MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freedomben | 2025-12-12 20:47:45+00:00
IMHO you should be able to enjoy your books however you want. If you want to run a local AI against it, more power to you.

But my opinion doesn't matter. Only Amazon's does. That's the point I was making. The premise of "my device, my content" is flawed (because of the DRM Amazon uses) and undermines the argument.
Early-stage growth ideas for a new product-discovery app?
by bazenda | 2025-12-12 20:47:51+00:00
Hey HN,

I recently launched Bazenda, a simple product-discovery app that lets users search and browse items from multiple US brands in one place. It’s not a store — just an easier way to explore and compare products.

Now I’m facing the early-stage challenge: How do you drive consistent growth when you don’t have a budget, a big audience, or existing distribution?

So I’d love to ask the community:

What growth loops worked for you in the early days?

Are there acquisition channels that actually scale from zero?

What would you focus on first: SEO, socials, referrals, niche communities, or something else entirely?

Any examples of products that grew from almost no initial audience?

Trying to avoid chasing random traffic spikes and instead build something steady.

Open to all suggestions — thanks in advance.

Link: https://bazenda.com
by whstl | 2025-12-12 20:48:15+00:00
That's how Game consoles operated, so there was definitely precedent.

But it took until 93-94 for Windows to actually become dominant enough to have such leverage, some argue that this only really happened with Windows 95. Since it was an open ecosystem for almost a decade at that point, changing was hard.

The Apple AppStore was different, it was launched after the iPhone shipped 13 million units and "only allowed web apps".
by lm28469 | 2025-12-12 20:48:31+00:00
You don't mind having an llm owned by a megacorp lecturing you about the meaning of a book ?

"Yes this is a good question about 1984 by George Orwell, you could indeed be tempted to compare the events of this book with current authoritarianism and surveillance but I can assure you this book is a pure work of fiction and at best can only be compared to evil states such as China and Russia, rest assured that as a US citizen you are Free"
by sailingparrot | 2025-12-12 20:48:42+00:00
Yes, very few new NPP have been built in Europe recently. Quite a few have been built by Europe however. The french company Framatome alone, with 18k employees, is actively building 2 EPR reactors in the UK (+ preliminary studies for 8 more), one reactor has been finished last year in France and recently multiple were built or being built in China, India, Russia (although I guess that might be canceled).

Its also already operating the 57 french reactors as well as operating reactors in South Africa, China, Korea, Belgium, Finland.

Sure, the industry will need to grow, but claiming it basically has to start from 0 is ludicrous.
by AngryData | 2025-12-12 20:48:42+00:00
Maybe because everyone knows violent uprising should be a last resort and things aren't bad enough to condemn millions to stravation and death yet.

Unless you are saying you personally would join a US uprising, asking why armed people haven't yet started one yet themselves isn't a compelling arguement to disarm them. If people were shooting back I think you and most others would be condemning them.
by sunrunner | 2025-12-12 20:48:51+00:00
This is a really good point and a common error in bit flip detection code. To avoid this kind of look-before-you-leap hazard the following is recommended:

try { do_action() } catch (BitFlipError e) { logger.critical("Shouldn't get here") }

Ask-for-forgiveness as an error detection pattern avoids these kinds of errors entirely.
by tshaddox | 2025-12-12 20:48:59+00:00
> It's not training on books, but it will answer questions about the book you're reading. Doesn't pass the sniff test.

What do you mean? Presumably the implication is that it will essentially read the book (or search through it) in order to answer questions about it. An LLM can of course summarize text that's not in its training set.
by acdha | 2025-12-12 20:49:24+00:00
That’s a vague hypothetical so I can’t answer it but in this case I saw a number examples of people asking questions which were obviously based on known falsehoods or presupposed answers for ideological reasons, so it wasn’t surprising that they encountered forum policies for acting in bad faith. I saw many people acting in good faith who had no negative consequences for exploring questions like this, too, so it’s really doesn’t seem like there was a problem here and the people who lied about why they suffered consequences only had their speech suppressed to the extent that they had to go somewhere else so the consequences were minimal.
by viccis | 2025-12-12 20:49:50+00:00
This reminds me of other 20th century atrocity denial I read online. There is adequate evidence of the Truman bombing attempt.

Regarding Lehi and Irgun, they were small because terrorist cells usually are. They operated with the permission of the government (evidence by the government ultimately demonstrating this when it dissolved them and incorporated many of them into itself), and involved people celebrated today in Israel for their terrorism, including future PMs of Israel. It is entirely accurate to say that the terrorist organizations Irgun and Lehi represent the nature and spirit of the Israeli people today in a pure and honest form. And I doubt many over there would disagree with you, as long as you're speaking Hebrew lol
by nickpsecurity | 2025-12-12 20:49:53+00:00
They mostly imitate patterns in the training material. They do it in response to what gets the reward up for RL training. There's probably lots of examples of both lying and confessions in the training data. So, it should surprise nobody that next, sentence machines fill in a lie or confession in situations similar to ghe training data.

I don't consider that very intelligent or more emergent than other behaviors. Now, if nothing like that was in training data (pure honesty with no confessions), it would be very interesting if it replied with lies and confessions. Because it wasn't pretrained to lie or confess like the above model likely was.
by popalchemist | 2025-12-12 20:50:12+00:00
I'm neck deep in philosophy, yes, but I can already tell you I have a fundamental disagreement that is likely to only frustrate both of us if we talk. You conceive of consciousness and/or self-awareness in a completely ungrounded way, to my eye.

However I do know of a user on huggingface whose work you may enjoy. Here you go:

https://huggingface.co/blog/kanaria007/structured-relationsh...
by solarengineer | 2025-12-12 20:50:23+00:00
Per the International Energy Association: What is the role of nuclear power in clean energy transitions? Nuclear power accounts for about 10% of electricity generation globally, rising to almost 20% in advanced economies. It has historically been one of the largest global contributors of carbon-free electricity and while it faces challenges in some countries, it has significant potential to contribute to power sector decarbonisation.

Why does it matter to energy security? Nuclear power plants contribute to electricity security in multiple ways by keeping power grids stable and complementing decarbonisation strategies since, to a certain extent, they can adjust their output to accompany shifts in demand and supply. As the share of variable renewables like wind and solar photovoltaics (PV) rises, the need for such services will increase.

What are the challenges? Nuclear power faces a contrasted future despite its ability to produce emissions-free power. With large up-front costs, long lead times and an often-poor record of on-time delivery, nuclear power projects have trouble in some jurisdictions competing against faster-to-install alternatives, such as natural gas or modern renewables. It also faces public opposition in many countries. Its uncertain future could result in billions of tonnes of additional carbon emissions.

https://www.iea.org/energy-system/electricity/nuclear-power

Do note: There are countries other than the US and France who license nuclear technologies and build-outs. There are innovative technologies by US companies that work with modern regulations and are faster and less expensive to build. We must stop citing US nuclear build times that are largely due to outdated regulations and hostile review processes.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-12 20:50:24+00:00
I agree with you, but this font is less notable for its glyph design than for the fact that you can obtain many variations of it by choosing suitable parameter values (hence the "Flex" name).

This is a feature that few, if any, open source typefaces possess.

Being open source, the same techniques can be reused in the design of another parametrized font, with less ambiguous glyphs.
by bwblabs | 2025-12-12 20:50:32+00:00
It falls into the category that most people think they understand DNS, the same as JavaScript, or e.g. elections, but the devil is in the detail. And I can tell you, at least for DNS (and Dutch Elections), it's kind of tricky, see fun cases like https://github.com/internetstandards/Internet.nl/issues/1370 and I thought the same before I had my current job which involves quite some tricky DNS stuff (and regarding this we also sometimes encounter bugs in unbound https://github.com/internetstandards/Internet.nl/issues/1803 )

But maybe DNSSEC is the 'unnecessary complexity' for you (I think it's kind of fundamental to secure DNS). Also without DNSSEC they needed RFC's like https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8020 to clarify fundamentals (same goes for https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8482 to fix stuff).
by ami3466 | 2025-12-12 20:50:56+00:00
The simplicity is a feature. I avoided headless Chrome because standard fetch tools (and raw DOM dumps) pollute the context with navbars and scripts, wasting tokens. This parser converts to clean Markdown for maximum density.

Also, by treating this as an MCP Resource rather than a Tool, the docs are pinned permanently instead of relying on the model to "decide" to fetch them.

Cloudflare Workers handle this perfectly for free (100k reqs/day) without the overhead of managing a dockerized browser instance.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-12-12 20:51:34+00:00
> the hate [age verification] gets

Age verification actually gets almost no hate. Society-wide surveillance gets a lot; age verification just happens to be the "think of the children" excuse to shoe-horn in the society-wide surveillance. As OP described, if the age verification is implemented as a "zero-knowledge proof" then we have age verification without society-wide surveillance and nobody is complaining.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof
by dekhn | 2025-12-12 20:51:34+00:00
Yes, I took an existing vision model that could run at realtime on my laptop, and fine-tuned it with a few hundred manually labelled images of tardigrades.

I don't like the openflexure design at all. I mean... obviously it works for a lot of people, but I just don't want a flexure based stage. I like real 2-axis stages based on rolling bearings, basically cloning the X and Y parts of this: https://www.asiimaging.com/products/stages/xy-inverted-stage...

UC2 is another cool project: https://openuc2.com/ but I found their approach constraining.

Frankly I think you could just buy an inexpensive 3D printer that had an open firmware, and replace the extruder with an objective, a tube, and a camera, and you'd have something up and running cheaper for less time.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-12 20:51:44+00:00
If you want proper answers, yes. If you want to rely on whatever reddit or tiktok says about the book, then I guess at that point you're fine with hallucinations and others doing the thinking for you anyway. Hence the issues brought up in the article.

I wouldn't trust an LLM for anything more than the most basic questions of it didn't actually have text to cite.
by Gimpei | 2025-12-12 20:52:00+00:00
Couldn’t agree more. This is actually a super useful feature. I can’t think of how many times I’ve been reading a book and some minor character resurfaces and I’m like, who the hell is that guy? Now I can know. I can also get information on historical context. Who knows, maybe I can finally read Ulysses without having to have 5 other books.
by popalchemist | 2025-12-12 20:52:20+00:00
I afford that "autonomy" (in the sense of a sponptaneous emergence of phenomena, not in the sense of having agency); nevertheless, thousands of years of culture going one way here and another way there lend themselves to pre-built apparati of perception. See other comments in this thread for a more articulated explanation of what I mean; I don't have the time to re-express it here.
by DarkNova6 | 2025-12-12 20:52:44+00:00
You are naturally correct and I have corrected my statement. I intended to refer to the West but my wording was factually incorrect.

China has invested so much for so long into nuclear technology that they now have the industry which Europe once had. And to rebuild the same type of industry would take the same amount of effort that China had to do. Meanwhile, the US can't even build their own warships anymore.
by brewtide | 2025-12-12 20:52:52+00:00
I bought a water heater that had a large (1k!) instant rebate that you had to scan, sign up on website and show the emailed coupon to the person during cashing out. Took me 25 minutes wandering around the store to get enough reception to actually do this process. Made me chuckle, thinking how having it online only but before point of sale in the store was such a terrible, terrible idea.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-12 20:53:10+00:00
In the case of a novel, or even certain text books, the author relies on the reader not jumping ahead. Especially murder mysteries and those kind of genres. There are artistic reasons for that, and it can wreck the work.

In my experience, AI summaries often miss points or misrepresent work. There is a human element to reading a well written novel. An AI will miss some of the subtleties and references.
by moffkalast | 2025-12-12 20:53:11+00:00
How can there be security issues with a public document? Can't you just sign it with a cert like any other piece of data that needs a proven source?

But also let me get this straight, there is an actual EU standard for invoices? Why the does nobody follow this and I have to keep asking people to put the fucking VAT ID onto it like I'm a broken record?
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-12-12 20:53:34+00:00
Neat https://docs.gitea.com/administration/config-cheat-sheet#ser...

> Enable this to force users to log in to view any page or to use API. It could be set to "expensive" to block anonymous users accessing some pages which consume a lot of resources, for example: block anonymous AI crawlers from accessing repo code pages. The "expensive" mode is experimental and subject to change.

Forgejo doesn't seem to have copied that feature yet
by akersten | 2025-12-12 20:53:48+00:00
> Is the "clerk" scanning the books an digitizing them to generate other products using an LLM under the guise of "Answering Questions?" I believe this is the question being asked.

That's what I mean by presumptuous. If that's really what they want the answer to, and what they object to, they should ask it plainly instead of alluding to it by asserting that there's some requisite but missing entitlement for the feature to exist on its face.
by rimunroe | 2025-12-12 20:54:33+00:00
> I can understand how someone under, say, 30, might not know how commerce happened before the Internet.

I remember those days, but I think most people would call something where you viewed a list of products and then called or mailed to order and received the product elsewhere a catalog, not a store. As for over-the-phone payments, I forgot about that method for a moment but don't think it meaningfully affects my argument. It's just as out-of-band as the mail order example I included.
by Rebelgecko | 2025-12-12 20:54:41+00:00
1. The user doesn't own the book, the user has a revocable license to the book. Amazon has no qualms about taking away books that people have bought

2. I doubt the Kindle version of the LLM will run locally. Is Amazon repurposing the author-provided files, or will the users' device upload the text of the book?
by FieryMechanic | 2025-12-12 20:54:44+00:00
Rewriting stuff is largly a waste of time unless the underlying design/product is flawed. You are going to have to solve the same challenges as before but this time in Rust.

Anyone that been on a "rewrite" knows that often the end result will look like the previous implementation but in <new thing>.

So what I see is a lot of development effort to re-solve problems that have already been solved. I think Ubuntu did this with the core-utils recently (I don't keep up with the Linux dramas as there is a new one every week and tbh it isn't interesting a lot of the time). They ended up causing bunch of issues that I believe were already fixed years ago.

There are issues with things in Linux land that have been issues for years and haven't been resolved and I feel that development effort would have probably been better spent there. I don't pay canonical employees though, so I guess I don't get to decide.
by rockostrich | 2025-12-12 20:54:47+00:00
McMaster-Carr's website is actually pretty impressive given how unassuming it is. It does a ton of pre-loading on hover and caching to make it feel like you're just navigating a static site. I didn't even realize that the page had a loading state until I enabled throttling from my network tab and immediately clicked on a link as soon as I hovered over it.
by mschwaig | 2025-12-12 20:54:56+00:00
I would blame how Austria, a very small country, is organized into 9 provinces that actually have their own budget and can pass their own laws on some topics.

Rail service is funded at the federal level, so there's less arguing about who pays for what. Bus service, however, is managed by regional transport associations funded by the provinces. This creates disincentives for cross-province bus routes because no single province wants to pay more than its 'fair' share for a service that primarily benefits voters in another province.

Similar dynamics play out at the city/province level. Take Linz, the provincial capital of Upper Austria: the city has had a social democratic (SPÖ) mayor continuously since 1945, while the province has had a conservative (ÖVP) governor for exactly the same period of 80 years. This disincentivizes the province government from helping to fund public transport within or into the city, because it's a win for social democratic city voters, while the more conservative rural voters would rather take the car anyway since they often can't do the whole trip by public transport.

Arguably the reason for the excellent public transport in the city of Vienna is that they are also their own province. Their mayor/governor, who has been a social democrat as well for the last 80 years, always controls both levels of funding.
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-12 20:56:03+00:00
> I used to have to read fan wikis to figure this out.

I would much rather read a fan wiki than hope a LLM correctly understood a book's plot, at least with the current state-of-the-art of things.

Case in point: Amazon's own AI gets significant details of its own prestige TV show wrong:

https://gizmodo.com/fallout-ai-recap-prime-video-amazon-2000...

The Fallout fan wiki probably at least knows the Great War was in 2077.
by wholinator2 | 2025-12-12 20:56:03+00:00
Very interesting how nearly half the list is (assumedly) every single chemical listed under California Prop 65. Do they really need to specify exactly which chemical it is? I've seen thousands of prop 65 warnings in my life but I've literally never seen it tell me what chemical its warning me about. I just commented to a friends a couple weeks ago i wished they'd tell me what so i could look it up myself!
by terafo | 2025-12-12 20:56:05+00:00
There are LLM's that can process 1 million token context window. Amazon Nova 2 for one, even though it's definitely not the highest quality model. You just put whole book in context and make LLM answer questions about it. And given the fact that domain is pretty limited, you can just store KV cache for most popular books on SSD, eliminating quite a bit of cost.
by torginus | 2025-12-12 20:56:24+00:00
They did not, but since the parent comment alluded to there being financial trouble, I was just pointing out one of the most egregious examples of mismanagement in recent memory.

Unfortunately, the AAA industry is not in a good spot right now, I remember there being an article that there was not a single AAA game at some point in the Steam Best Sellers list.

id and Bethesda isn't doing quite so badly, but their most recent games have been meh.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-12-12 20:56:28+00:00
Lot's of assumptions about humanity and how unique we are constantly get paraded in this conversation. Ironically, the people who tout those perspectives are the least likely to understand why we're really not all that "special" from a very factual and academic perspective.

You'd think it would unlock certain concepts for this class of people, but ironically, they seem unable to digest the information and update their context.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-12 20:56:36+00:00
I also prefer JetBrains Mono, after using a very large number of other programming typefaces in the past.

While there are a few other programming fonts with a very similar quality, for myself JetBrains Mono has a distinctive advantage: it includes a much greater character set than any other good programming font that I have ever tested (DejaVu Sans Mono also has a big character set, but it is definitely uglier), for instance it has a lot of mathematical symbols that I need.
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-12 20:56:44+00:00
The nice thing about regulatory bucketing by market share is that it's harder to evade.

We've seen the legal gymnastics around market definition for monopoly purposes.

But it's harder for Google to make the case that it doesn't own at least a big chunk of {mobile OS} or {mobile app store} market share.

They can argue +/- a few percent over methods, but "We don't have a substantial market share" won't fly.
by tekacs | 2025-12-12 20:56:46+00:00
I really hope that Japanese developers take advantage of this situation to show off at least some of the creativity that's possible when we're not quite as limited by Apple's restrictions. I don't doubt that from a 'security' point of view, Apple is going to continue to enforce all sorts of things that make it wildly more difficult to use the supercomputer in our pockets than I would like. But nonetheless, perhaps this gives a bit of room to be a little more illustrative.

I know that from time to time people have argued that jailbreaking should have resulted in more creativity if it were going to, but with that tiny, tiny market, it's hard to believe that many developers, relatively speaking, would have been able to go hard at building something custom and impressive. With this larger market, hopefully folks will get the chance to do that now.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-12-12 20:57:05+00:00
Mining asteroids makes no sense whatsoever with any currently imaginable practical tech, especially not economically. The numbers for even the most basic solutions just don't work, and anything cleverer - like adding thrusters to chunks of metal and firing them at the Earth - has one or two rather obvious issues.

The Moon is interesting because it's there, it's fairly close, it's a test bed for off-world construction, manufacturing, and life support, and there are experiments you can do on the dark side that aren't possible elsewhere.

Especially big telescopes.

It has many of the same life support issues as Mars, and any Moon solutions are likely to work on Mars and the asteroids, more quickly and successfully than trying to do the same R&D far, far away.

Will it pay for itself? Not for a long, long time. But frontier projects rarely do.

The benefit comes from the investment, the R&D, the new science and engineering, and the jobs created.

It's also handy if you need a remote off-site backup.