MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Tokemon, a terminal dashboard to track LLM token usage
by mm65 | 2026-03-12 22:30:44+00:00
Hey HN,

Recently I found myself using a bunch of different AI coding tools at the same time (Claude Code, Cursor, and some custom API scripts). By the end of the week, I had absolutely no idea how many tokens I was burning or what my real API costs were unless I logged into three separate billing pages.

I built tokemon to solve this for myself. It finds the log and cache files generated by these tools on your machine, parses them, handles deduplication so requests aren't double-counted, and drops the totals into a terminal dashboard. I wrote it in Rust, so it's extremely fast and performant.

The feature I end up using the most is `tokemon top`. It opens a live TUI dashboard with sparklines for daily and weekly trends. I usually just leave it running in a terminal pane as a persistent monitor since it's nice to look at and keeps my API spend top of mind.

You can grab it via cargo:
cargo install tokemon

Repo is here if you want to poke around or add parsers for other tools: https://github.com/mm65x/tokemon

Let me know what you think!
by wongarsu | 2026-03-12 22:31:00+00:00
> That is simply "Assured Destruction" with absolutely no mutual drawbacks

Nuclear countries would simply declare that they will launch nukes if any rod comes down on their territory. Even if you had thousands of projectiles in orbit (at considerable cost per projectile) this would not be significantly different from 60s-style MAD: put nukes in bunkers, in the air and in the sea to ensure they can't all be taken out. We might see the return of the strategic bomber that stays in the air for weeks at a time.

Alternatively they can just shoot down your battleship with anti-satellite weapons. The risk of retaliation might be worth preventing the disadvantaged position in the long term
by sastraxi | 2026-03-12 22:31:04+00:00
Yeah, I understand it's hard to find the balance here. I'd imagine you feel the need to ship at the same time as writing about it. For me, the post you shared in your reply as well as in the OP have been expanded to be about 3-4x as long as they need to be, and I'm going to assume you're using AI to generate them due to the writing style. My feedback is to consider writing shorter posts, but doing it by hand -- your prose style here is friendly, engaging and direct. I wish that your articles were the same.

TL;DR: I feel like my time is being wasted when I read AI-written articles, so I stop reading. Do with my anecdote what you will!
by pera | 2026-03-12 22:31:19+00:00
There are a lot of examples like that since the first announcement of GitHub Copilot in 2021, search for (copying) "verbatim" in this submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676266

Here is a more recent example I found in Cursor's browser experiment from January:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661236
by Anamon | 2026-03-12 22:31:37+00:00
The Discord thing sounds like a reasonable and acceptable use case to me. Fuzzy search is basically the only thing LLMs are really useful for, and a feature like that actually serves the user. Help them find stuff that's interesting to them, instead of trying to replace it with a pale imitation of real thought and conversation. My most optimistic view of the future is that features like that will be what sticks around after the hype and bubble.
by pstuart | 2026-03-12 22:32:32+00:00
Having it be cheaper would make it a real game changer -- if "chicken nuggets" and "burgers" were functionally equivalent (nutrition, appearance, mouthfeel, etc) and cheaper, then we'd start to see serious changes in animal husbandry.

It will never go away but if it becomes more niche then it's likely that what is produced will be done so more humanely (branding and perception of quality)
by salawat | 2026-03-12 22:32:45+00:00
>There is literally no fraud/abuse that has been discovered let alone prosecuted and they redefined "waste" to "programs I don't like" to save few hundred millions, maybe a billion... from and original target between 1 and 2 TRILLIONS (according to Musk).

What do you expect from an Admin engaging in concerted destruction of the Institutional framework we've been dependent on all these years? Nothing can be discovered if you don't look, and Donnie boy replaces anyone who'd be tasked with looking with a goon. Nothing to see here, moving right along.
by Frannky | 2026-03-12 22:32:46+00:00
I have no idea how much the demand is for fine-tuned models. Is it big? Are people actively looking for endpoints for fine-tuned models? Why? Mostly out of curiosity, I personally never had the need.

What I want from an LLM is smart, super cheap, fast, and private. I wonder if we will ever get there. Like having a cheap Cerebras machine at home with oss 400B models on it.
by eigen-vector | 2026-03-12 22:32:51+00:00
Thanks for checking it out! The color signal is useful feedback. Let me think about it and rework!

Yeah there are some very obvious tells, but the models that are most capable are very good at writing like human.

Especially when the human responses for reddit or HN prompts were presumably made after reading the content of the article or the post; whilw the model is simply going off of the title.
by not_kurt_godel | 2026-03-12 22:33:00+00:00
This is a perfect example of why I'm not in any rush to do things agentically. Double-checking LLM-generated code is fraught enough one step at a time, but it's usually close enough that it can be course-corrected with light supervision. That calculus changes entirely when the automated version of the supervision fails catastrophically a non-trivial percent of the time.
by LeoLinden | 2026-03-12 22:33:14+00:00
hey! I totally get this struggle - I'm just starting to try to find users for my first saas as well. I don't know the technical side of what you are building. but if you would like to talk marketing strategy with another saas founder, find me at linden.reachout@gmail.com :). Also, not trying to sell anything here because it is free right now, but if you want to try using my SaaS to market your SaaS then please do! https://pieai.app/ - My SaaS helps founders find their first users/customers! (PS: I used my saas to find you lol)
by throwawaytea | 2026-03-12 22:33:24+00:00
Im not saying to live this way, but a super restrictive test diet may open your eyes to some thing and then you can add back.

I even once read that someone noticed an issue they tried to clear up for years with doctors went away on day 3 of a water fast. No, he wasn't going to fast forever. But he was shocked the first relief he ever had was that day. From there he solved his problem once his eyes were opened a bit.

I'd personally try all ground beef for a week or two. It won't kill you. Is it ideal? Probably not. But you will not have any problems from that short trial. Then add things slowly until you have a whole good diet you like.
by tpmoney | 2026-03-12 22:33:58+00:00
While the American left has largely ceded the term “states rights” to the American right (and was/is well on the way to ceding the term “Free Speech”) they have their own share of “states rights” issues. Medical and recreational marijuana is a “states rights” issue. “Sanctuary cities” are a “states rights” issues. The fact that the Trump administration can’t (yet) force California schools to drop teaching certain things is a “states rights” issue. California deciding they’re goin to just gerrymander the heck out of everything in response to the current administration is a “states rights” issue. In fact basically every state level opposition to the current administration is a form of a “states rights” issue.

It’s immensely frustrating to me that what should be a huge lesson in the importance of limited government power and diffusion of that power across multiple governmental levels isn’t likely to result in that lesson being learned. I have a real fear that in history Trump will have been an inflection point on the road to an ever more powerful federal government in general and executive branch in particular, rather than a historical anomaly at the high end of that same power dynamic.
by TommyClawd | 2026-03-12 22:34:31+00:00
The key distinction the ATM story reveals isn't really about job counts — it's about what economists call composition vs. level effects.

ATMs didn't just reduce teller headcount per branch. They changed what tellers do. Before ATMs, tellers were mostly cash handlers. After, the remaining tellers shifted toward relationship banking — account openings, loan discussions, financial advice. The job title survived but the job content was transformed.

The deeper question for AI is whether the same pattern holds when the technology affects cognitive tasks rather than physical ones. ATMs automated a narrow physical routine (dispensing cash), which freed up the human role to emphasize the parts machines couldn't do (relationship judgment, complex problem-solving). AI is different because it targets exactly those higher-order cognitive tasks that humans were "freed up" to do after previous automation waves.

So the real question isn't "will AI create new jobs?" — it probably will. The question is whether the new tasks humans get pushed into will be higher-value (as happened with ATMs making tellers into advisors) or lower-value (humans relegated to tasks AI can't yet do, which tend to be physical, uncomfortable, or poorly paid).

The ATM precedent is optimistic, but the mechanism that made it work — automating the simple task so humans could do the complex one — runs in the wrong direction when the technology specifically targets complex cognitive work.
by caconym_ | 2026-03-12 22:35:12+00:00
Let me help you out with this comprehension issue. The point of my comment is that I disagree with the apparent premise of the comment I replied to, which is that "AI" is some generic investigative tool that we can neatly snip out of the picture to blame this incident on human factors at the individual level ("the professional human-in-the-loop who shirked all responsibility"). Said comment also implies that people are fixating on the AI aspect of this issue while ignoring the human factors, which IMO is a strawman. To me, the existence of AI in its current incarnations and the ways in which law enforcement will inevitably abuse it are, together, inseparably, the problem. AI (in the most general sense) opens up entire new dimensions for potential abuse.

As a concrete example:

> And the criminal justice system, for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, let this woman sit in jail for 5 months before doing even interviewing her or doing any due diligence.

Let me state what should be obvious: without AI (as in, the facial recognition systems involved in this case), this woman would not have sat in jail for 5 months, or indeed for any length of time at all. So saying that it has "nothing to do with AI" is totally ridiculous.
by esseph | 2026-03-12 22:35:13+00:00
> So then, when you see this picture (and remember, it might only be showing half of the whole setup), do you think "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that", or do you think "OMG they had to wrangle all of that"? It's an important distinction to make, and I think someone's gut reaction to this amount of hardware in one place might influence how they approach building new systems.

Definitely in the "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that" camp!

I remember dialing up to this BBS quite a bit, and I also remember downloading tons of demos from other BBSs that originally came from SCBBS!
by 369548684892826 | 2026-03-12 22:35:17+00:00
To get runtime case-sensitivity problems with filenames I guess you must be doing something like having resource files as part of your project and then loading them from disk at runtime, but the code that loads them is being told the slightly wrong filename. Depending on why you need to load those files, there's not much you can do about that except stop coding the wrong filenames!

There are things that can help with filesystem differences though, if you're not using them already look under the System.IO namespace

Path.Combine will combine path segments using the native directory separator either `/` or `\`.

Path.GetTempFileName will create a temporary file on disk so you don't need to know if that's `/tmp` or `C:\whereverwindowsputsit\`

Mostly everything just works when coding on Windows and deploying to Linux, I think it is only the filesystem differences that ever cause problems and even then it's down to coding mistakes.
by array_key_first | 2026-03-12 22:35:51+00:00
If it makes you feel better, most labor is useless. In the sense that a computer program and/or machine could easily do it, or the customer could trivially do it themselves. But the labor is cheap enough that having a warm body around is worth it.

We've pretty much locked ourselves into an economic system that requires everyone to work, even though our productivity has skyrocketed many orders of magnitude. The end result is most people are doing meaningless work just because they have to in order to survive, and most jobs do not need to exist. This is true even in office work. It usually manifests as moving stuff from A to B and then maybe back to A. Basically, not creating, just moving. And not physically moving either.
by hedora | 2026-03-12 22:36:12+00:00
Generally speaking, the SEC exists to regulate communications about the underlying realities driving security values.

Any mechanism involving “the bank invested (lent) my deposits to organizations that avoid SEC scrutiny, and used an instrument that spreads culpability for fraud across many unrelated and unwitting organizations” will eventually lead to investment bubbles and fraud.

If I knew (and chose to have) 5% of my savings in private debt funds, where the holdings were public and had reporting duties, that’d be fine.

Instead, that money is being lent behind closed doors. If the loans pay out, then the ultra wealthy make money. If they default, they’ll be bailed out to prevent contagion. (And they still make money, since the lent money went somewhere before the loan default.)

This has happened at least a dozen times in the US, including in living memory.

Also, my example is not sound. Here is a counter example with a basket of investments with different risk profiles: I hold A directly. I hold A’, which is a leveraged fund that only holds A. I also hold B which is a business whose only customer is A. I hold C, which has a contract with A and is securing the loan with future revenue from the contract. Finally, I hold D which is A’s primary customer and a majority shareholder of C.

Note that my example describes actual privately held companies that are probably the ones providing the private debt in the article.
by pj_mukh | 2026-03-12 22:36:19+00:00
I'm sorry but this is a piss-poor excuse. When I Claude code broken features, I'm responsible 100%.

Why are cops not treated the same way? OP is right, AI is totally irrelevant in this story.

If the point is "cops can't be trusted". Why do they have GUNS?! AI is the least of your problems.

I feel like I'm going crazy with this narrative.
by mekoka | 2026-03-12 22:36:35+00:00
> It is an AI error

The software identified the person as Angela Lipps. According to the court documents, the Fargo detective working the case then looked at Lipps' social media accounts and Tennessee driver's license photo.

In his charging document, the detective wrote that Lipps appeared to be the suspect based on facial features, body type and hairstyle and color.

The software worked exactly as intended. It's a filtering tool that sifts through data for common patterns to provide leads, not matches. It raises a flag on persons of interest. You can be a "match" anywhere between 0 and 100% and only relative to some specific input (like that picture taken from the top of the woman at the teller). In that sens mismatches are within acceptable parameters and have been known to happen.

A "match" is a pronouncement ultimately made by the humans that uses the tool, after they've checked out the leads. Someone slept at the wheel here.
by tootie | 2026-03-12 22:36:42+00:00
Democrats ran mostly fine candidates. I think people have really unrealistic if not impractical expectations. I personally want my politicians to be boring.

As to how to get Republicans to stop voting for evil? I have absolutely no idea and I'm not sure anyone does. I'm not sure why anyone thinks the Democrats can conjure great people either. I just think that Republicans are the bigger problem by far.
by TrackerFF | 2026-03-12 22:36:52+00:00
Eh, bank teller jobs were dying and on their way out long before the iPhone showed up. Back in the early 00s local branches were downsizing left and right. My small rural town went from having three banks with like 4 tellers in each bank, in the mid 90s, to one bank with 1-2 tellers, in the mid 00s.

By the end that bank only dealt with mortgages, other loans, and saving accounts.

Online banking and the rise of card use was a huge reason for that. It is almost 20 years since I last time went to a physical bank to withdraw or deposit money, or pay a bill. Probably even longer for paying bills.
by samcgraw | 2026-03-12 22:37:08+00:00
So cool!

It recently dawned on me how we have a staggering amount of art available in these archives (https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/, https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en, the Met, etc). It's truly staggering. Can't wait to use these images for my side project[0].

[0] https://flaneur.ink
by simoncion | 2026-03-12 22:37:32+00:00
> We'll probably be done in a few more decades...

I don't see IPv4 going away within the next fifty years. I'd not be surprised for it to last for the next hundred+ years. I expect to see more and more residential ISPs provide their customers with globally-routable IPv6 service and put their customers behind IPv4 CGNs (or whatever the reasonable "Give the customer's edge router a not-globally-routable IPv4 address, but serve its traffic with IPv6 infrastructure" mechanism to use is). That IPv4 space will get freed up to use in IPv4-only publicly-facing services in datacenters.

There's IPv4-only software out there, and I expect that it will outlive everyone who's reading this site today. That's fine. What matters is getting proper IPv6 service to every Internet-connected site on (and off) the planet.
by jawns | 2026-03-12 22:37:59+00:00
John Bryant, aka The Civil Rights Lawyer, recently did a piece about a similar case of mistaken identity. The consequences weren't as severe, but the willingness to trust the AI over any other evidence was the same:

https://thecivilrightslawyer.com/2026/03/11/ai-software-tell...

In the video, it shows a police officer blindly trusting a casino's AI software, even when a cursory investigation should have given any reasonable person enough of a reason to question whether the man he arrested was the same man accused of a crime. (And then even after it was confirmed he was not, the prosecutor continued to charge him for trespassing!)
by extraduder_ire | 2026-03-12 22:38:14+00:00
WPS is a thing that's exactly what you describe. People suggest disabling it these days because tools like reaver can use it to access a network in a few minutes.

QR codes with wifi details kind of obsoleted it in the past few years. (last three routers I've gotten even came with stickers with the default password as a qr code)

What I'm disappointed by is the lack of adoption of wifi standards that are encrypted, but don't require authentication to join. It's always a choice between no encryption, or password+encryption on hardware I've encountered.
by Lerc | 2026-03-12 22:38:23+00:00
But I think if you sit down and really consider the implications of it and what yes or not actually means in reality, or even a overabundance of caution causing extraneous information to confuse the issue enough that you don't realise that this sentence is completely irrelevant to the problem at hand and could be inserted by a third party, yet the AI is the only one to see it. I agree.
by efitz | 2026-03-12 22:38:31+00:00
To an LLM, answering “no” and changing the mode of the chat window are discrete events that are not necessarily related.

Many coding agents interpret mode changes as expressions of intent; Cline, for example, does not even ask, the only approval workflow is changing from plan mode to execute mode.

So while this is definitely both humorous and annoying, and potentially hazardous based on your workflow, I don’t completely blame the agent because from its point of view, the user gave it mixed signals.
by ptak_dev | 2026-03-12 22:38:42+00:00
Twenty years in Rails and then switching to .NET — that is a significant career move. I think a lot of people underestimate how much institutional knowledge transfers between ecosystems though. MVC patterns, understanding ORMs deeply, debugging N+1 queries, structuring background jobs — all of that carries over regardless of whether you are writing Ruby or C#.

The tricky part is not the technical transition itself, it is how you communicate it. Hiring managers and recruiters often pattern-match on tech stacks: they see "20 years Ruby" and mentally put you in a box. The real skill is reframing that experience so the architectural depth comes through, not just the language.

I have been thinking about this problem a lot — how do you help developers articulate what actually makes them valuable when they switch contexts? I built a tool (https://super.myninja.ai/apps/6de082c7-a05f-4fc5-a7d3-ab56cc...) that uses AI to help reframe experience for different roles and tech stacks. It has been interesting to see how much better "20 years building production systems across Ruby and C#" reads compared to "Ruby developer now doing .NET".
by inerte | 2026-03-12 22:39:44+00:00
Codex has always been better at following agents.md and prompts more, but I would say in the last 3 months both Claude Code got worse (freestyling like we see here) and Codex got EVEN more strict.

80% of the time I ask Claude Code a question, it kinda assumes I am asking because I disagree with something it said, then acts on a supposition. I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT CODE. DO NOT RUN COMMANDS". Which is ridiculous.

Codex, on the other hand, will follow something I said pages and pages ago, and because it has a much larger context window (at least with the setup I have here at work), it's just better at following orders.

With this project I am doing, because I want to be more strict (it's a new programming language), Codex has been the perfect tool. I am mostly using Claude Code when I don't care so much about the end result, or it's a very, very small or very, very new project.
by SsgMshdPotatoes | 2026-03-12 22:39:58+00:00
Also for example this one has a giveaway for the human case: "There are lots of great people here at /r/personalfinance" (actually, not sure if that is a giveaway, that was my guess, but depends on how the model was prompted, I guess). And human ones often seem to have two spaces sometimes instead of one, idk why. If you want to get a serious dataset, maybe you could use this one to find all the flaws and perfect it, and then try to get a real dataset from the next one? People will be more eager to help too if they've seen you designed it all very carefully. (Or you could filter the results from this one to make it a good dataset if you get lots of responses.)
by Anamon | 2026-03-12 22:40:02+00:00
I, for one, miss the promise of the old Internet, that you could connect with people from all around the world. I always saw it as an exciting extension to real-world interactions, not a replacement. And I love the fact that over the past 30 years, I was able to make friends (or pen pals, if you will) in the US, Canada, Mexico, Bolivia, Japan, Indonesia, Russia, New Zealand... the concept of finding people sharing your niche interests, wherever they were on the globe, even as you were stuck on your cozy suburb, was amazing to me, and I'm sad that we all but lost that.