AI is supposed to be something within reach, but always some years away. By wasting that term for the current era, it's gonna suck so hard to think of a new marketing term that's gonna be seen as an improvement in comparison to the term "AI".