MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by qrios | 2025-12-09 16:17:24+00:00
"low hanging" is relative. At least from my perspective. A significant part of my work involves cleaning up structured and unstructured data.

An example: More than ten years ago a friend of mine was fascinated by the german edition of the book "A Cultural History of Physics" by Károly Simonyi. He scanned the book (600+ pages) and created a PDF (nearly) same layout.

Against my advice he used Adobe tools for it instead of creating an epub or something like DocBook.

The PDF looks great, but the text inside is impossible to use as training data for a small LLM. The lines from the two columns are mixed and a lot of spaces are randomly placed (makes it particularly difficult because mathematical formulas often appear in the text itself).

After many attempts (with RegEx and LLMs), I gave up and rendered each page and had a large LLM extract the text.
by stocksinsmocks | 2025-12-09 16:17:35+00:00
Which is the better value:

Hundreds of tests that were written basically for free in a few minutes even though a lot of them are kind of dumb?

Or hundreds of tests that were written for a five figure sum that took weeks or months, and only some of them are kind of dumb?

If you’re just thinking of code as the end in and of itself, then of course, the handcrafted artisanal product is better. If you think of code like an owner, an incidental expense towards solving a problem that has value, then cheap and disposable wins every time. We can throw our hands up about “quality“ and all that, but that baby was thrown out with the bathwater a very, very long time ago. The modern Web is slower than the older web. Desktop applications are just web browsers. Enterprise software barely works. Windows 11 happened. I don’t think anybody even bothers to scrutinize their dependency chains except for, I don’t know, like maybe missile guidance or something. And I just want to say Claude is not responsible for any of this. You humans are.
Show HN: AutEng Docs – Google Docs x Gist x LLM chat
by llabs | 2025-12-09 16:17:52+00:00
Think of it as a cross between Google Docs, Gist and LLM chat (with tools).

What it does today: Editor for GitHub-flavoured Markdown + Mermaid + KaTeX in one place Live preview as you type LLM Chat enables: Drafting an architecture doc from a short description Generate or update Mermaid diagrams from text Refining a document Change Tracking (visual or diff) Public share links Integrations (needs tidy up/fixing) ImageGen - hooked up to flux.1, gen image store in s3 GithubMCP - needs fixing (too many tools/ no private repo support) Web Search/Fetch

How I got here (14M later): It started out as a development platform with vscode plugin and support for a frontend for docs/design with realtime comms between the two. Decided this was a losing battle as a side gig against cline / cursor etc . This still exists, just isn't exposed and is what I've used to develop AutEng - it's very specialised to my workflow (documents for arch -> phased plan -> progress log). I switched to Goal Driven Agent, where the LLM generates a json-schema digraph to meet the goal. This was difficult (it works, just not very well), but I still have a workflow automation I can use down the line (e.g. auto create docs from github). Third and hopefully final pivot to Docs, I was struggling sharing DS conversations and ML architecture proposals I'd had with various LLM's and realised AutEng was capable of this.

What’s next

Kind of depends how things go. Directions I'm thinking: Proper Github integration / autogen doc from repo Shared realtime editing (Google docs style) Support for more niche rendering e.g. chemistry, biology

Check out where I am (LLM Chat needs signup, but still free for a try): https://auteng.ai (loads straight into the editor, no login). Example architecture doc: https://auteng.ai/docs/software/architecture/architecture-do... Example math/physics doc: https://auteng.ai/docs/physics/general/physics-equations-dia...

Feedback would be very much appreciated, particularly:

What would this need to be useful to you? For math/physics folks: is this usable for real derivations/problem sets, or what’s missing? For the autogen docs and keep them up-to-date, how would you want that to work (e.g. PR to github/gitlab repo)

Happy to answer anything about the journey, product, roadmap etc.
by 9rx | 2025-12-09 16:17:55+00:00
> I like your analysis but it seems to imply that at one point we can produce near-infinite amount of software and that this will be welcome.

It implies that there will be no need to share libraries (which is said including things like networked SaaS services). You can have your legions of machine developers create all the code you need.

Let's face it, sharing code sucks for a long list of reasons. We accept it because it is a significantly better value proposition than putting human labor into duplicating efforts, but if that effort diminishes to almost nothing, things start to change in a lot of cases. There are still obvious exceptions, of course. You probably couldn't throw your machine developers at building a Stripe clone. It's far more about human relationships than code. But bingo card creator?

It says nothing about creating software nobody wants or needs.
by syockit | 2025-12-09 16:18:01+00:00
You can add the guideline, but then people would skip the "I asked" part and post the answer straight away. Apart from the obvious LLMesque structure of most of those bot answers, how could you tell if one has crafted the answer so much that it looks like a genuine human answer?

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/810/
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-09 16:18:02+00:00
Being an engineer and being contextually intelligent are not mutually exclusive. Understanding context is necessary for being an effective lead engineer, for instance. Without sufficient context, you cannot make effective technical decisions.

The purpose of a technology is not inherent to the technology itself, but externally determined, and without knowing context, you cannot know the purpose, and if you don't know the purpose, you won't know which way to go, and without knowing the terrain you have to navigate, you won't know how to get to your destination or how to prioritize your work. Strategy and tactics become impossible.
by williamstein | 2025-12-09 16:18:15+00:00
Their new CLI agent tool [1] is written in Python unlike similar agents from Anthropic/Google (Typescript/Bun) and OpenAI (Rust). It also appears to have first class ACP support, where ACP is the new protocol from Zed [2].

[1] https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-vibe

[2] https://zed.dev/acp
by mohsen1 | 2025-12-09 16:18:34+00:00
I am an American citizen living in Europe. There are grocery stores here generating billions too. They have to advertise the price including taxes. That alone is a huge advantage for the shopper that regulations enforce it.

If you're on the lower income side and have limited money to buy your groceries you don't have to guess the total price of your basket. Prices are WYSIWYG.

I didn't think things are bad in the US until I lived here in Europe for some time to realize.

Dollar General situation is bad and in a fairer system they would still make billions. Don't assume regulations that protects people automatically means bad business
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-09 16:18:44+00:00
One idea: Buy one of these (https://www.harborfreight.com/150-lb-capacity-foldable-hand-...) and turn it into this (https://images.turnto.com/media/t7kuhATX6jW2ChSsite/5A481415...). If you want to keep it foldable, instead of an axle going all the way through, use either a long bolt or threaded rod, with nuts and lock washers, to attach a smaller pneumatic wheel to each side (threaded rod goes through plastic enclosure, nuts/lock washers keep it locked on either side of plastic housing, wheel fixed on outside with bushings or cotter pin)

Or you could strap your bag to a kayak cart (https://www.amazon.com/Kayak-Cart-Capacity-Foldable-Watercra...)
by craftkiller | 2025-12-09 16:19:04+00:00
> it’s always easier to make an engine than a game.

It could just be different interests. The kind of person who makes a game engine is a technical optimization-focused tech-focused person, sort of like a mechanic. In order to make a game, you have to deal with softer concepts like "is this fun" which is more like a designer/artist. Game studios need to bring these people together, but in the FOSS world the mechanics are happy to spend their time building an engine that runs beautifully without concerning themselves with the art side of things.
by saubeidl | 2025-12-09 16:19:07+00:00
This trope is tiring.

* We're leading the world in fusion research. https://www.pppl.gov/news/2025/wendelstein-7-x-sets-new-perf...

* Our satellites are giving us by far the best understanding of our universe, capturing one third of the visible sky in incredible detail - just check out this mission update video if you want your mind blown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXCBFlIpvfQ

* Not only that, the Copernicus mission is the world's leading source for open data geoobservation: https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/

* We've given the world mRNA vaccines to solve the Covid crisis and GLP-1 antagonists to solve the obesity crisis.

* CERN and is figuring out questions about the fundamental nature of the universe, with the LHC being by far the largest particle accelerator in the world, an engineering precision feat that couldn't have been accomplished anywhere else.

Innovation isn't just about the latest tech fad. It's about fundamental research on how our universe works. Everyone else is downstream of us.
by swiftcoder | 2025-12-09 16:19:31+00:00
> Color coding... is just an extra differentiator for GUI elements which are already differentiated by icon shape and text labels.

In principle, I agree, but I do not believe I have ever used a software package that follows this philosophy. In practice, once you give people a tool, they are inclined to use it, and most projects only try and address accessibility concerns post-ship
by ben_w | 2025-12-09 16:19:47+00:00
Depends on the context.

I find myself downvoting (flagging) them when I see them as submissions, and I can't think of any examples where they were good submission content; but for comments? There's enough discussion where the AI is the subject itself and therefore it's genuinely relevant what the AI says.

Then there's stuff like this, which I'd not seen myself before seeing your question, but I'd say asking people here if an AI-generated TLDR of 74 (75?) page PDF is correct, is a perfectly valid and sensible use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164360
by ethagnawl | 2025-12-09 16:19:55+00:00
I haven't seriously tried playing it again since it came out but it didn't appeal to me either and my friends all thought I'd lost it. I also remember the clerk at Electronics Boutique being gobsmacked when I wanted to return it.

I do generally find stealthiness to be engaging and great fun _as a component of game play_ but as the main draw and, especially, from the jump I just found it to be frustrating and annoying. Maybe I'd feel different these days, though. I'll try it again some day.
by Daneel_ | 2025-12-09 16:19:58+00:00
Given that the user will typically have their watch on them as well, why not make the ring a battery-less BLE transmitter that triggers voice input on the watch? It’s still one-handed operation, but now the battery life is infinite since there’s no battery? The disposable ring seems like a solution in search of a problem to me, unfortunately.

Example button: https://core-electronics.com.au/self-powered-wireless-switch...

I imagine the reason is reliability, but USD$99 plus international shipping every two years isn’t worth that to me, sorry.

Aside: I loved my kickstarter pebble and my steel, btw!
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-09 16:20:13+00:00
https://archive.today/Yz45e

Related:

Wood banks in Maine are increasing and so is the need for heat - https://www.bangordailynews.com/2025/11/21/hancock/increased... - November 21st, 2025

Residential Heating Fuel Sources in Maine - https://www.maine.gov/energy/sites/maine.gov.energy/files/in... - October 2024

Alliance for Green Heat: Funding for Firewood Banks - https://www.firewoodbanks.org/

Maine Wood Banks Network - https://woodbanks.org/explore-our-network

National Wood Bank Project - https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/woodbanks/
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-09 16:20:26+00:00
> China has been steadily moving towards being an actual competitor to the US

China is in this position because of regulations (and technological enforcement of them like GFW), which prevented US tech from taking any significant foothold and left the market available for local competition.

> enormous legal burden on any prospective competitor that failure is guaranteed

Can you tell me which business can't work in the EU? Selling software is legal. Operating a SaaS is legal. Hell, even industrial-scale spyware is legal, as long as you become big quickly enough so that enforcing the GDPR against you becomes counterproductive. The only thing I see that can't be done is industrial-scale corporation-on-consumer fraud, but I don't think we're losing much because of that.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-12-09 16:20:29+00:00
"Banks are full of war stories trying to migrate off their old mainframe codebases, and often giving up."

Most of the time it's a question of trying to apply "death by a thousand cuts" to their codebase, which works well enough as long as you're in the periphery, but eventually they start moving into "core business", you know that entangled mess that has 60 years old code that still runs today, and they realize they need to rewrite all of it, which will take a long time, and cost a lot of money, and they forget about it again for a few years.

It's the same problem everywhere with large and old codebases. You can easily amputate a tentacle here and there, but as soon as you get to the core of it, it is basically one giant monolith, and with age there has been added loads of "integrations" or "shortcuts" between various subsystems, and nobody in the company today has any idea why it is like it is, it just is and it works.

A bank I used to work for had somewhere around 50000 batch programs running nightly. Some were the same program running multiple times, but at least 20000 were "unique" programs. All of those programs had to fit like pearls on a string, each working off of the output of the previous program in the chain.

Untangling that mess is like peeling an onion one layer at a time, with the added bonus that the output of one program might be the final result for some report, and at the same time the input for some other program that needs to do something else.

Add to that, that there's no inherent problem with the mainframe or COBOL. They both work, and reliably as well. Both can push some serious IO through the system, loads that many x86/x64 builds would struggle with.

The conventional answer to IO problems is eventual consistency, which doesn't really work well with finance, at least not if applied broadly. You can get some of the way with slicing / partitioning, but you will still have to deal with a lot of traffic between partitions.
by nels | 2025-12-09 16:20:51+00:00
It's interesting how number 5 on the list is the same as today's: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203581 (Show HN: AlgoDrill – Interactive drills to stop forgetting LeetCode patterns (algodrill.io)).

I'm hoping we'll have gotten rid of current-style LeetCode interviews in 10 years from now :D
by jbstack | 2025-12-09 16:20:53+00:00
It's pretty bad when you consider that you have to limit it to just this use-case (3-6 second recordings 10-20 times a day), when it could have instead been useful for other things e.g. recording much longer thoughts or making notes while reading a book or watching a video.

Even for just the narrow use-case, 2 years is still pretty poor. I generally expect my tech to last a lot longer than that.
by AdamH12113 | 2025-12-09 16:21:15+00:00
To me, the valuable comments are the ones that share the writer's expertise and experiences (as opposed to opinions and hypothesizing) or the ones that ask interesting questions. LLMs have no experience and no real expertise, and nobody seems to be posting "I asked an LLM for questions and it said...". Thus, LLM-written comments (whether of the form "I asked ChatGPT..." or not) have no value to me.

I'm not sure a full ban is possible, but LLM-written comments should at least be strongly discouraged.
by masot | 2025-12-09 16:21:20+00:00
For me, it was just to have some fun seeing whether you can get the convenience of generics in C without blowing up the size of a "minimal standards-compliant compiler." E.g., Chibicc[1] is only a few thousand lines of code; adding Gamma to that would not blow it up by much. There's something aesthetically pleasing about knowing I can read the whole thing in a few days. Nothing like that is possible for C++ (or D?) AFAIK.

But yes --- for a real project I would absolutely recommend someone use D over this !

[1] https://github.com/rui314/chibicc
by stogot | 2025-12-09 16:21:38+00:00
This is addressed in the article.

> In fact, they are conducting a massive, multi-phase shift in software strategy. Phase 1 is releasing and open sourcing a new native PyTorch backend. They will also be open sourcing the compiler for their kernel language called “NKI” (Neuron Kernal Interface) and their kernel and communication libraries matmul and ML ops (analogous to NCCL, cuBLAS, cuDNN, Aten Ops). Phase 2 consists of open sourcing their XLA graph compiler and JAX software stack.

> By open sourcing most of their software stack, AWS will help broaden adoption and kick-start an open developer ecosystem. We believe the CUDA Moat isn’t constructed by the Nvidia engineers that built the castle, but by the millions of external developers that dig the moat around that castle by contributing to the CUDA ecosystem. AWS has internalized this and is pursuing the exact same strategy.
by Spivak | 2025-12-09 16:21:51+00:00
Everyone likes to hate on Dollar General but they made a little over $1 billion in profit on a little over $40 billion of goods sold which is a 2.7% profit margin. In terms of real value delivered to customers it's really hard to beat that. Kroger by comparison is 1.8%. In both cases we're talking about less than 3 cents of profit per dollar.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-12-09 16:21:58+00:00
I found this by poking around on the ystrickler.com site and was happy to find someone else who thinks about thinking and had actually read Il Saggiatore (The Assayer). I read it with something completely different in mind, and would recommend it (The Assayer) as one of the beginnings of a social discussion on the nature of science, but would caution against thinking it was the end of the conversation.

Still... I liked the page linked to. It's nice to see kids still care about practical epistemology.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-12-09 16:22:32+00:00
Maybe I remember the Grok ones more clearly but it felt like “I asked Grok” was more prevalent than the others.

I feel like the HN guidelines could take inspiration from how Oxide uses LLMs. (https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576). Specifically the part where using LLMs to write comments violates the implicit social contract that the writer should put more care and effort and time into it than the reader. The reader reads it because they assume this is something a person has put more time into than they need to. LLMs break that social contract.

Of course, if it’s banned maybe people just stop admitting it.
by Zufriedenheit | 2025-12-09 16:22:39+00:00
Many news articles have social media posts as sources. Most articles have other articles as sources. And then wikipedia takes the info from the news articles and compiles them. Now google takes all of these and creates summaries again and they have links to original sources in the ai summaries. EU Commission seems very naive and fallen out of time. They are not gonna stuff the AI revolution back into the bottle no matter how hard they try.
by ibdf | 2025-12-09 16:23:14+00:00
"Roughly 12 to 15 hours of recording. On average, I use it 10-20 times per day to record 3-6 second thoughts. That’s up to 2 years of usage." They really don't seem have tested the battery life, so 2 years is probably the best case scenario here. He says there's no subscription but if you need to buy one every 2 years or less, then that's the subscription. The primary reason given for not having an option to charge is just awful: "You would probably lose the charger before the battery ran out". This is seriously a device for reviewers and youtubers to hype, make a video about it, and then it's gone.
by BDPW | 2025-12-09 16:23:19+00:00
I don't know. I don't really care about the details in this case, I just don't really get the dismissive attitude that often surrounds things like this. Do you think this is not something that is worth looking into if it happens at such as large scale?

Just do be clear, I use genAI all the time for finding info and answering questions, so my browsing habits changed as well. I'm the kind of person who this case would indirectly be about. But don't you think that it's valuable to look at how do we compensate people who create content when their content is being used by genAI.

Many people seem to have the feeling of 'oh it's too late and those websites were garbage anyway (whatever that means), who cares'. Don't you think that's a bit of a silly way to go about this?
by sejje | 2025-12-09 16:23:25+00:00
My best shopping option is about 50mi away.

It's worth it, because my only neighbor is about 1/4 mile away, and he's the most reliable person I've ever met.

I don't lock my doors, the keys are in all my trucks.

We do have thieves, who are small and furry, and make off with my figs and tomatoes.

I don't miss your shopping rich area. It's a chore I suffer through.

Anyway, DG can save me about an hour of driving vs Walmart or the normal grocery.
by ben_w | 2025-12-09 16:23:31+00:00
Unfortunately it's easier to train an AI to be convincing than to be correct, so it can look insightful before it's true.

Like horoscopes, only they're not actually that bad so roll a D20 and on a set of numbers known only to the DM (and varying with domain and task length) you get a textbook answer and on the rest you get convincing nonsense.
by AlwaysRock | 2025-12-09 16:23:42+00:00
Yes. Unless something useful is actually added by the commenter or the post is about, "I asked llm x and it said y (that was unexpected)".

I have a coworker who does this somewhat often and... I always just feel like saying well that is great but what do you think? What is your opinion?

At the very least the copy paster should read what the llm says, interpret it, fact check it, then write their own response.
by 0x00cl | 2025-12-09 16:23:52+00:00
This is what DeepSeek said:

> 1. Existing guidelines already handle low-value content. If an AI reply is shallow or off-topic, it gets downvoted or flagged. > > 2. Transparency is good. Explicitly citing an AI is better than users passing off its output as their own, which a ban might encourage. > > 3. The community can self-regulate. We don't need a new rule for every type of low-effort content. > > The issue is low effort, not the tool used. Let downvotes handle it.
by poszlem | 2025-12-09 16:24:04+00:00
They’ll switch to military tech the second it becomes necessary, don’t kid yourself. I’m just glad we have a European alternative for the day the US decides to turn its back on us.

This tech is simply too critical to pretend the military won’t use it. That’s clearer now than ever, especially after the (so far flop-ish) launch of the U.S. military’s own genAI platform.