MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nbadg | 2025-12-09 17:05:59+00:00
For those that can't get it to load (it takes a minute, and I noticed my desktop's fan kick it up a notch while things were getting initialized, so... YMMV): this is a portfolio site done via a cozy-gaming-style AWSD game where you drive around in a jeep-like thingamabob. There are some cute easter eggs, including a sort of... shrine to each of the socials, which you can run into with your car and knock over (though the links remain clickable, of course!). It also looks like there's some degree of global state; for example, you can "sacrifice yourself to the gods of chaos" (ie drive into a portal) and a counter on the side of the portal goes up, presumably for everyone (since I certainly didn't drive into it 1700 times myself!). There's a strongly consistent art style, and just generally... seems pretty polished. Or at least, that's what it felt like after 5 minutes of driving around.

All in all I'd say, I'm impressed, and enjoyed it. Though I think the HN title ("handsdown one of the coolest 3D websites") is maybe a bit much. It's an extremely-well-executed portfolio site; no more, no less.
by gruez | 2025-12-09 17:06:07+00:00
This is a terrible article.

I dug into the figures behind some of the claims made in the article and they seem a bit hyperbolic, for instance:

>You don’t start a wood bank in a country with functioning institutions. You start one when heating assistance programs can’t keep up, when the grid flickers every time the wind shifts, when propane and heating oil costs swing so hard that families can’t budget more than a week out.

The linked articles cite a 8.4-16.4% price increase for natural gas, and a decrease of 4% and 5% for heating oil and propane respectively. While I understand some people might be living paycheck to paycheck, characterizing this as "costs swing so hard that families can’t budget more than a week out" is a stretch. At the very least the author could not mention "heating oil" when it decreased in price?

Other parts of the article are equally misleading. For instance

>Rural families don’t get to pretend. They know exactly what it means when the power goes out for the third time in a month and the utility company shrugs because the profit isn’t there to fix it.

That gives you the impression that electricity companies are refusing to fix broken electricity grids, leaving people to freeze, but the first link is actually a story about people being disconnected after they don't pay their bills, and the second is about lack of maintenance for California's grid. Both are vaguely related to the original claim, but are cited in a highly misleading way. While it's regrettable that customers are disconnected for bill non-repayment, you obviously can't also have an utility operate where there's no consequences for non-payment. And while PG&E should be raked over the coals for their lack of maintenance, it's a stretch to link it to people in the north east freezing.
by summermusic | 2025-12-09 17:06:23+00:00
> I sort of would've preferred it was JUST a button

Exactly. The Pebble already has all the hardware to capture voice notes. There are at least a few third party Pebble apps that do this already. The problem that Eric has is limited to the activation of the feature, not the feature itself, but he overengineered a disposable standalone gadget instead of making an accessory for his already capable platform.
by rekabis | 2025-12-09 17:07:40+00:00
> Then AI arrived, and overnight, our engineering velocity jumped by roughly 3–8x.

X Doubt

This flies in the face of all available scientific evidence collected to date, which shows an average company-wide slowdown of 20-50%, depending on industry, codebase, and a number of other factors being likely.

Only about 2% of all devs show an increased velocity after 12+ months of using AI, and for almost all of them, their “improvements” stayed stubbornly in the single digits. Plus, for the remainder, regression analysis strongly indicated that over 90% of them would never be faster with AI than without.

Pretty much 98% of all companies using AI have seen no material RoI, and the vast majority of them have remained deep in the red.

Honestly, I call bullshit on any numbers like the ones stated above, and would strongly advise anyone else with healthy, non-indoctrinated scepticism to demand evidence such as analytics and observability reports.
by iambateman | 2025-12-09 17:07:45+00:00
My big concern is not crazy robots on a humanoid platform…it’s a purpose-built drone swarm.

Society is not built for the threat of someone who can open the trunk of a car and release dozens of autonomous drones each capable of flying over a mile and delivering weapons to a target.

We as tech-oriented people need to start thinking about how to respond to and defend against autonomous weaponized drones now.

[edit:] I understand that Gemini was basically trying to be funny, and I appreciate that it was doing a good job at that. I think when we ask LLM’s to make real predictions, in seriousness, about the future, it’s remarkably bad.
by ivape | 2025-12-09 17:07:46+00:00
I think the influx of many truly self-driven and resourceful self-taught programmers in the 2010s established a perceptible need (not necessarily an accurate one) of needing to "properly vet" non-degreeed candidates. Stuff like Leetcode is what emerged. The truth is, the "vetting" was originally done via self-selection. Generally computer-oriented and creative people gravitated toward application development and it was worth something to the world. The world probably didn't know how to value this group of people, so continuously tried to put in some kind of formal process.

But like Art, the artists came from everywhere. We're being dishonest if we don't acknowledge what truly made these developers get to where they are, and it wasn't because they originally went "Oh, I know what I'll do, I'll do thousands of Leetcode problems', that is absolutely not the true story of the developer in the last decade.

Leetcode is a sloppy attempt at recognizing and appropriately handling developers. It was an "attempt", a failed one imho. It fundamentally ignores the spirit in which these developers operated in, it reduces them to gym rats, and that's not how they got there.

This being a spiritual problem is what makes the most consistent sense. Even those that grind Leetcode will tell you their heart is not in it (just like GP mentioned above).
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-09 17:07:55+00:00
Dark matter absolutely is a crutch.

It's "dark" in the sense that the (fabled) Dark Ages were dark. They didn't have more cloud cover then. And dark matter is 'dark' as in 'inobservable, except by gravitational attraction'. So we admit it might not even be "matter" by any definition we have; it's just what we're calling this invisible, untouchable, silent elephant in the room. That is very heavy. And might not be an elephant.

Honestly, "invisible matter" might have been a better term, but that too would have been misinterpreted.
by newsoftheday | 2025-12-09 17:08:21+00:00
> Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous and over-the-top. But I haven’t had this much fun writing software since my 20s.

But...you're not writing it. The culmination of many sites, many people, Stack Overflow, etc. all wrote it through the filtering mechanism being called AI.

You didn't write a damn thing.
by euroderf | 2025-12-09 17:08:36+00:00
> but if you were traveling at the speed of light, time stops

Are we saying then that it is theoretically possible that (a) photons have a zero or near-zero lifetime, but that also (in our frame of reference) (b) they exist for a finite duration of time and are visible during that time simply because time stops for them ? Or did someone manage to slow down light to some fraction of light speed ?
by estearum | 2025-12-09 17:08:54+00:00
The message of the consultant class is that demagogues can win by just lying to people?

Which consultants said that?

Biden won because he came hot on the heels of Trump's complete inability to actually govern.

Which specific pragmatic, positive visions did Biden put forth that are so distinct from Harris's that they won in one case and lost in another?
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-09 17:08:58+00:00
I listened to the acquired podcast where they interviewed Steve Ballmer for a few hours. Very nice to get that perspective.

But he commented quite a bit on how office licensing changed and how that made MS filthy rich. Around Office 97 was when they started emphasizing getting the full office suite as a licensing option. Especially for companies this was a big deal because you would just get all the office applications; whether you needed them or not.

And then later around 2011 they figured out that companies really didn't like having to deal with having to buy a lot of office licenses every few years. So it became a yearly subscription instead and at that point the revenue increased again, a lot.

It's the progressive insight that transitioned MS from being windows OEM license dependent (office came with the PC) to being more dependent on recurring SAAS revenue. Companies actually prefer this model. Even though it costs them more.

I've been free from any MS licenses since I started working for startups on a mac. I occasionally use Google docs and gmail. But I haven't really done anything with Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint etc. since 2012. You don't need any of that stuff to run a company. The rare case I deal with a customer that insists on that stuff, they can just give me access to the web version. Or send a PDF. Or one an office file that usually opens fine in drive.
by JeremyNT | 2025-12-09 17:09:29+00:00
In a work context, for me at least, this class of reply can actually be pretty useful. It indicates somebody already minimally investigated a thing and may have at least some information about it, but they're hedging on certainty by letting me know "the robots say."

It's a huge asterisk to avoid stating something as a fact, but indicates something that could/should be explored further.

(This would be nonsense if they sent me an email or wrote an issue up this way or something, but in an ad-hoc conversation it makes sense to me)

I think this is different than on HN or other message boards, it's not really used by people to hedge here, if they don't actually personally believe something to be the case (or have a question to ask) why are they posting anyway? No value there.
Show HN: I built an AI tool that tracks competitor changes in real time
by emre94 | 2025-12-09 17:09:33+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm the solo founder of Signal Labs. I built a tool called CIx because in my previous roles, competitive intelligence and battelcards became outdated in days. Updating them manually was painful, slow, and constantly behind competitors.

The problem we’re trying to solve:

- Competitors launch features daily/weekly but teams only notice months later

- Sales needs fresh intel for calls, not stale quarterly slides

- PMs want to know what competitors are shipping so they can make informed roadmaps decisions

- CI/PMM teams spend hours gathering intel that becomes outdated before anyone uses it

What CIx does:

- Monitors competitor websites, releases, and changes in real-time

- Generates and updates battlecards automatically using CI best-practices.

- Helps PMs, Sales, Marketing and Leadership teams stay aligned

Here’s a 60-second demo: https://www.loom.com/share/cee4b34448684a54b44c9d3ad4619b54

Here’s the deeper blog post on why we built it: https://usesignallabs.com/the-ci-treadmill-is-broken-why-bat...

You can try CIx here (free): https://usesignallabs.com

I'd love feedback, criticism, or ideas, especially from anyone who has dealt with fast-moving competitors or has built similar automation tools.

Happy to answer any questions.
by fwip | 2025-12-09 17:09:58+00:00
The SAE rate increases 2 percentage points on average, as I understand it - not necessarily uniformly across interventions. It could be the case that medicine A has 4% SAE in healthy patients, and 5% in unhealthy* ones, whereas medicine B has 3% SAE in healthy and 6% in unhealthy - and without testing on unhealthy patients, you don't know that medicine B is riskier for those patients than A.

It could be that I'm totally misunderstanding, and that every medicine has the same elevation of risk of SAE for unhealthy patients, but that seems unlikely to me. You do have 'doctor' in your username though, so I'm probably embarrassing myself here.

*apologies for the healthy/unhealthy terminology, I don't know the right lingo to use here.
by stego-tech | 2025-12-09 17:10:07+00:00
Y’know what? This feels like the most plausible future outcome in a lot of ways.

* All the big LLM companies are dead/dying or their infra just never panned out (like Google killing Gemini)

* We’re still fighting the advertising wars

* Restoration of kit continues to be a thing we all love/upvote to see

* More focus on local stuff rather than ginormous moonshots

* Speaking of moonshots, SpaceX continues succeeding despite Elmo’s best drug-fueled benders trying to undermine it like he does Tesla and X

* Clickbait science posts that the comments rightly point out as such while bitching about “can’t keep these things off the front page”

* People still trying to make WASM and web-as-an-OS a thing, bless their hearts (shine on, you brilliantly weird diamonds, I love seeing what you build even as I doubt the practicality of it)

If this is even half-accurate, I will be pleased we didn’t obliterate ourselves in the process, though disappointed another decade went by dealing with the same fucking problems we’ve had for twenty-odd years.
by alt227 | 2025-12-09 17:10:09+00:00
Not hit and run. There are underlying assumptions which most intelligent people can infer. The intention was to say that all of your comments are a bit naive from an ecommerce site perspective. Having been through mutiple builds and launches of them, I can tell you categorically that your comments are uninformed and wrong. But rather than write all that and make you feel like I am intentionally insulting you, I just point out that you have made your lack of knowledge obvious.
by fn-mote | 2025-12-09 17:10:25+00:00
The title is misleading. This isn't the correct use of the term "hallucination". Hallucination refers to making up facts, not extrapolating into the future.

I read 10 comments before I realized that this was referring to 10 years in the FUTURE and not in the PAST (as would be required for it to be a hallucination).
by glenstein | 2025-12-09 17:10:30+00:00
>It’s interesting to notice how bad AI is at gaming out a 10-year future.

I agree it's a bit silly, but I think it understood the assignment(TM) which was to kind of do a winking performative show and dance to the satisfaction of the user interacting with it. It's entertainment value rather than sincere prediction. Every single entry is showing off a "look how futury this is" headline.

Actual HN would have plenty of posts lateral from any future signalling. Today's front page has Oliver Sacks, retrospectives on Warcraft II, opinion pieces on boutique topics. They aren't all "look at how future-y the future is" posts. I wonder if media literacy is the right word for understanding when an LLM is playing to its audience rather than sincerely imitating or predicting.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-12-09 17:10:53+00:00
Before the AI stuff Google had those pop up quick answers when googling. So I googled something like three years ago, saw the answer, realized it was sourced from HN. Clicked the link, and lo and behold, I answered my own question. Look mah! Im on google! So I am not surprised at all that Google crawls HN enough to have it in their LLM.

I did chuckle at the 100% Rust Linux kernel. I like Rust, but that felt like a clever joke by the AI.
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-09 17:10:56+00:00
The amount of people it takes to maintain a server rack is minimal and low cost labor. Most of the money is spent on hardware and paying people to right software for that hardware.

Writing that software is becoming automated and it’s not hard to imagine that buying will as well. So you’re left with the equivalent of a plumber running your data center based on what automated systems flag as issues and other automated systems explain you the troubleshooting to go do. There might be a specialist they fly in for an insane rate (in the shorter term) if none of that works but we’re talking about a drastic reduction in workforce needed, and this is for the data center maintenance which not many companies have anymore since the cloud migration
by flexagoon | 2025-12-09 17:10:58+00:00
> Personally, I'd love a website that can provide all the ebooks oreilly provides. But it needs to work on a tablet.

Can't you just download pirated copies as a pdf or epub and read them on any device? It feels much more convenient than using a shitty DRM app, and if you have ethical concerns nothing's stopping you from still paying for a subscription while doing that.
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-09 17:11:13+00:00
The first problem with the nature of consciousness is describing what you mean by it. Try, and I guarantee you that someone will find a sponge, Apple product, or bathroom slipper that meets that definition.

Electro-magnetic radiation, on the other hands, is highly describable in precise, testable, repeatable terms.

When you can state Maxwell's Laws of Consciousness, we'll talk. And rename them "Grishka's".
by tracker1 | 2025-12-09 17:11:15+00:00
Can't +1 this enough... I've found that in practice, outside of images, menu pop/flyout and dialogs/trays, there really isn't too much need for additional aria attributes. Most component libraries should already be configured out of the box imo.

ARIA should only be needed relatively sparingly assuming you're using appropriate semantic elements. Testing with keyboard only navigation can reveal a lot as well.

Related, and one I experience a lot are issues on mobile devices with text/display cranked up... too many modal interactions with buttons off-screen.
by fastball | 2025-12-09 17:11:20+00:00
imo this is a hill people need to stop dying on. Open source means "I can see the source" to most of the world. Wishing it meant "very permissively licensed" to everyone is a lost cause.

And honestly it wasn't a good hill to begin with: if what you are talking about is the license, call it "open license". The source code is out in the open, so it is "open source". This is why the purists have lost ground to practical usage.
by GoatInGrey | 2025-12-09 17:12:01+00:00
It's been my experience that reaching for an LLM is a significant context switch that breaks flow state. Comparable to a monkey entering your office and banging cymbals together for a minute, returning to programming after writing up instructions for an LLM requires a refocusing process to reestablish the immersion you just forfeited. This can be a worthwhile trade with particularly tedious or annoying tasks, but not always.

I suspect that this explains the current bifurcation of LLM usage. Where individuals either use LLMs for everything or use them minimally. With the in-between space shrinking by the day.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-12-09 17:12:12+00:00
> This is especially damning when the long unskippable cutscene is during a boss fight or something which you might fail afterwards and cannot save.

Some games have started to get this right, either by making cutscenes you've seen skippable, or by just automatically skipping straight to the battle if you've already been through it once. I suspect one reason it didn't happen on older games was the need to explicitly save, rather than autosaving.
by itissid | 2025-12-09 17:12:17+00:00
I have always wondered if I should be recording all my conversations privately — with consent —with family and friends and then train an LLM to let anyone speak to someone that sounds "like me" when I am gone.

I suppose one could order all the data over time -— decades — and then train a model incrementally every decade and imitate me better at a point in time.

I suppose one could also narrate thoughts and feelings associated with many transcripts, which would be very tedious but would make the LLM imitate not just style but some amount of internal monologue.

I suppose one level further could be an LLM learning about the variety or parts of the ego, the I, me, mine, ours. Then the Observer and the Observed parts of thought — if we can somehow tap internal thought without manually speaking — because thoughts are, metaphorically speaking, the speed of light.

Why would one do all this? I suppose a curt answer would be to "live" eternally of course — with all the limitations of the current tech — but still try.

It might make a fascinating psychoanalysis project, one that might be a better shot at explaining someone's _self_ not as a we, a stranger, might as outwardly see it: just as a series of highs and lows and nothing in between, but instead as how they lived through it.
by adamc | 2025-12-09 17:12:32+00:00
Not a European, but this rings true for me in the US. I'll go out and get something, in part, because it is less lonely and feels more attached to life, to the world. Endless deliveries actually make that worse. I started buying more things locally in part because of that.

It's also one of the reasons I don't really like working from home.
by no_wizard | 2025-12-09 17:12:46+00:00
>the biggest pain there was that we were relying on a bunch of third parties to pack an order, and if any of them got something wrong we ended up with an unhappy customer on the phone and needing to deal with it.

Why not have drivers verify the order with the store? Like have the store folks walk through the pick ups. It might be slower up front, but it would save lots of time and money for everyone in the long run. One of those slow is smooth and smooth is fast situations. Alternatively, the drivers should have a book they could match pics to items perhaps

The other thing I wonder if it would be possible, would be to reduce revenue share for stores that routinely had issues with accuracy, but that means you'd need leverage, and you simply may not have it.
Show HN: Swift Bitcoin - Experimental full node and dev framework for Swift
by craigwrong | 2025-12-09 17:12:50+00:00
Been working on a pure swift bitcoin implementation for over 3 years. We recently reached the important milestone of achieving testnet synchronization and now we want to do the same for mainnet. Please send us some love in the form of GitHub stars if you love Swift or Bitcoin or just FOSS :)