skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You make a good point, that raising capital is the central problem.

It's particularly difficult today when wealth inequality is so high. When so many corporations have vacuumed up trillions of dollars of market cap, and billionaires sit on dynastic wealth that only gets spent through the lens of their ego, slowing innovation in sectors of the economy that aren't traditionally profitable like education, healthcare and the environment.

It seems odd that workers don't have much capital these days, while company owners and investors have millions or billions of dollars. It's reminiscent of the Gilded Age and robber barons collecting businesses into monopolies before regulation, or selling off their parts like private equity firms do today with companies like Toys "R" Us. It leads to feelings that the most likely future is one of megacorps and striking workers, with widespread suffering and violence while productivity is at an all-time high. Case in point:

https://apnews.com/article/amazon-warehouses-quebec-union-jo...

In other words, we live in a rigged economy that hasn't catered to workers since 1980s trickle-down economics and austerity brought neoliberal policies that aren't recommended by macroeconomic principles into widespread adoption.

I believe that's a result of former colonies gaining their independence, so colonizer countries like the US and UK began colonizing themselves. Rather than investing in shared prosperity by nationalizing their means of production, or at the very least incentivizing the creation of worker-owned cooperatives, they chose to privatize them to maintain existing power structures.

Just like in the game of Monopoly, eventually a lucky few end up owning everything if they get an early win. When traditionally 90% of businesses failed in their first year, today we might have 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 startups dominating sectors of the economy due to above-the-fold and long-tail effects.

Multiplied wasted effort under rugged individualist culture eventually grows to consume the entirety of workers' time as they scrape to make rent. Potential tires into wasted talent and widespread underemployment over lost decades as capitalism consumes itself in the end. Eventually driving populist movements that could shift the US's capitalist democratic republic and even Europe's social democracies into authoritarianism or even fascism. Books like Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty go into great depth exploring the inevitabilities of this late-stage capitalism.

Wow am I such a bright-eyed optimist this morning!

-

Continues ->
Busybox commands often don't support all features used to and differ even substantially if you depend on GNU additions. https://www.busybox.net/about.html
Maybe 200 top-line - 100 from MGX and the same from Softbank and Oracle et al.
Start by using home-manager in your current environment. Once you can modularize your own config, start building other systems with it. It's a very deep rabbit hole, and starting off as a replacement for managing your own dotfile scripts and the like is a great way to try it out without having to replace whole systems.
I was surprised by bytedance doing ai but really, they're the only social media company that has done the "suggested/for you" feature in way that everybody isn't aghast by.
If there's one thing I don't think you get banned for on Bluesky it's porn so that comic made zero sense.
Big jumps in benchmarks from Claude's Computer Use though.

87% vs 56% on Webvoyager

58.1% vs 36.2% on WebArena

38.1% vs 22% on OsWorld

These are next gen improvements so the fact that Claude didn't make any waves doesn't really mean anything (Of course no guarantee this will either)
I'm surprised folks on Hackernews are always critical of V1s.

In 18 month, apps will have APIs for "agentic browsing" ™OoTheNigerian ;)

And you will not need to give anything control over your browser. I you will merely connect your app to OpenAI or any other client.
How Do Low-Income Households Respond to Basic Income? Experimental Evidence
Thank you for all of your incredible contributions!
Considering how popular the show was at its peak, the fact that there is still more content to come and how IPs are being rehashed all the time, it would a non zero chance that they redo the entire thing someday.
No, the bias towards natural isn't because of appeal to nature, it's because we co-evolved and we'd know by now if red insect dye is carcinogenic compared to a new synthetic dye that hasn't had decades of interaction with humans. We have a longer time window of prior experience with the older, natural ingredient.

We could be creating something as dangerous as asbestos artificially.
I presume the diet been great for weight loss and blood-sugar maintenance.

What other effects have you noticed, good or bad?
That's also a problem with sheep, you know.
See What's New in Teardown Creator's Custom Voxel Physics Engine
Also just being free of the expectations of others. No matter how it turns out I bet it'd be nice if he could wake up and know that it's been finished and that he doesn't have to worry about people asking about it anymore
> Nowadays the best solution to this issue is "stop using this crate" with libraries like rustls.

Nice to see that the author of the library has a sensible take. Unfortunately the ecosystem does not: https://github.com/seanmonstar/reqwest/blob/master/Cargo.tom...
Crypto Perpetual Motion Machines
I saw a lot of work towards this pre-LLM. Lots and lots.

While it was scaling, someone(s?) smart went and did a UXR study.

Turned out even if you had a 100% success rate (i.e. human on other end), it's dreadfully boring watching someone else use your computer, you can't touch it while they are, and you'd rather just do it yourself

Now throw in the actual latency, the actual error rate, the cost...I am very comfortable saying this is a waste of time, product-wise.
Small related a thread a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40848340
I inhaled the first 2 books in that series.

I will not read the last one even if he publishes it. I won't disparage the guy here, but I am no longer a fan, and I have zero faith he will ever finish the series. And if he does, he gets zero minutes of my time and zero units of my money.
There are certainly levels of the abstraction pyramid where mutable global state is unavoidable; however, it shouldn't be too difficult to get to a point where we have enough abstraction so that we don't need to worry about mutable global state for what we do.

And even if those abstractions can't be 100% effective, we'd go a long way to achieving the desirable results of getting rid of it, if we just develop the mindset of avoiding it if at all possible, excepting for very rare instances where it's needed as a last resort.
Bricklayers for Stronger 3D-Prints now open source [video]
It's for OpenAI.
If there are pre-approved standardized actions, it would be just be a plain old API; it would not be AGI. It's clear the AI companies are aiming for general computer use, not just coding against pre-approved APIs.
I really really freaking wish Americans would stop worrying about who has the best $STUFF, and start worrying about whether their own kids are fed/clothed/educated.

China is too big. This was going to happen eventually. Empires come and go, that's just a fact of life. The question was whether you'd fall back gracefully like Western Europe, now ranking at the top of "World's Happiest Countries", or whether you'll become Russia 2.0 with the biggest guns, richest oligarchs, and the worst quality of life.

Eisenhower 1953 said "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Nobody listened. Americans think life is a Marvel movie, and they are Iron Man. Turns out conflict is not a long-term winning strategy.
I wonder how the "ring context" works under the hood. I have previously had (and recently messed around with again) a somewhat similar project designed for a more toy/exploratory setting (https://github.com/blackhole89/autopen - demo video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O1T2q2t7i4), and one of the main problems to address definitively is the question of how to manage your KV cache cleverly so you don't have to constantly perform too much expensive recomputation whenever the buffer undergoes local changes.

The solution I came up with involved maintaining a tree of tokens branching whenever an alternative next token was explored, with full LLM state snapshots at fixed depth intervals so that the buffer would only have to be "replayed" for a few tokens when something changed. I wonder if there are some mathematical properties of how the important parts of the state (really, the KV cache, which can be thought of as a partial precomputation of the operation that one LLM iteration performs on the context) work that could have made this more efficient, like to avoid saving full snapshots or perhaps to be able to prune the "oldest" tokens out of a state efficiently.

(edit: Georgi's comment that beat me by 3 minutes appears to be pointing at information that would go some way to answer my questions!)
OpenAI is a $50B company that should be releasing serious products, the "scrappy hacker releasing a beta product that doesn't do much" as a defense doesn't apply.
Agreed. Now you're throwing in a presentation layer to wrangle with, and that presentation layer is HTML/CSS/JS, which is the thorniest presentation layer out there.

Or, HTTP POST.
Can it be combined with scheduled tasks?

E.g.

"Every month, log in to LES.com and pay the current balance. If the balance exceeds $500, alert me before paying."
The mouse and keyboard are definitely dying (very slowly) for everyday computing use.

And this kind of seems like an assistant for those.

ChatGPT voice and real-time video is really a beautiful computing experience. Same with Meta Ray Bans AI (if it could level up the real-time).

I'd like just a bulleted list of chats that I can ask it to do stuff and come back to vs watching it click things. E.g.: Setup my Whole Foods cart for the week again please.
> But probably more difficult to get app developers on board.

That's it. The problem is getting Postmates to agree to give away control of their UI. Giving away their ability to upsell you and push whatever makes them more money. Its never going to happen. Netflix still isn't integrated with Apple TV properly because they don't want to give away that access.

I'm not convinced this is the path forward for computers either though.
Yeah. And also fear of ideas not being good enough to match the (by now) likely overblown fan expectations. It's like Valve considering to make Half-life 3: anything less than a masterpiece would be a disappointment.
Yeah fun fact: the books were already well enough known by the time WarCraft 3 was released that the final mission was named "A Symphony of Frost and Flame".
Systematically Improve Your RAG Applications
So are you really saying that large bomber formations carpeting an area is better than precision strikes?
But of course, after all the benchmark issues we've had thus far -- memorization, conflicts of interest, and just plainly low-quality questions -- I think it's fair to be suspicious of the extent to which these numbers will actually map to usability in the real world.
US keeps the 6th fleet in Europe / Mediterranean sea. It costs a pretty penny to defend Europe's seas - about 40 ships,175 aircraft and 21 thousands people.

https://www.c6f.navy.mil/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Sixth_Fleet
From what I've read about his process the initial drafts will vary massively from the finished product because he's very iterative and will go on long digressions either getting characters to a point or exploring where characters would go from where they are at that particular point.

That's what gives them such a rich feeling because he's working with characters and how they'd perhaps operate in the world but that makes it hard to wrangle them into particular positions if you're dedicated to the idea that they should proceed naturally from where they are to where they are next. It leads to a bit of a combinatorial explosion of needing to setup causes to push them into the next part of the story but you have to setup those causes first, which need their own antecedents, and on and on and on.
We already have this

https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use
For those who don't know, He is the gg of `gguf`. Thank you for all your contributions! Literally the core of Ollama, LMStudio, Jan and multiple other apps!
Naturally a "capability" is really just API + prompt.

If your product has a well documented OpenAPI endpoint (not to be confused with OpenAI), then you're basically done as a developer. Just add that endpoint to the "app store", choose your logo, and add your bank account for $$.
This is my suspicion as well.
Show HN: Open-source AI video editor
Hey HN community! I'm one of the lead devs of this project at fal.ai and we created an open source lightweight video editor powered by the latest media AI models. The main goal was to tackle some challenges when dealing with complex media handling and encoding on the browser.

It all started as an internal experiment but as we tackled some of the issues it was clear there could be some value sharing it with the open source community.

Some of the key points and tech stack details:

- It uses IndexedDb, so all data is local (i.e. no auth, no cloud db)

- Multiple AI models for video, image, music and voice-over. APIs are provided by fal.ai

- Built with the typical React+Next.js, Shadcn front-end

- Used remotion.dev for the realtime video preview (this is such a great project, without it the codebase would be twice as large)

- File uploads so you can bring your own media by uploadthing.com

- ffmpeg for encoding the final video and also some ui tricks, like the audio waveform

We deployed a version of it and for now it's free to use. We do plan to add some rate limiting and a bring your own API Key next, but it's open source and I'm curious about what the community will build on top of it, or derive from it. Customize your own video app and if you do, please share.

If you have any questions, hit me up!
Doesn't reddit host its own images, so, none?
Congratulations! This is such a great story. I’ve followed you for years and your success is inspiring
It's time you stopped creating accounts to prosecute this fixation on HN.
How to Write a Job Description That Actually Gets People to Apply
Ah alas there's no way to estimate it?
Having some music on helps me with this too.
To be perfectly clear: I don't think there was any ill will here.

My perception is that Musk may be unaware of the possible consequences of his actions.
From tiny to immense: Geological spotlight on the Alexander Mosaic
Image to Generative Code
How sure are you that the next generation of video compression codecs won't rely in part on AI/ML models?

I'd even be surprised if a decade from now there are 0 models in the Linux kernel. If a SOTA model for I/O scheduling existed & was clearly superior for a broad range of scenarios, why wouldn't Linux adopt it as the default?
Yeah, looks like another "bot" that has no practical use-case.
I'm not the guy you are replying to, but most MDs really don't know anything about nutrition. That simply is not a topic they ever took a class in, and official nutrition recommendations themselves are completely changing. The "food pyramid" with a base of carbs? Must eat breakfast of sugary cereals and orange juice? That's all murderous nonsense. (And it's changed!) And so on.

MDs want "stable" patients who resemble patients they've familiar with. Even though that could mean being diabetic on half-a-dozen meds. Based on my genes, I would be fat and diabetic by now if I had kept following only my doctor's advice.
Not quite. This is operating a computer, Duplex is a (very small) set of pre canned WAVs that can handle negotiating a time during a phone call
Security Scanner for AI Agent Traces: Invariant Analyzer
APIs have an MxN problem. N tools each need to implement M different APIs.

In nearly every case (that an end user cares about), an API will also have a GUI frontend. The GUI is discoverable, able to be authenticated against, definitely exists, and generally usable by the lowest common denominator. Teaching the AI to use this generically, solves the same problem as implementing support for a bunch of APIs without the discoverability and existence problems. In many ways this is horrific compute waste, but it's also a generic MxN solution.
Well, you can look at the US and global situation with obesity and diabetes, and see that whatever people are doing is not working.
(Sorry for the offtopicness but would you mind emailing hn@ycombinator.com? I have some information that might potentially be relevant.)
"operator, please perform this computationally expensive action on my competitors website 1000000 times"
I've never found IMDB ratings to be worth anything.
Isn't that reddit/home depot/instagram's problem? Not a job for the guy you hired to do a thing
I thought Claude Computer Use is through API, and I remember hearing about high number of queries and charges.

This looks like its in browser through the standard $20 Pro fee, which is huge. (EDIT: $200 a month plan so less of a slam dunk but still might be worth it)

Is there any open source or cheap ways to automate things on your computer? For instance I was thinking about a workflow like:

1. Use web to search for [companies] with conditions

2. Use linked in sales navigator to identify people in specific companies and loose search on job title or summary / experience

3. Collect the names for review

Or linked in only: Look at leads provided, and identify any companies they had worked for previously and find similar people in that job title

It doesn't have to be computer use, but given that it relies on my LinkedIn login, it would have to be.
> It is reasonable that things got bad on Dec 12 2000, but I contend that things have gotten worse (at least from a liberal PoV).

What could be worse "from a liberal PoV" than the Supreme Court, on a 5-4 party-line vote, stopping the recount in Florida and thus giving the 2000 election to Bush, who then went on to become President for 8 years?

Even Hillary Clinton doesn't dispute that that she lost the electoral college in 2016, democratically, according to your definition. She conceded on election night.

January 6 was ugly, but Trump still left office at the end of his term.

> I don't know understand the goal of projecting it as always being bad. I think that hides nuances or details that matter.

The goal is to break you out of a dogmatic slumber, in which you seem to think that everything was basically ok until Trump came along. It wasn't.
> Compare it to how email works nowadays, and it's very similar.

> And good luck running your own email server, you'll also get marked as spam by most.

That's exactly the problem. You don't want that to happen.
Their goal was to convert to a hydrogen fuel source. Moonshot for sure, but hardly deserving to fail, especially since that sort of thing would almost certainly be barred in lease terms
Will they? What incentive is there if people haven't started using agents yet?

We already have a way to build websites for machines: it's called APIs. And frankly, I think that's a better answer for "hooking LLM into website" -- the things which make APIs hard for humans (discomfort, inconvenience, low discoverability, technical complexity) aren't really problems for LLMs.
I find this fun because I always described this metric as 'time to cow.' I suppose a sheep is fine too.
Great run, Paras!

If I may:

- Did VWO ever apply to YC?

- Do you foresee PE asset stripping (crashing & burning) VWO eventually?

- What's next (5y time period)?

Thanks.
> So all you need to do to abuse employees is make the algorithm sufficiently complex and get a smooth talking lawyer.

Yeah that is true. I was speaking more to the importance of interpretability in these things, and how the lack of it leads to bad incentives very quickly.

> Problem with high dimensions is that it is really hard to explain without math because you no longer can rely on any visualization reference.

Yep, and the co-dependencies also tend to become very hard to reason about.
Please...it didn't even kill the TV franchise. There's already one spinoff out with a second one in the works.
I'm looking at the reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/t...

Unless it's misrepresented, this looks like an earmarked VC fund
probably more difficult to get app developers on board.

You answered your own question. You have to build the ecosystem if you want to have the facilities your comment outlines.

Whereas the facilities are already in place for "Operator"-like agents.

Even better, it will be difficult for companies who object to users accessing their resources in this fashion to block "Operator"-like agents.
One of the reasons X is being fazed out in favor of Wayland is because X is far more global than it needs to be -- and this is one of the reasons it has security risk that can't be completely removed without API-breaking effects.
totally missed it at first but just watched it. badass. Inventions that build upon what is already in the market are the most ingenious
You ought to distinguish 'the law' that can be discriminatory, unjust, imperfect, and 'the rule of the law', which in theory cannot. In practice, the 'rule of the law' was never truly achieved, nowhere, and recently (post 9/11 it seems) the US might have gotten further from the hypothetical 'perfect state'. Presidential pardon, Guantanamo, or I think closer to everyday life civil forfeiture, or arrest without cause, interrogation without a lawyer...

Some exceptions to the rule of law are just good practice: immunity to the executive power from executing a voted law, immunity for the legislative power (in some countries like France this immunity have some caveats) while elected. Sadly it breeds corruption.
That is not what Duplex is
Then why not say that in the first place? It's not very charitable to get upset with someone for correcting an incorrect number you yourself stated.

Also, what's up with the faux-stutter?
Oh yeah, how could I forget about an obscure repo from a company that's getting banned from the US!

It's simple, with trillions at play, if it's so easy to steal OpenAI's game, why has no one done it yet? Don't "argue" about it, just go and grab the money, it's easy, right?
Elon Musk Controversial Salute Image Beamed on Tesla Factory in Berlin
Depends on the pricing & speed. I think you'd use this to create scripts that would run frequently, then on failure you'd have this evaluate if there were changes and if so create a new script.
Readers of The Freeze Frame Revolution will be having flashbacks...
The announcement of investing $500B with the proposed benefit of creating $100K jobs - to my amazement did not produce any commentary that I came across raising questions about the ROI of spending $5M per job created. I mean it’s all right there in the announcement!

For instance, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, which allocated approximately $787 billion, was estimated to have created or saved between 2.4 and 3.6 million jobs by early 2011. This translates to a cost of roughly $218,000 to $328,000 per job

In contrast, a study summarized by economist Valerie Ramey in 2011 found that each $35,000 of government spending produced one extra job.

Federal Highway Administration estimated that every $1 billion in federal highway and transit investment supports approximately 13,000 jobs for one year, equating to about $77,000 per job.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest...
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17787/w177...
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/otps/pubs/impacts/
Yeah. But before AlexNet GPUs were only for graphics and esoteric papers in scientific computing. The realization that conv layers map well to cuda cores has led to GPU production being a national security issue.