MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2025-12-08 08:32:25+00:00
There are no euphemisms. The issue I think you're having is viewing things in a an artificially binary fashion. In reality it's all a lot fuzzier. If you don't have enough resources in one area it doesn't mean everybody just starves, it instead means you work a bit more, or just make do with a bit less. And that creates a voluntary pressure against fertility. Nature even has relatively tame 'stop-loss' measures here that further reinforce this like the fact that malnutrition directly reduces fertility. So if we graph population vs time, there's going to be a trend, but it'll look a lot like a relatively low amplitude sine wave. You'd only see sharps shifts after something like a plague.
by Ekaros | 2025-12-08 08:32:45+00:00
Cash is not completely anonymous, but hard enough and not enough parties track it. Bills are serialized and you could take photos of coins and likely identify them based on scratch patterns.

Still, whole thing is saved by not enough people actually tracking it to that level.

And on other side, BTC tracks every single transaction ever. Which is also detriment, that is we keep everything stored forever in lot of places... Which kind seems massive waste.
by avadodin | 2025-12-08 08:32:58+00:00
I'm a big fan of the GLib/old ObjC approach when it comes to UI elements and backwards compatibility with C but I can't imagine a situation where it would be appropriate on the kind of embedded we're discussing here to dynamically create and destroy objects - whether through malloc or oop. Maybe on the HUD but even there I'd favor other approaches if it were my soldiers that I want to return home behind that HUD.
by globular-toast | 2025-12-08 08:33:52+00:00
Alas, any comments trying to talk about the problem are getting buried. They don't understand the solution because they stick their fingers in their ears when someone tries to show the problem. Of course a solution doesn't make sense if there is no problem.

We have to remember 2008 was 17 years ago. People who were born during the crisis are now adults. The tragedy is there might not necessarily be another huge crisis. We blew it 17 years ago. We didn't fix anything. People stopped talking about financial reform about a decade ago. So now we might just have to live with a system where a few elites are creaming the top of the money supply. A system where the brightest and most talented people go and work for something like Jane Street, spending their days playing games and trading bits of paper with each other, causing real effects for people doing actual work, but adding nothing of value themselves but taking loads.

This Douglas Adams quote explains a lot:

> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
by bluecalm | 2025-12-08 08:33:56+00:00
I tried using Firefox. I had it as default browser for 2 years but I just keep going back to Chromium. Firefox is slow and crashes/hangs too much in my experience. It was even very slow to open my automatically generated tables for accounting (for simple html but very big files because accounting regulation in my previous country of residence were brain dead). I don't think often published benchmarks tell the whole story there.

Now I am back to Brave and very happy. Almost no ads, super fast, doesn't crash or hang.
by tempestn | 2025-12-08 08:34:08+00:00
I don't think the author's argument is that it won't replace any human labour. Or at least I wouldn't agree with such an argument. But the stronger case is that however much LLMs improve, they won't replace humans in general. In the furtherment of knowledge, because they are fundamentally parroting and synthesizing the already known, vs performing truly novel thought. And in creative fields, because people are fundamentally interested in creations of other people, not of computers.

Neither of these is entirely true in all cases, but they could be expected to remain true in at least some (many) cases, and so the role for humans remains.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-08 08:34:11+00:00
> for 99.99% of people the banking layer and bureaucracy of modern monetary systems is a feature that protects them from fraudulent transactions, people stealing their credit card number, and businesses charging them and not delivering goods. These are generally good things.

Let's go through these. To begin with, "fraudulent transactions" is redundant because that's either someone stealing your credit card number or someone you paid not doing what they said. So let's consider those two:

> people stealing their credit card number

This is the problem caused by the existing system, which is designed with such poor security that breaching a merchant allows the attackers to make charges to their innocent customers' cards at a different merchant. They get zero credit for providing a mitigation to the problem they created themselves.

> businesses charging them and not delivering goods

This gets sold as a benefit, but it's also a cost, because then it becomes a mechanism to commit fraud. People go to a business that does deliver the goods and issue a fraudulent chargeback. The merchants then have to pass the cost of that onto everyone else, which means that it's also a fraud against every other customer.

Meanwhile we have other solutions to that problem that don't do that. Established businesses don't want to ruin their reputation. If someone rips you off you can sue them. Sometimes you're just paying someone for something they're already delivered.

And most importantly, there instances when you would trust someone to deliver the goods independent of the payment system, and other instances when you wouldn't. Which is why you want both payment systems to be available instead of just the second one, so you don't have to pay for the chargeback fraud when you don't need to buy your trust from the payment system.
by locallost | 2025-12-08 08:35:11+00:00
Yeah, a totally mind boggling statement, almost completely void of reality. I wasn't even tired of the crashes, it was just a totally awful experience of using them in every way. They took forever to load, were clunky to use and even just downright ugly because the UI had nothing to do with what you usually got to use, and was a lot worse. The idea was good on paper, but the implementation sucked.

Everyone, well almost everyone apparently, was relieved we didn't have to deal with any of that anymore.
Show HN: Dograh – an OSS Vapi alternative to quickly build and test voice agents
by a6kme | 2025-12-08 08:35:24+00:00
Hi HN, I have been building voice agents for sometime now. I was earlier automating parts of visa processing, and we needed real-time, multilingual voice calling.

I assumed the hard work was just wiring LiveKit/Pipecat + STT/TTS + an LLM. It wasn’t.

Even with solid OSS (Pipecat/LiveKit), we still had to do a lot of plumbing- variable extraction, tracing, testing etc and any workflow changes required constant redeploys.

We eventually realized we’d spent more time building infrastructure than building the actual agents. Everything felt custom. We hit every possible pain with Pipecat and VAPI style systems.

So we built Dograh - a fully open-source voice agent framework that includes all the boring, painful pieces by default.

What’s different:

- Pipecat-based engine, but forked - custom event model, and concurrency fixes

- One-click start template generated by an LLM Agent for a quick get start template for any use case

- Drag-and-drop visual agent builder for quick iteration (the thing we wished existed earlier)

- Variable extraction layer (name/order/date/etc.) baked into the LLM loop

- Built in Telephony integration (Twilio/ Vonage/ Vobiz/ Cloudonix)

- Multilingual support end-to-end

- Select any LLM TTS STT (add their credits, if any)

- AI-to-AI call testing: automatically stress-test an agent before shipping (still a work in progress- so patchy as of now)

- Fully Open Source

It's built and maintained by YC alumni / exit founders who got tired of rebuilding the same plumbing.

Why we open-sourced it: We kept feeling that the space was drifting toward closed SaaS abstractions (VAPI, Retell). Those are good for demos, but once you need data controls, privacy or self/offline deployment, you end up stuck. We wanted a stack where you can see every part, fork it, self-host it, and patch it as needed.

Try it:

- Repo: https://github.com/dograh-hq/dograh

This spins up a basic multilingual agent with everything pre-wired.

Who this is for:

- If you are looking for self hosting a Vapi like platform for Data Privacy etc.

- Anyone trying to build production-grade voice agents without reinventing audio plumbing.

- If you’ve tried to glue STT→LLM→TTS manually, you probably know the exact pain this is built for

Happy to answer technical questions, show the architecture, or hear how we can improve the product.
by inesranzo | 2025-12-08 08:35:38+00:00
This is the best model IMO as it supports creators directly and not the advertisers.

If Daring Fireball had this membership subscription model and not selling highly and questionably expensive ad slots I would definitely subscribe, even if the price would be $20 a month or $200 a year. (I would argue he can make more than he charges for ads does already given this model.)

But $11K (a week!) is outrageous to support Daring Fireball.
by davidhyde | 2025-12-08 08:36:03+00:00
Thanks for the links. To the limit of my influence I try to protect my team from distractions, be fluid about methodology (constant agile churn can be depressing), limit the toxicity of pull requests, and to spend as much time with them as I can. A happy team is a productive team. Oh and I try not to work with leaders who obsess over Gantt charts. To me estimates are more about trust and respect rather than metrics and velocity. It has to be the right kind of company though.
by kragen | 2025-12-08 08:36:51+00:00
This argument proves too much:

"Bloodletting is not futile or make believe. It is useful even if the patient does not always survive. That's why physicians continue to use it."

"Trial by ordeal is not futile or make believe. It is useful even if sometimes Inquisitors reach mistaken conclusions. That's why Inquisitors continue to use it."

"Lottery-number-picking systems are not futile or make believe. They are useful even if some players never win. That's why players continue to use them."

It is a fully general argument which, if correct, would demonstrate that no practice that had continued for a period of time could ever be ineffective or counterproductive.
by torginus | 2025-12-08 08:36:51+00:00
> Does this actually happen to you?

Yes and millions of other devs who work in an enterprise 'agile' environment - where a single huge project is/was developed by armies of developers work on a single product with a strict-ish release cadence?

Have you heard about the horror that is SaFe?

I'm not convinced that true agile works or has ever worked on a project that was bigger than a dozen devs.

In practice, it's just another dishonest way of selling consulting hours, infantilizing and disempowering devs, and putting folks who have zero subject matter knowledge in charge by doing these feelgood rituals.

Agile (scrum) in practice at enterprise-scale projects tends to be a combination of feelgood BS +top-down micromanagement (product owners dicking around with task priorities) +traditional project management.

One of the key ways these agile people are incredibly dishonest, is that Agile at the top level is sold to enterprises as a way of keeping the old high-level project management style, with push-only command-structures, and agile people subsequently try to sugarcoat it as it somehow 'empowering' the devs and giving them autonomy, when the truth couldn't be farther from it.
by crimsoneer | 2025-12-08 08:36:52+00:00
As a teenager who went through quite a similar journey back in the day, it wasn't as much the books (which are quite badly written, I still have PTSD from that monologue) and more about the story very plainly supporting the view of the world I had back then... Champions of industry, unshackled by free enterprise, freed from the stagnation of governance etc.
by mike_hearn | 2025-12-08 08:36:55+00:00
No, not really. I've read lots of research papers from commercial firms and academic labs. Bad citations are something I only ever saw in academic papers.

I think that's because a lot of bad citations come from reviewer demands to add more of them during the journal publishing process, so they're not critical to the argument and end up being low effort citations that get copy/pasted between papers. Or someone is just spamming citations to make a weak claim look strong. And all this happens because academic uses citations as a kind of currency (it's a planned non-market economy, so they have to allocate funds using proxy signals).

Commercial labs are less likely to care about the journal process to begin with, and are much less likely to publish weak claims because publishing is just a recruiting tool, not the actual end goal of the R&D department.
by pfortuny | 2025-12-08 08:37:15+00:00
Point taken about anonymity. However, its design (that of cash) is theoretically anonymous, it is reality which gets in the way. BTC, on the other hand, is "just" a huge ledger of transactions with giver and receiver perfectly "identified" (in a unique way, albeit just pseudonymous) and preserved forever.

Also, as you point out, BTC is a massive waste of resources and storage space.
by zkmon | 2025-12-08 08:37:33+00:00
But the issue is, 99.999% of the humans won't see is as a bag of words. Because it is easier to go by instincts and see it as a person and assume that it actually knows about magic tricks, can invent new science or theory of everything, and can solve all world problems. Back in the 90's or early 2000's I have seen people writing poems praying and seeking blessings from the Google goddess. People are insanely greedy and instinct-driven. Given this truth, what's the fall-out?
by pjmlp | 2025-12-08 08:37:49+00:00
Sun folks disagree,

https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere

Sure, they could have taken a bit more, like proper AOT instead of it being a feature only available in third party commercial JDKs, or some low level niceties like C#.
by bawolff | 2025-12-08 08:38:24+00:00
> Your political party affiliations AND the fact on whether you voted is already public knowledge in our current electoral system

Neither of these are how you actual voted so they don't really matter.

That said, as a non-american, the party affiliation thing is super weird.

---

> If you give someone your block ID that says how you voted, then yeah ok - but you can do that today by taking a picture of your ballot.

And in many countries this would be a crime and have legal consequences.
by bjackman | 2025-12-08 08:38:52+00:00
You can't completely escape advertising while still participating in modern society but there's still a huge difference between free and premium YouTube in this regard.

Yes, creators have paid sections but they are skippable (and note YouTube helps you skip with a little white dot in the UI[1]) and creators have a strong incentive to protect their credibility. They have an ongoing "relationship" with their viewer. Not so for the random companies that get to spam you with unskippable adverts for crypto scams or fat-free yoghurt in the freezer version.

[1]They don't like sponsored segments as they don't get a cut most of the time. They do have a programme for arranging sponsored segments via the platform, in which case they _do_ get a cut. I'm not sure if they still offer the little skip-helper dot in that case... Anyone know?
by EGreg | 2025-12-08 08:39:00+00:00
Both Family Dollar and Dollar General declined interview requests and did not answer detailed lists of questions from the Guardian. Instead, both sent the Guardian brief statements.

“At Family Dollar, we take customer trust seriously and are committed to ensuring pricing accuracy across our stores,” the company said. “We are currently reviewing the concerns raised and working to better understand any potential discrepancies. We continue to be focused on providing a consistent and transparent shopping experience.”

Dollar General said it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”. In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”

They make it sound like isolated incidents. Someone should keep following up on statements like that until they are fixed, or refer them to a DA. No?

Furthermore, what about "false advertising" laws?
by skepti | 2025-12-08 08:39:04+00:00
As I wrote to someone else:

Why require that companies use a specific programming language instead of requiring that the end product is good? > And the F35 and America's combat readiness would be in a better place today with Ada instead of C++.

What is the evidence for this? Companies selling Ada products would almost certainly agree, since they have a horse in the race. Ada does not automatically lead to better, more robust, safer or fully correct software.

Your line of argument is dangerous and dishonest, as real life regrettably shows.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88

> The failure has become known as one of the most infamous and expensive software bugs in history.[2] The failure resulted in a loss of more than US$370 million.[3]

> The launch failure brought the high risks associated with complex computing systems to the attention of the general public, politicians, and executives, resulting in increased support for research on ensuring the reliability of safety-critical systems. The subsequent automated analysis of the Ariane code (written in Ada) was the first example of large-scale static code analysis by abstract interpretation.[9]
by moralIsYouLie | 2025-12-08 08:41:05+00:00
most humans in any percentile act towards the thing of someone else. most of these things are a lot worse than what the human "would originally intend". this behavior stems from 100s and thousands of nudges since childhood.

the issue with AI and AI-naysayers is, by analogy, this: cars were build to drive from A to Z. people picked up tastes and some people started building really cool looking cars. the same happens on the engineering side. then portfolio communists came with their fake capitalism and now cars are build to drive over people but don't really work because people, thankfully, are overwhelming still fighting to attempt to act towards their own intents.
by vkou | 2025-12-08 08:41:25+00:00
> Rent control is not in the landlord's business... Seattle... Landlords going out of business...

And you immediately demonstrate why having a conversation with you on this subject is pointless.

There's a million different dimensions in which the problem that I've pointed at manifests. But what you do is you cherry-pick one particular dimension of it in one particular municipality in one particular time period[1], claim that that dimension is (allegedly) biased in the other direction, and thus you reach the universal conclusion that clearly landlords are the real victims[2], and you can just sweep the entire issue off the table.

I don't have enough words to describe how incurious and chock-full-of-fallacies this kind of thinking is.

You already know everything that you feel you need to, and there's nothing more that needs to be said. It's like you have found the number 2, and conclude that therefore, most numbers are even primes.

---

[1] Actually, you don't do even that. You just vaguely wave your hands in its direction.

[2] Kind of weird that the market values their real estate to be worth twice what it was a decade ago if they are getting such a raw deal. I'm sure PE is snapping up rental properties because they are money-losing investments, too. After all, serious people who have done the math and are putting billions of dollars into this (and are reaping profits on their investments hand-over-fist) must all be too stupid to understand just how awful renting out property is.
by soanvig | 2025-12-08 08:42:11+00:00
> Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”

Can you explain to me how USA is called civilized? How somebody can say things like that, and how a shop is even allowed to have an error margin
by another_twist | 2025-12-08 08:42:47+00:00
I understand the sarcasm but this take is devoid of fact. Modern Java loads fast, Java 21 has pretty good functional programming featurez. The ecosystem churns out language level features at a pace and a budget that would put most large funded startups to shame.

Java is also the workhorse of the big data ecosystem and moves enough money either as product revenue or as transactions than most nations GDP. They didn't figure out startup times for 10+ years, they were busy dealing with Oracle and its messy management. I think it will simply continue to get better given that Java has endured through so many language fads. It has its ways to go but it will end up like SQL - here before we were alive and will be here when most of us are dead.
by a6kme | 2025-12-08 08:43:12+00:00
Earlier I was using other platforms for production voice agents. One thing that became obvious was the cost: 60–70% of our total spend was the Vapi platform fee, and only 30-40% was actual LLM/STT/TTS usage. Platform cost dominated everything. That alone pushed us toward something self-hosted.

But when we switched to OSS stacks (Pipecat, LiveKit), we realise that even with great OSS, the plumbing was still painful and necessary- no standard way to extract variables from conversations (name/date/order ID), no straightforward tracing of LLM calls, no way to run AI-to-AI test loops, and no fast workflow iteration - and every change meant another redeploy.

The infrastructure glue kept ballooning, and each time it felt like rebuilding the same system from scratch.

Dograh came out of that combination of cost pain and integration pain. Happy to dig deeper into anything.
by skepti | 2025-12-08 08:45:47+00:00
Another factor for Ada not being more popular is probably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88

> The failure has become known as one of the most infamous and expensive software bugs in history.[2] The failure resulted in a loss of more than US$370 million.[3]

> The launch failure brought the high risks associated with complex computing systems to the attention of the general public, politicians, and executives, resulting in increased support for research on ensuring the reliability of safety-critical systems. The subsequent automated analysis of the Ariane code (written in Ada) was the first example of large-scale static code analysis by abstract interpretation.[9]