MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: With so many AI models, how do you quickly choose the right one?
by ankit2098 | 2025-12-30 05:28:42+00:00
With the number of AI models available today (for transcription, OCR, image/video generation, etc.), I am curious how people choose the right model in practice.

If you care about things like output quality, cost, and latency, how do you evaluate models quickly, especially if you don’t want to write custom code or build evaluation pipelines?

Do you rely on docs and benchmarks, ask engineers to run experiments, manually test a few options, or something else?
by array_key_first | 2025-12-30 05:30:12+00:00
I think most software is like this if you sit and reason about the domain model long enough. It's just easier to say "fuck it" and allocate each individual object on its own with a lifetime of ???.

Also, is easier to refactor if you do the typical GC allocation patterns. Because you have 1 million different lifetimes and nobody actually knows them, except the GC kind of, it doesn't matter if you dramatically move stuff around. That has pros and cons, I think. It makes it very unclear who is actually using what and why, but it does mean you can change code quickly.
by WolfeReader | 2025-12-30 05:30:21+00:00
There is indeed a class of programmers who think AI over-reliance will make us worse. And there should be, because it's true.

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4812513
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2025-12-30 05:30:48+00:00
If you’re doing a restructuring of the company, i.e. mass layoffs, you’re allowed to do it regardless. In some states FMLA/PFMLA a company is automatically presumed a retaliation firing if it’s done within 6 months and the onus is on the company to prove it wasn’t—-the mass layoff is the cover, and large companies know it.

However, the fact that they cancelled her health insurance a week before returning and demanded she returned on a certain date or she’d be terminated despite a demonstrated disability, that’s pretty whack and might be hard to defend as company-wide restructuring.
by tstrimple | 2025-12-30 05:31:29+00:00
Is this because of an older version of iOS or specifically because of the shitty carrier? I can add and remove esims from my iPhone. I just recently added one for my new 17 Pro Max. It prompted me to login to Verizon and it "just worked". There is an option right there to delete the Verizon esim. Nothing restricted or difficult about it.
by simonguo | 2025-12-30 05:32:17+00:00
Features

Native Markdown Parsing - Import .md files and render embedded code blocks as interactive components
Live Preview - Execute and preview React code in real-time
Editable Code - Built-in code editor with syntax highlighting
Universal Plugin - Works with Webpack, Vite, Rollup, esbuild, and Rspack
TypeScript - Full TypeScript support out of the box
Tree-shakeable - Import only what you need
Zero Config - Works out of the box with sensible defaults
by etempleton | 2025-12-30 05:32:30+00:00
Films rely on 24 fps or, rather, low motion resolution to help suspend disbelief. There are things that the viewer are not meant to see or at least see clearly. Yes, part of that specific framerate is nostalgia and what the audience expects a movie to look like, but it holds a purpose.

Higher frame rates are superior for shooting reality. But for something that is fictional it helps the audience suspend their disbelief.
by rtpg | 2025-12-30 05:32:48+00:00
I have the same sound issues with a lot of stuff, my current theory at this point is that TVs have gotten bigger and we're further away from them but speakers have stayed kinda shitty... but things are being mixed by people using headphones or otherwise good sound equipment

it's very funny how when watching a movie on my macbook pro it's better for me to just use HDMI for the video to my TV but keep on using my MBP speaker for the audio, since the speakers are just much better.
by greatgib | 2025-12-30 05:33:00+00:00
The issue here is that coderabbit is indeed a crappy product and then you have this problem that we want people to be nice to your products but sometimes it is just pity.

Personally I'm not a small indie dev but if asked, I would have the same feedback as Aiden about it.

First time I encountered it, it was with an open source project where it was mandatory I think and this agent pissing kilometers of useless crap at each interaction was really really annoying.

But looking at the CEO response, I think that the product might be at the image of its leadership: egocentric.

Like as an user it is just one of the tool like another one for you to use, you want it to be discreet, direct, providing you tldr and no more.

Instead, you get something that will try to get as much visibility and your attention as possible, taking all the space. Like if it was the main and only thing in your software forge.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-30 05:33:41+00:00
You don't need to go balls to the wall and allocate 100% upfront. The typical split we see is either "allocate all the things" or "allocate every object, even if it's 16 bytes and lives for 100 microseconds".

Most programs have logical splits where you can allocate. A spreadsheet might allocate every page when it's created, or a browser every tab. Or a game every level. We can even go a level deeper if we want. Maybe we allocate every sheet in a spreadsheet, but in 128x128 cell chunks. Like Minecraft.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-12-30 05:33:57+00:00
> But the current models are capable of being trained in a way to steer agentic behavior from reasoned token generation.

This does not appear to be sufficient in the current state, as described in the project's README.md:

Why This Exists

We learned the hard way that instructions aren't enough to
keep AI agents in check. After Claude Code silently wiped
out hours of progress with a single rm -rf ~/ or git
checkout --, it became evident that "soft" rules in an
CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md file cannot replace hard technical
constraints. The current approach is to use a dedicated
hook to programmatically prevent agents from running
destructive commands.

Perhaps one day this category of plugin will not be needed. Until then, I would be hard-pressed to employ an LLM-based product having destructive filesystem capabilities based solely on the hope of them "being trained in a way to steer agentic behavior from reasoned token generation."
by Teever | 2025-12-30 05:34:02+00:00
Let's say I'm mildly convinced by your argument. I've read your blog post that was popular on HN a week or so ago and I've made similar little toy programs with AI that scratch a particular niche.

Do you care to make my concrete predictions on when most developers will embrace this new normal as part of their day to day routine? One year? Five?

And how much of this is just another iteration in the wheel of recarnation[0]? Maybe we're looking at a future where we see return to the monoculture library dense supply chain that we use today but the libraries are made by swarms of AI agents instead and the programmer/user is responsible for guiding other AI agents to create business logic?

[0] https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/wor.htm
by mothballed | 2025-12-30 05:35:57+00:00
>By owning stock.

Yes often stock, although this can be confusing for ownership portions in private equity because the incorporation often does use stock as a form of ownership but not the publicly traded kind as one often thinks of (this why I prefer a more generic 'capital'). The key here is ownership of things that facilitate the production of goods and services. These usually represent by far the largest portion of wealth billionaires have, its almost never mostly horded as mostly unused or non-productive wealth but rather representative of ownership of productive assets that bring goods and services to fruition.

>I'm not sure that "on paper" is a particularly interesting qualifier. I'm not a billionaire, but most of my wealth, such as it is, is "on paper". I have some cash on hand to pay expenses (technically, a checking account, and less than $50 in physical bills and coins), but you're probably losing money if you're keeping most of it in cash and not investing it on something with returns.

A large portion of people have their assets mostly in real estate, vehicles, demand accounts, personal tangible assets. The median household stock ownership is $~50k of $~200k in median household net worth. Having most wealth "on paper" is very much a situation of note from the viewpoint of the common person, and your position puts you closer to the billionaires in this regard.

>IPOs

Stock ownership is literally the ownership of the company and thereby the productive capital. Wealth tax on stock is a punishment for owning productive assets. You are trying to sidestep this by arguing whether the purchase of the stock itself adds investment while ignoring the stock itself is a fractional title of the productive assets.

>It's questionable how much these investments actually benefit the community. For example, if labor is brought primarily from outside the community, then existing residents do not necessarily benefit from the spending, and they may find themselves priced out of their own community by the incoming labor force.

This is a fully informed acknowledgement you simply don't seem to care if the investments leave the community.

Your attitude seems to be something akin to, well, if the biggest productive capital holders want to leave then it probably doesn't matter for the community anyway. I can respect that. You know what you want and you're willing to work to get it.

I wish you the most sincerest of luck. Although I'm not in favor of these kind of zero sum games, I will definitely welcome the movement of investment out of California and into my state where it definitely will not benefit my community.
by eru | 2025-12-30 05:36:10+00:00
Alternatively, I guess you could also use really thin cables to carry the low voltage paths; and that act as fuses, if ever a lot of current at high voltage was flowing across them? But probably not very reliable both in regular operation and as fuses.

We have a Miele washing machine and a Miele dryer. Solid machines all around even after years of use.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-12-30 05:38:02+00:00
It's entirely dependent on the type of code being written. For verbose, straightforward code with clear cut test scenarios, one agent can easily 24/7 the work of 20 FT engineers. This is a best case scenario.

Your productivity boost will depend entirely on a combination of how much you can remove yourself from the loop (basically, the cost of validation per turn) and how amenable the task/your code is to agents (which determines your P(success)).

Low P(success) isn't a problem if there's no engineer time cost to validation, the agent can just grind the problem out in the background, and obviously if P(success) is high the cost of validation isn't a big deal. The productivity killer is when P(success) is low and the cost of validation is high, these circumstances can push you into the red with agents very quickly.

Thus the key to agents being a force multiplier is to focus on reducing validation costs, increasing P(success) and developing intuition relating to when to back off on pulling the slot machine in favor of more research. This is assuming you're speccing out what you're building so the agent doesn't make poor architectural/algorithmic choices that hamstring you down the line.
by mindcandy | 2025-12-30 05:39:27+00:00
My source is first and second hand reports from management of game companies having worked in the industry for decades. But, they don’t make numbers like that public.

The best public report I can find is https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759... which shows a median difference 20% of revenue for games where Denuvo is cracked “quickly” but also no significant difference if Denuvo survives for at least 3 months.

What I’ve observed from internal reports from multiple companies is that, if you don’t assume an outlier blockbuster game, major game studios’ normal plan is to target a 10% annual profit margin with an expected variance of +/-20% each year.

So, assuming you have a solidly on-target game, DRM not just being there, but surviving at least a couple months is the difference between “10% profit moving the whole company forward on schedule” vs “10% loss dragging the whole company down” or “30% profit, great success, bonuses and hiring increases” depending on the situation.

Outside of games, I have seen many personnel reports on Hacker News over the years from small-time ISVs that they find it exhausting they need to regularly ship BS “My Software version N+1” just as an excuse to update their DRM. But, every time they do, sales go back up. And, the day the new crack appears on Pirate Bay, sales drop back down. Over and over forever. Thus why we can’t just buy desktop software anymore. Web apps are primarily DRM and incidentally convenient in other ways.
by idea2patentAI | 2025-12-30 05:40:44+00:00
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• The 12-Month Countdown: Next Steps After Filing
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We hope you find this article useful.

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by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-30 05:40:48+00:00
There's no point arguing with someone who's not only wrong, but who doesn't care if they're wrong. ("I will not be able to produce anything even remotely comparable in terms of negative impact that AI brings to humanity these days.")

There are basically no conditions under which one party can or will reach a legitimate common ground with the other. Sucks, but that's HN nowadays.
by tstrimple | 2025-12-30 05:41:27+00:00
For me it was the creep of "Not my content" constantly showing up front and center post Plex updates. I'd have to navigate to some side menu to actually access the content I set the entire fucking service up for. Jellyfin has never done that. It's just my content and only my content and I don't have to fight against nonsense slipping in each update.
by Pockets | 2025-12-30 05:41:30+00:00
We’re launching SmartZip Pro: ZIP, RAR & 7Z — a utility app for iOS devices that brings robust archive management to iPhone and iPad users.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/smartzip-pro-zip-rar-7z/id6756...

What it does

SmartZip Pro is designed for users who routinely work with compressed files on iOS:

Extract archives in all common formats: ZIP, RAR, 7Z, TAR, GZIP, BZIP2, XZ, ISO directly on your device.
App Store

Preview contents without unpacking — photos, videos, audio, and documents can be opened inside the archive.
App Store

Compress files into ZIP with AES-256 encryption for security.
App Store

Browse files like folders and manage them (rename, duplicate, move, share) all within the app.
App Store

Cache cleaning and space reclaiming to help keep devices lean.
App Store

Why it’s useful

iOS has improved file handling over the years, but native support for archive formats beyond ZIP remains limited. SmartZip Pro fills that gap with:

Quick previews without full extraction (saves time and storage).
App Store

Secure ZIP creation with industry-grade AES encryption.
App Store

A file-centric manager tailored to compressed data workflows.
App Store

Target audience

Developers / engineers who receive archived logs, datasets, or shared ZIP/RAR releases on the go.

Students / researchers managing course materials or shared data.

Anyone needing a reliable, ad-free archive utility on iPhone/iPad.

Platforms & Compatibility

iPhone & iPad (iOS 17+)

Mac (macOS 14+ with Apple M1/M2)

VisionOS & Apple Watch support planned/available as applicable.
App Store

We’re keen to hear feedback from the HN community — what formats, workflows, or features you’d like to see next (e.g., multi-part archive handling, scripting/automation support, CLI integration via Shortcuts, etc.).

Thanks for reading and please let us know what you think.
by chunkmonke99 | 2025-12-30 05:41:35+00:00
Would you think it would be better for "society" to allow more people to go into finance and law? Or that advanced knowledge should be gate kept by only the select cognitive elite that are most adept at playing the "glass bead game" by age 18? Would you change any of your opinions if AI renders most High IQ practical/technical tracts obsolete? Perhaps, a more sane society would be one where curious people could develop themselves in whichever way they so choose: if they want to study the mating habits of marmots in the Central Asian steppe then so be it.
by araes | 2025-12-30 05:41:50+00:00
Suspicion is you're correct, and is it's probably something like payments or money to developers who have games on the GOG platform. However, the definition in the document is kind of self referential.

"Cost of Sales" is 100% "Cost of goods for resale and materials sold"

and "The Cost of goods for resale and materials sold represents mainly the cost of sales of goods for resale and materials sold via the GOG.COM platform"

Kind of self referential. Everything else is in the CD PROJEKT RED group (Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition on Nintendo Switch 2 cartridges).

If your suspicion is correct then that would also imply that historical games are either almost always the same 70/30, or GOG is not really making that much on "historical" games (ie, most of the money is recent indie releases). And, kind of implied that they're not really selling that much. At maybe 10 EUR average, that's only like 1000 games a quarter.

Notably, its really difficult to find anything other than an online article that actually talks about the 70/30 split situation. Google links to Wikipedia for evidence that then links to a 2013 Engadget article. Nothing appears to actually spell out the financial terms on GOG's actual site.

If you happen to know where that type of legalese is on the GOG site, that would actually a helpful ref.
by godelski | 2025-12-30 05:41:56+00:00
> Why do you use the word "chasing" to describe this?

I think you'll get the answer to this if you read my comment and your response to understand why you didn't address mine.

Btw, I have tried it. It's annoying that people think the problem is not trying. It was getting old when GPT 3.5 came out. Let's update the argument...
by eru | 2025-12-30 05:42:04+00:00
> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.

That's a nice narrative, but its simplicity clashes with reality.
by greatgib | 2025-12-30 05:42:07+00:00
It is a well known issue:
https://zvox.com/blogs/news/why-can-t-i-hear-dialogue-on-tv-...

I don't find the source anymore but I think that I saw that it was even a kind of small conspiracy on tv streaming so that you set your speakers louder and then the advertisement time arrive you will hear them louder than your movie.

Officially it is just that they switch to a better encoding for ads (like mpeg2 to MPEG-4 for DVB) but unofficially for the money as always...
by adityaathalye | 2025-12-30 05:43:05+00:00
The people assembling GPU boxen would need work. Big Datacenter will likely turn off the power and evict those human cost centers, as a first step toward asset liquidation. Which is why I hope that occurrence feeds forward into a glorious SME business boom. e.g. Nokia's mobile telephony self-own by the end of the aughts was both sad and great for Finland; hurting national pride at one end and fuelling their high tech startup scene, exactly due to losing experts to attrition and entrepreneurship.
by efitz | 2025-12-30 05:43:33+00:00
When I worked at Microsoft years ago, me and my team (a developer and a tester) built a high volume log collector.

We used a streaming compression format that was originally designed for IBM tape drives.

It was fast as hell and worked really well, and was gentle on CPU and it was easy to control memory usage.

In the early 2000s on a modest 2-proc AMD64 machine we ran out of fast Ethernet way before we felt CPU pressure.

We got hit by the SOAP mafia during Longhorn; we couldn’t convince the web services to adopt it; instead they made us enshittify our “2 bytes length, 2 bytes msgtype, structs-on-the-wire” speed demon with their XML crap.
by vunderba | 2025-12-30 05:44:56+00:00
It's been a while - I remember liking the first two seasons. Season three felt a bit silly to me without going into much detail (we need a spoiler text wrapper for HN). Season four has a lot of "zombie-esque" stuff which just doesn't have near the dread horror that the first two seasons did IMHO. Haven't seen any of the final season.
by itissid | 2025-12-30 05:46:51+00:00
From my own experience as one grows over their 30's, or probably much older, to get to what you mentioned "money, houses, kids, friends", these ads pretty much don't target u very effectively any ways because one's priorities are shifted and you care more about other things than what the attention economy is all about. IOW these ads all about the people who have attention to spare.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-12-30 05:47:46+00:00
I'm sure you're interacting with a ton of tools built via agents, ironically even in software engineering people are trying to human-wash AI code due to anti-AI bias by people who should know better (if you think 100% of LLM outputs are "slop" with no quality consideration factored in, you're hopelessly biased). The commercialized seems like an arbitrary and pointless bar, I've seen some hot garbage that's "commercialized" and some great code that's not.
by lostlogin | 2025-12-30 05:48:11+00:00
You probably know but Substacks’ free speech thing is a huge turn off.

That’s how you end up sending push notifications for your latest Nazi content.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/substacks-nazi-p...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e...
by Larrikin | 2025-12-30 05:49:34+00:00
I would absolutely not trust an LLM to teach me anything alone. I've had it introduce ideas I hadn't heard about which I looked up from actual sources to confirm it was a valid solution. Daily usage has shown it will happily lead you down the wrong path and usually the only way to know that it is the wrong path, is if you already knew what the solution should be.

LLMs MAY be a version of office hours or asking the TA, if you only have the book and no actual teacher. I have seen nothing that convinces me they are anything more than the latest version of the hammer in our toolbox. Not every problem is a nail.