MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RiverCrochet | 2025-12-29 20:48:42+00:00
Incorrect. Art is practice. It's literally what the word means historically. Put in "Etymology of the word 'art'" in your favorite search engine or LLM.

If someone is entering a prompt to generate an image in a model I have access to, I don't really need to pay them to do it, and definitely don't need to pay them as much to do it as I would an actual artist, so it is deceptive for them to represent themselves as someone who could actually draw or paint that. If the product is what counts then truth in advertising is required so the market can work.
by hyperhello | 2025-12-29 20:49:29+00:00
Look, the 90's Internet isn't cool anymore. Sorry. Things are cool for a while and then they're not.

Franchises die. It's still cool to say "The originals were really cool", and always will be, but now we're talking about now. Star Wars is uncool. There are people who sort of automatically praise it and subtly put down those who don't like they're aligned with a magnetic field, sure, but they're in their own world. Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters are uncool now. Star Trek is almost there. AI is not cool and never will be. Tiktok is cool, but soon everything that is uncool will descend upon it.

Sorry. Bananas blacken and apples get spots. Time moves on.

Downvoting isn't cool. Reply instead.
by deepsun | 2025-12-29 20:50:00+00:00
It happens often when "error" field is not a bool, but a string, aka error_message. Could be empty string, or _null_, or even _undefined_ if we're in JS.

Then the obvious question why do we need _succeeded_ at all, if we can always check for _error_. Sometimes it can be useful, when the server doesn't know itself if the operation is succeeded (e.g. an IO/database operation timed out), so it might be succeeded, but should also show an error message to user.

Another possibility if the succeeded is not a bool, but, say, "succeeded_at" timestamp. In general, I noticed that almost always any boolean value in database can be replaced with a timestamp or an error code.
by ericpauley | 2025-12-29 20:50:51+00:00
Every TCP proxy (that doesn't thwart this) is detectable :)

Countermeasure: pick some min-RTT >= the actual client RTT (you can do this as a TCP proxy by measuring client ping). Measure server RTT and artificially delay responses to be >= min-RTT. This will require an added delay during the handshake and ACKs, but no added delay for the response payloads.

Counter-countermeasure: the above may lead to TCP message types that don't make sense given a traditional TCP client state machine (e.g., delayed ACK would bundle ACK and PUSH but the system shows separate/simultaneous ACK and PUSH packets. Counter-counter-countermeasure is left to the reader.
by ajb | 2025-12-29 20:51:30+00:00
The flaw with the technology is that it is designed so you need the co-operation of your carrier, when previously you did not. Indeed, for the first versions moving a sim profile could not even be initiated independently by a user, but required them to contact support. Now there is the "device change" protocol which can be triggered by an app on the phone, but I think it still requires the co-operation of carrier servers.
by sanskritical | 2025-12-29 20:51:40+00:00
Yes, it is so bad that I will no longer buy a game for its Linux release. Almost every single Linux game I have outside of actual Valve titles no longer works. I don't want to hear that they have a Linux release. I want to hear that they have a Windows release that works with Proton. Windows is the only ABI that I can expect to reliably run on Linux.
by nospice | 2025-12-29 20:51:47+00:00
I don't even think this golden age actually exists today. Like, ask Google for the best product in some category - say, the best kitchen range - and it cites... a bunch of spammy "review" websites and a YouTube video.

If you're shopping around, an LLM you control can work for stuff like summarizing customer reviews or compiling a list of products with specific features (if you don't mind them being randomly wrong). But for general shopping advice / "plan my vacation" kind of queries, it's already firmly in the land of garbage-in-garbage-out.
by SXX | 2025-12-29 20:52:08+00:00
Yet those niche nolife hardcore fans is exactly what makes or breaks games. If 10,000 unhappy hardcore fans will go around pouring shit on your game and company then you likely never get 1,000,000 players who could've potentially liked it.

Nolife hardcore fans will also be the the first to buy your game, review it and tell everyone if they did not liked it.

CDPR got huge amount of trust after Witcher 3 and they mostly had to start over after CP2077 release.

EA can survive if 4/10 of their games flops completely, but company like CDPR will likely just end there.
by kiwijamo | 2025-12-29 20:52:27+00:00
I agree that seems to be the ideal balance. Retain the flexibility of being ablen to easily swap your home SIM, but also retain access to eSIMs as a option when travelling. I still use physical SIMs when travelling as it's still easy to get a physical SIM in many countries. Dubai I got offered a free SIM at immigration(!) and in Singapore there were cheap SIMs for sale post-Security. But I imagine that there will be other countries where eSIM may be a better option.
by viraptor | 2025-12-29 20:52:30+00:00
It's not something that suddenly changed. "I'll generate some code" is as nondeterministic as "I'll look for a library that does it", "I'll assign John to code this feature", or "I'll outsource this code to a consulting company". Even if you write yourself, you're pretty nondeterministic in your results - you're not going to write exactly the same code to solve a problem, even if you explicitly try.
Ask HN: Are AI agents overloading your back end APIs?
by Ugyen_Tech | 2025-12-29 20:53:01+00:00
AI agents behave very differently from human users. A single agent task can trigger 50+ cascading API calls, retry failures, and recurse based on results.

- Uncontrolled fan-out (one goal → 50 parallel requests)
- Legacy SOAP/XML responses eating 5000+ tokens
- No way to group agent requests into logical "goals"
- Rate limiters built for humans failing on agent bursts

Is this actually a problem you're facing? How common is this in production? or i'm not seeing this problem common because most of the AI agent still not in production and just in pilot or testing phase?
by simonw | 2025-12-29 20:53:06+00:00
I nodded furiously at this bit:

> The hard part of computer programming isn't expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking -- with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions -- into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a programming language.

> That was the hard part when programmers were punching holes in cards. It was the hard part when they were typing COBOL code. It was the hard part when they were bringing Visual Basic GUIs to life (presumably to track the killer's IP address). And it's the hard part when they're prompting language models to predict plausible-looking Python.

> The hard part has always been – and likely will continue to be for many years to come – knowing exactly what to ask for.

I don't agree with this:

> To folks who say this technology isn’t going anywhere, I would remind them of just how expensive these models are to build and what massive losses they’re incurring. Yes, you could carry on using your local instance of some small model distilled from a hyper-scale model trained today. But as the years roll by, you may find not being able to move on from the programming language and library versions it was trained on a tad constraining.

Some of the best Chinese models (which are genuinely competitive with the frontier models from OpenAI / Anthropic / Gemini) claim to have been trained for single-digit millions of dollars. I'm not at all worried that the bubble will burst and new models will stop being trained and the existing ones will lose their utility - I think what we have now is a permanent baseline for what will be available in the future.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-12-29 20:53:07+00:00
this plot twist happened years ago.

anyway, the main theory of better ad performance from generated ads isn't about, being weird or whatever. it's that few ads on social media are matching with intent to buy, i.e., they are the opposite of google search ads. so there's a much higher diversity of creatives. like, "saturation", like you see the ad so much, you are psychologically going to choose whatever product it is hawking when it finally comes time for you to buy a thing in the category it belongs to. generative ads are merely delivering ad creative development work that SMBs (40% of Meta's revenue) are too unsophisticated to use.
by trey-jones | 2025-12-29 20:53:23+00:00
Yes - we're in what I like to call the Socialist Phase of AI (user acquisition). We were once in this phase with Google. Eventually we'll move into the as-yet-unnamed-by-me phase that Google (and search in General, also the internet) have been in for quite some time, where they try and squeeze out all the money that they put in during the Socialist Phase.
by 0xC0ncord | 2025-12-29 20:53:30+00:00
About one of my favorite racing games of all time: "The game could have been removed for a number of reasons, including the closure of developer Bizarre Creations in early 2011, but the most likely cause was expired licensing of the real-world cars featured in the game."[1]

To me this is one of the most egregious examples of how licensing massively hurts consumers. The game is fully playable offline (and online with a patch) but cannot legally be sold because of an arbitrary restriction limiting the use of likeness of virtual cars in the game.

[1] https://delistedgames.com/blur/
by bisonbear | 2025-12-29 20:53:42+00:00
Yep! Honestly it was just a random rabbit hole - I recently read Lee Smolin's Time Reborn (highly recommend btw, super fascinating read) and was curious as to what his more recent work was about, which lead me to come across The Autodidactic Universe paper. With the AI hype train full steam ahead, the paper felt newly relevant, especially as it seems that we're starting to hit plateaus for model intelligence and looking to other areas (e.g. world models) for further advancement in the field
by soham_byte | 2025-12-29 20:53:46+00:00
On the nginx point — totally agree that nginx + multiple Node instances is a well-understood and effective setup. Titan isn’t trying to replace that pattern or compete with it directly.
The motivation is removing Node from production entirely and shipping a single native Rust binary with a constrained runtime surface. That also enables a true multi-threaded execution model at the server level, rather than relying on process-level scaling.
In environments where that matters — simpler deployment, embedded or edge use cases, tighter control over concurrency and memory — the trade-offs look different.
by raffraffraff | 2025-12-29 20:54:07+00:00
Yeah my point about aircon (and to an extent, big vehicles) is that we have the ability, to a degree, to avoid or work around the problems that climate change is throwing at us. I personally take individual action on climate but I don't think it's possible to make other people change their lifestyle so I don't even try. Do what you want to do people. I live my way because of my own conscience, that's all.
by dnw | 2025-12-29 20:54:12+00:00
I have been using Copilot, Cursor, then CC for a little more than a year now. I have written code with teams using these tools and I am writing mostly for myself now. My observations have been the following:

1) These tools obviously improved significantly over the past 12 months. They can churn out code that makes sense in the context of the codebase, meaning there is more grounding to the codebase they are working on as opposed to codebases they have been trained on.

2) On the surface they are pretty good at solving known problems. You are not going to make them write well-optimized renderer or an RL algorithm but they can write run-of-the-mill business logic better _and_ faster than I can-- if you optimize for both speed of production and quality.

3) Out of the box, their personality is to just solve the problem in front of them as quickly as possible and move on. This leads them to make suboptimal decisions (e.g. solving a deadlock by sleeping for 2 seconds, CC Opus 4.5 just last night). This personality can be altered with appropriate guidance. For example, a shortcut I use is to append "idiomatic" to my request-- "come up with an idiomatic solution" or "is that the most idiomatic solution we can think of." Similarly when writing tests or reviewing tests I use "intent of the function under test" which makes the model output better solution or code.

4) These models, esp. Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2, are remarkable bug hunters. I can point at a symptom and they come away with the bug. I then ask them to explain me why the bug happens and I follow the code to see if it's true. I have not come across a bad bug, yet. They can find deadlocks and starvations, you then have to guide them to a good fix (see #3).

5) Code quality is not sufficient to create product quality, but it is often necessary to sustain it. Sustainability window is shorter nowadays. Therefore, more than ever, quality of the code matters. I can see Claude Code slowly degrading in quality every single day--and I use it every single day for many hours. As much as it pains me to say this, compared to Opencode, Amp, and Toad I can feel the "slop" in Claude Code. I would love to study the codebases of these tools overtime to measure their quality--I know it's possible for all but Claude Code.

6) I used to worry I don't have a good mental model of the software I build. Much like journaling, I think there is something to be said about the process of writing/making actually gives you a very precise mental model. However, I have been trying to let that go and use the model as a tool to query and develop the mental model post facto. It's not the same but I think it is going to be the new norm. We need tooling in this space.

7) Despite your own experiences with these tools it is imperative that they be in your toolbox. If you have abstained from them thus far, perhaps best way to get them incorporated is to start to use them for attending to your toil.

8) You can still handcraft code. There is so much fun, beauty and pleasure it in to deny doing it. Don't expect this to be your job. This is your passion.
by solatic | 2025-12-29 20:54:19+00:00
> capacity constraints make it difficult to have significant competition

Thirty years ago, you would be correct. In the modern day, you could tie switch signalling to real-time auctions and let private rail's command centers decide how much to bid and thus whether or not they win the slot for putting their cars onto the shared rails. The public rail owner likely needs to set rules allowing passenger rail to pay a premium to secure slots in advance (say, a week) so that a timetable can be guaranteed to passengers during peak rush hour, but off-peak slots can and should be auctioned to naturally handle the difference between off-peak passenger rail and not-time-sensitive, more-cost-averse freight rail.
by einarfd | 2025-12-29 20:54:48+00:00
Colors and color names are culture dependent, and you are not guaranteed that people in different cultures agree on what color something is.

The most famous of these discrepancies is Japan and green vs blue, or why does Jenkins by default use red, yellow and blue instead of red, yellow and green.

So I would urge using something other than colors as an example of shared human experience.
by Verdex | 2025-12-29 20:54:53+00:00
My dad worked in the auto industry and they came across a defect in an engine control computer where they were able to give it something like 10 million to one odds of triggering.

They then turned the thing on, it ran for several seconds, encountered the error, and crashed.

Oh, that's right, the CPU can do millions of things a second.

Something I keep in the back of my mind when thinking about the odds in programming. You need to do extra leg work to make sure that you're measuring things in a way that's practical.
by lokar | 2025-12-29 20:55:04+00:00
Did you read the page? The context is very clear: a small business that had for years gotten a lot of its leads/customers from Adwords is seeing that Adwords ("Google" in context) is not working. They are then asking (other small businesses in the same situation, "where do we go now?").

There nothing about nostalgia, no real concern for Google as a company, or how the web used to work, etc. Just a small business trying to stay afloat.
by barishnamazov | 2025-12-29 20:55:05+00:00
And that's without a way to disable this without using a custom Link component. I noticed that with only 2 users (testing stage), my website had ~3-4k daily requests. After a bit of digging, I found out that every visible link on the webpage did two tiny server requests (totaling <5kb) -- one for metadata, and one for some javascript -- and it only happens on production, not locally.

This probably makes a lot of money for Vercel and Cloudflare.
by Arisaka1 | 2025-12-29 20:55:21+00:00
>Why?

Because I keep wondering myself if AI is here and our output is charged up, then why am I keep seeing more of the same products but with an "AI" sticker slapped on top of them? From a group of technologists like HN and the startup world, that live on the edge of evolution and revolution, maybe my expectations were a bit too high.

All I see is the equivalent of a "look how fast my new car made me go to the super market, when I'm not too demanding on the super market I want to end up with, and all I want is milk and eggs". Which is 100% fine, but at the end of the day I eat the same omelette as always. In this metaphor, I don't feel the slightest behind, or have any sense of FOMO if I cook my omelette slowly. I guess I have more time for my kids if I see the culinary arts as just a job. And it's not like restaurants suddenly get all their tables booked faster just because everyone cooks omelettes faster.

>It's allowed me to do things that I simply would not have been able to do previously.

You're not the one doing them. Me barking orders to John Carmack himself doesn't make me a Quake co-creator, and even if I micromanage his output like the world's most toxic micromanager who knows better I'm still not Carmack.

On top of that, you would have been able to do previously, if you cared enough to upskill to the point where token feeding isn't needed for you to feel productive. Tons of programmers broke barriers, and solved problems that haven't been solved by anyone in their companies before.

I don't see why everyone claiming that they previously couldn't do something is a bragging point. The LLM's that you're using were trained by the Google results you could've gotten if you Google searched.
by nacozarina | 2025-12-29 20:55:26+00:00
they won't be in a separate panel you can ignore, either

the product promotion text will be integrated into the responses

'your prompt is insightful and refreshing. reminds me of the refreshing taste of organic coconut-cinnamon water. here's a QR code coupon for $1 off a 48-ct pack you can use at your local HoleFoods.'
by hawtads | 2025-12-29 20:55:30+00:00
Google ads are the cheapest yes, but depending on your audience they may not be looking on Google now.

For ChatGPT (and similar) you need to have a strong FAQ page and lots of content marketing to increase the likelihood of being the suggested answer when a user asks ChatGPT a relevant question (it's a highly probabilistic system, look up AEO/GEO).

CloudFlare for example offers an option to block AI scraping bots by default. If you are in the services business, this is the opposite of what you want because having AI crawlers scrape your site would drive traffic down the road when users ask a related question.
by xp84 | 2025-12-29 20:55:46+00:00
> every consumer facing software product I’ve worked on has tracked things like startup time and latency for common operations as a key metric

Must be nice. In my career, all working on webapps, I've seen a few leaders popping in to ask us to fix a particularly egregious performance issue if the right customers complain, but aside from those finely-targeted and limited-attention-span drives to "improve performance" it seems the answer for the past decade or so is just to assume everyone is on at least a gigabit connection, stick fingers in ears, and just keep adding more node modules. If the developers' disks get full because node_modules got too big, buy a bigger SSD and keep going. (ok that last part is slight hyperbole but I also don't think frontend devs would be deterred from their ravenous appetite for libraries by a full disk).
by andy99 | 2025-12-29 20:55:55+00:00
This is actually the most legit thing I can think of that could be behind an ad. It looks like an actual small business that is using ads as a replacement for the yellow pages, presumably when people are searching for party entertainment. I had assumed that basically all online ads were just straight up scams.

That said, I don’t ever want to see ads for it either. If I lived in Durban and wanted a juggling act, I’d like to be able to find it, as I’m sure all their clients would. I wonder if the market is just very competitive, or if they don’t show up on regululat searches for some reason.
by soham_byte | 2025-12-29 20:56:06+00:00
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback — this is helpful.
To clarify, Titan isn’t meant to be a drop-in replacement for Node or a V8 competitor. The primary goal is a JavaScript-first developer experience that compiles into a single native Rust binary, removing Node.js from production while keeping a familiar authoring model.
You’re absolutely right that Boa is slower than V8. At the moment, Boa is used during development and as the embedded JS runtime, but the core value proposition is not raw JS engine speed. The focus is on deployment simplicity, portability, and tighter control over the runtime surface. In production, the output is a single Rust binary (no Node.js dependency), and a production-ready Dockerfile is already available.
Performance parity is important, and benchmarks are on the roadmap, but the initial emphasis is on reducing operational complexity rather than outperforming Node in every scenario.
I’ve been updating the documentation to make this positioning clearer — including recent production and Docker updates. For anyone interested, the latest docs are here: https://titan-docs-ez.vercel.app/docs
Appreciate the pushback — it’s useful for refining both the project and the messaging.
by api | 2025-12-29 20:56:12+00:00
"AI art" today is mostly play, which is usually the first thing you get with new artistic tools. People just fool around with them in an un-serious way. There's also some porn. Porn is always early. It was one of the first uses for moving pictures, for example.

"The early adopters of new technologies are usually porn and the military." Forget where I heard that but it's largely true.
by Sakura-sx | 2025-12-29 20:56:20+00:00
I think you could also compare with TLS handshake timings, delay for client hello among other things. And you could also compare it with HTTP RTT, not to mention that you can do TCP fingerprinting and compare it with the TLS and HTTP fingerprint of the browser, you can also measure the IP TTL and ping, among many other things... What I mean is that there are a ton of things that can be done on both sides, but any company with enough people working at this and enough servers will surely make something miles away from my proof of concept, and they also have a lot of traffic to know what's baseline data and what isn't.

It's a complex but fun world we live in hehe