MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by codedokode | 2025-04-11 14:39:31+00:00
I don't understand how one can design a website that would survive arbitrary style changes. I think that is unrealistic, so the designer should expect all default styles to be standard. And if the user has too much free time to change the font size then it is their own problem; my suggestion is that they simply use reader mode and change the styles there.

I would like to remind that some time ago browsers allowed to change the default font size; it never worked well so Opera started to scale the whole page instead. Other browsers followed it.

Android browsers seem to repeat the same mistake by the way: they override developer's styles when the user changes font size in OS accessibility settings.
by npn | 2025-04-11 14:40:06+00:00
> gc latency I don't know, never care much about it, haven't cause any issue the 6 years I run my web services using Crystal.

> long running programs depends, I write several services that running 24/7. Some runs fine for months, some just refuses to response after a few day. Too busy to track for the cause so I just automatically reset the affected services at 4AM.
by alchemist1e9 | 2025-04-11 14:40:14+00:00
Sure it does. The strategy is based on chaos and reminding all the world, allies included that the US is in charge and they want some very specific changes from both Canada and EU, they need them to militarize quickly, the US military is furious that all their allies appear to be almost incapable, very little naval power specifically. I’d even argue the implied threat to leave NATO, the talk of annexation of Canada and Greenland, it’s all strategic psychological warfare on allies to shock them into action … and it’s working … take a look a Germany’s new military budget and plans. There is also an intentional devaluation of the dollar to assist in re-industrialization. This is all national security and world order driven, not economics, and it’s actually the optimal time during a strong domestic US economy to try to make these changes.
by troyvit | 2025-04-11 14:40:22+00:00
I was speaking to ESR's essay holding up to the test of time but you have a good point. I'd argue however that the lock-down Apple imposes on OS X, such as signed system volumes, keeps them firmly planted in a cathedral. That said I don't know why I'd argue with Neal Stephenson about this stuff to begin with so maybe I should stop typing :)
by toss1 | 2025-04-11 14:40:56+00:00
Nice example, but not everything is like automobiles where probably not even one in 1000 people has ever been to a track day let alone actually raced a car, but sporty marques are desired.

A very large portion of people actually cares about what they are searching for, and want the ability to ACTUALLY search and find that, with real parameters, not merely get some not-even-close stuff shoved onto their screen instead. That is NOT the serendipity of browsing the stacks in a great library.

A great example of failure is Amazon. I run a small design & manufacturing business, and years ago started getting pestered by Amazon about "Amazon Business" trying to supply both office staples and parts to businesses. This was an area that had enormous potential. Yet, they have entirely failed. I've never bought a single item, and it has faded.

Their primary competitor is McMaster-Carr [0] who does it right. Well-defined categories of everything, and highly specific search capabilities, at reasonable but not bargain prices. EVERYTHING you might search for is fully parameterized in every dimension and feature. Min/max/exact, width/depth/height/thread/diameter/material/containerType/etc./etc./etc. appropriate for each type of product. The key is McMaster DOES NOT WASTE MY TIME. I can go there, quickly find what I want or determine that they don't have it, and get on with my day.

The smaller company that does it right is still beating the tech giant a decade later. Same for other similar suppliers who actually have a clue about what their customers really want.

They continue to prevail over tech giants and VC-funded sites BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT STUPID.

It would be nice if the tech/vc crowd would also stop being stupid. They started out not stupid, but they really lose the plot when they think a few extra eyeballs this week will really win in the long run. At least provide two modes, a strict and serious search and their new messy UI. But they are stupid and this will not happen. Enshittification rules the day.

[0] https://www.mcmaster.com/
by phlakaton | 2025-04-11 14:41:55+00:00
You can name almost anything (these are general-purpose languages, after all), but I'll just throw a couple of things out there:

1. A compiler. The actual algorithms and datastructures might not be all that interesting (or they might be if you're really interested in that sort of thing), but the kinds of transformations you're doing from stage to stage are sophisticated.

2. An analytics pipeline. If you're working in the Spark/Scala world, you're writing high-level functional code that represents the transformation of data from input to output, and the framework is compiling it into a distributed program that loads your data across a cluster of nodes, executes the necessary transformations, and assembles the results. In this case there is a ton of stateful I/O involved, all interleaved with your code, but the framework abstracts it away from you.
Show HN: Omiword – A daily, sector-based word puzzle
by DamnInteresting | 2025-04-11 14:42:16+00:00
Hi everybody. I occasionally make little browser-based games, and this is my latest attempt. It's not quite done, but it's quite playable (note: it does include audio):

https://www.omiword.com/

This has been my occasional tinker target for ~5 years now, starting in the early days of Covid. The objective is to drag letter tiles within certain boundaries to spell four common American-English words.

It hasn't got ads or anything, it's just supposed to be fun for its own sake. If people happen to like it, I might add an option for folks to make a small, one-time payment to unlock access to the archive.

I'm happy to hear any feedback, or about any shortcomings that you might discover.
by red_admiral | 2025-04-11 14:42:29+00:00
The story of playing at damming the creek or on the sand at the seaside is wholesome and brought a smile to my face. Cracking the "puzzle" is almost the bad ending of the game, if you don't get any fun at playing it anymore.

People should spend more of their time doing things because they're fun, not because they want to get better at it.

Maybe the apocalypse will happen in our lifetime, maybe not. I intend to have fun as much as I can in my life either way.
by lxgr | 2025-04-11 14:42:38+00:00
To be clear, it's totally fair to require account creation – data and customer relationships are currencies too, after all – in my view. (I might personally choose to not use it then, and that's just as fair.)

I'd just have liked to know about it before selecting a few of my cards, which took me a minute or so. That's too much time/effort to get nothing in return.
by echelon | 2025-04-11 14:42:46+00:00
> Even if someone today builds a better version of what Netflix used to be, it wouldn't matter. They won’t have the rights and licenses to the shows and movies. That’s what keeps people from switching.

What, apart from Stranger Things and Squid Game, has been enough of a cultural touchstone that it keeps people on Netflix? Those aren't things you keep coming back to again and again.

Netflix doesn't own Friends, Seinfeld, The Office, Community, Parks and Rec, etc.

I'd argue Max (nee HBO) has better legacy titles and franchises. They have both enduring IP as well as the reputation of being "destination television".

The thing that keeps people from cancelling Netflix is that they have a better content slate of licensed classics paired with new originals. And they do it in the greatest volume of all the streamers, so there will be "something" on, even if it isn't particularly good.
Rethinking data architecture: Replayability, decoupling, continuous improvement
by odinellefsen | 2025-04-11 14:43:02+00:00
Hey, I work at a new company called Flowcore, and we think we've found a way to make data systems less tightly wound, scary, and a lot more accessible for AI-powered querying. I'd love to get your opinion. we have documentation too.

What is Flowcore?

Flowcore is a platform that captures all your data events as they happen, and keeps them independent from your main database. Instead of locking your data into fixed tables and rigid schemas, Flowcore gives you an event history that stays flexible as your systems evolve. You still have your database, but Flowcore becomes the place where you shape, improve, and rethink your data without limitations.

Why use Flowcore?

With Flowcore, your data architecture works like well-designed code. Each flow listens to your events, transforms them, and sends them where they need to go — fully decoupled from your database or downstream systems. Flowcore uses a special event sourcing approach and also cold-storage to retain a complete history of your data, so when you change your flow logic, you don’t have to rewrite scripts or run risky migrations — you just update your flow and replay your event history, at the click of a button. That means you’re not only fixing mistakes quickly, you’re continuously improving your automations over time. It’s like applying SOLID principles to your data: safe to change, easy to extend, and naturally resilient. And you'll find, your data feels a lot less scary when it’s decoupled from your database as the single source of truth.

But what really unlocks the power is when you bring AI into the mix. With Flowcore MCP Server, you explore and understand your data just by asking questions in plain language. And because Flowcore keeps all your data in one place, not scattered across disconnected systems, you can instantly gain insights even from messy or complex data. The best part? You don’t have to design the perfect schema from day one. Flowcore’s replayability means you can figure out what you care about later, spin up a new table in minutes, and replay your history straight into it. So when you plug in AI, you’re not limited to whatever data you had at the time — you can continuously shape your data into exactly what your AI needs to answer even your most abstract questions.

So the feature that we like the most is the replayability. Seeing as all of your data changes have been captured in the event source like deleting, updating, or creating an entry you can, at the push of a button, derive entirely new read models, backfill missing data, or apply improved logic to your entire historical dataset. Whether you realize you forgot a field, need to enrich your data for AI use, or simply want to reshape how your data is stored, you don’t have to start from scratch. You just update your flow and replay your events through it.

here are the documentation https://docs.flowcore.io and the website https://flowcore.com
by mindslight | 2025-04-11 14:44:28+00:00
To the extent Trump was elected with a mandate, it was to do the things his supporters thought he was going to do from hopeful "4d chess", and not actually to do his best to destroy the country.

My partner was talking to a random person at the supermarket yesterday who, unprompted, started complaining about tariffs/inflation. He voted for Trump and was upset and regretful about what Trump was doing, and saying that he can't believe that Trump "lied".

I suspect this collapse of cognitive dissonance is pretty widespread, especially among the low information voters that thought they were getting neutral information from Fox News etc. This is a mere two months from when the buffoon took power, not the usual sour taste that develops three years into a president's term.
by klabb3 | 2025-04-11 14:44:47+00:00
Overwhelmingly, products are designed to maximize total recurring user interaction, aka engagement or attention grabbing. This is the proxy for ad revenue, the most popular business model (even if Netflix is different). Look at Quora, LinkedIn and even SO, which essentially degraded into content farms for these reasons, largely downstream of the Google search funnel.

But engagement maximization looks the same everywhere – it’s communicating with the amygdala of the user, not their consciousness. And in a way, everyone’s amygdala is kind of the same and generic (sugar foods, violence, rage bait, boobs, chock value etc). Products that are largely designed for higher consciousness are more varied, such as most books. But those drive less engagement.

The amygdala wants more of the same, and the prefrontal cortex seems to want variation. My view is that you can’t have the chocolate muffins and raw carrots on the same plate, or a bookshelf with both Dostoevsky and Playboy magazines. You have to compartmentalize to protect yourself from your own amygdala. Same goes for media. Even well meaning product managers will be completely fooled if they simply follow the metrics.
by Tistron | 2025-04-11 14:45:08+00:00
Nothing has ever felt better than my student days with DC++. The whole campus had a server we all used and I could search for stuff I liked and see what other people who had that on their disks also had, and explore that. I found a lot of music that way, as well as other stuff. Before that we had had a list of ftp servers which was also good once I wrote an indexer, but DC automated all that and made more people able to participate.

I hate the Netflix interface enough that I prefer to watch movies other ways even though I have access to it.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-11 14:45:33+00:00
>This is neither innovative nor showing creativity IMO

Ya'll are gonna be blindsided by AI if you don't turn around and see what is happening.

Programming is getting democratized. People who have never written a CLI command in their life will get the ability to tell a computer what they want it to do. Instead of having to get bent over with a stupid feature-packed $9.99/mo app, they can say "Make me a program that saves my grocery list and suggests healthier alternatives via AI analyses." And get a program that is dead simple and does exactly the simple task they want it to do.

Keep in mind that Excel '98 probably covers 90% of excel uses for 90% of users. Yet here we are in 2025 with society having spent billions over the years to upgrade and now subscribe to msoffice so Amy in HR can add up columns of payroll.

You have completely lost sight of reality if you think seeing a program like this is dumb because "anyone can just go and copy the git from a million different clones, load it into their choice programming enviroment, get the relevant dependencies, compile it and be playing in no time!". Maybe you live in a bubble where those words are English to everyone, but it is not reality.

For SWE's, I have great sympathy and the comradery for engineers solving hard problems all day.

But for the software industry as a whole? I hope it burns hell. The tolls to cross the moat of "telling the computer what to do" have been egregious and predatory for years.
by torginus | 2025-04-11 14:45:51+00:00
This is just a personal preference thing - but I dislike any attempts at injecting artificial personhood - if they make an agentic personal assistant or whatever, I don't want to think of it as a person but a rather sophisticated tool. My phone uses AI to retouch the pictures it takes with its camera, but I don't have to exchange pleasantries with iPhone Clippy for it to do its thing - it just pretty much does.

I don't want artificial buddies, or servants or whatever except maybe in video games.
by mindslight | 2025-04-11 14:46:00+00:00
Yes, that is one of the mechanisms that has hamstrung us from being able to appropriately respond to the economic effects of offshoring. It can obviously be changed.

Or the mechanisms themselves might not actually have to be changed if we could cast off this myopic political red herring about "the deficit". What we perceive as the balance sheet of "the government" needs to include The Fed, Fannie/Freddie, etc. Treasuries owned by other countries are the equivalent of a big savings account. Treasuries owned by the Fed are the same as all the other other debt owned by the Fed - monetary creation / monetary inflation.
by XCSme | 2025-04-11 14:46:06+00:00
I was initially surprised to see several customers from .gov or medical corporations using my self-hosted analytics platform (I never considered those customer types before), but it makes a lot of sense. I think many of them actually run the platforms locally, and I think all companies that deal with private data (e.g. medical, banks, insurance) should be legally forced to not send any data to third parties, unless the customers explicitly agree to that (or the law forces them to do so).
by dingnuts | 2025-04-11 14:46:18+00:00
Something about the design causes cliques to form, both within and between instances, expressed with mutual blocking and bans based on association.

It's actually extremely antisocial! It's why I left, all the instances were tribes with beefs against the other instances, and that told me something about the design encourages the behavior

calling it antisocial is pretty apt imho
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-11 14:46:28+00:00
Like anything in marketing it is 100x more work than you think.

It was years ago when I worked at it seriously, back then I didn't think nofollow mattered. I think the objective measure of the value of a link is how much traffic you get over it as you can't directly measure Google's PageRank [1]

I think you want every kind of link you can possibly get in large numbers. That includes mentions in blogs, social media, directories, Wikipedia (if you can't add your links to Wikipedia you can always take out your competitor's links and leave a comment that says they are spam... deletionists will love you!) both high quality and low quality, human curated, automatically generated, etc. White hat and black hat SEO go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Don't forget that you want keywords that you want to rank for in the anchor text because one of Google's innovations was indexing the anchor text.

Site architecture matters more than you might think. Most of all it is easier to rank for longer and more obscure query terms than it is to rank for shorter and more popular ones. A corollary to this is that you want to have many pages on your site about many topics because each one is like buying a lottery ticket. For that matter, it is a lot easier to build links to a site with 20,000 pages than a business card site with 5 because a given source might link the business card once but might drop 2,000 links to the big site.

[1] In the original PageRank paper, PageRank transmitted over a link is proportional to the traffic estimated to go over the link assuming web browsing is a certain Markov process
by vincent_s | 2025-04-11 14:46:30+00:00
Max requests are only an additional 5 cents each. The real cost is in tool calls that cost another 5 cents each, which adds up fast in agent mode.

From one day of coding with MAX models:

174 gemini-2.5-pro-exp-max requests × 5¢ = $8.70

1269 premium tool calls × 5¢ = $63.45

143 claude-3.7-sonnet-thinking-max requests × 5¢ = $7.15
by bryanhogan | 2025-04-11 14:46:59+00:00
Great read!

I think what we must keep in mind with many modern products and services, especially popular ones, is that they are not becoming TikTok, they are becoming things competing for our attention in the most perverse ways possible. The potential to make these systems even more manipulative and exploitative is there, I see great potential for UX design that is even "worse" than what we already know.
by muzani | 2025-04-11 14:47:25+00:00
We use it too, but anything that requires actual funds, we would migrate to AWS or refactor.

Like we'd use to allow PMs to change banners/copy on the fly, but Supabase is better. It does RAG but Supabase does that better too. Firebase functions are really good for prototyping, but once it starts to cost money, we move it to AWS. It's good for feature flagging, and we moved that to Growthbook. Analytics started on Firebase and were moved to open source so we'd own the data. The only thing they do well is Crashlytics and that's free.

If everyone was as bad a customer as us, I would assume they're in trouble.

Unfortunately a lot of people have trust issues with Google. We don't want them controlling data and certainly nothing as core as functions, DB, and feature flagging. Then when people don't use these things, Google kills it real fast.
by em-bee | 2025-04-11 14:47:39+00:00
just before going to sleep is the only time i do hobby stuff. in the morning i have to work. putting something off to the next day always means putting it off to the next evening. i don't care how long things take. i care that i can do them right now and then forget about them. if i can't do that then i have to keep the tasks in my mind. i can write them down, but that only helps if i have a habit of doing that.

sometimes i remember some important message i need to send colleagues or clients... for that i like the telegram feature where i can send a message with a delay. i can write it now and it will be sent the next morning or whenever i think is a good time. i wish my email client had that feature too.
by codethief | 2025-04-11 14:47:46+00:00
In case anyone from Varnish is around, possibly even the author himself: Last time we discussed TinyKVM here, I wanted to know[0] whether it could possibly be used as an OCI container runtime and what capabilities it would need? Background: I would like to use it as a runtime in order to allow for nesting containers in my CI pipelines, which is difficult with standard OCI runtimes like runc/crun without granting them privileges or at least additional capabilities that AppArmor is not happy about. Anyway, I'd still be very much interested in an answer! :)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43364218
by olavur | 2025-04-11 14:48:32+00:00
Hey, just want to chime in as a colleague working on Flowcore — I’ve been super excited about what we’re building, especially how the platform flips the usual data modeling process on its head.

In most setups, you're stuck making big up-front decisions about schema, pipelines, and integrations, which usually gets brittle fast. Flowcore is about pushing those decisions downstream, so you can iterate safely — the event history is the source of truth, not the current state in your DB.

What that unlocks is wild: you can reshape your data or change your business logic after the fact, and just replay events into new read models or AI workflows. And honestly, it’s refreshing to stop treating data pipelines like fragile glass sculptures and start treating them more like software — testable, modular, composable.

We’re still early, so feedback is gold — if anything seems confusing, missing, or off, we’d really love to hear it. And if you're working with messy or evolving data, we’d love to know what your biggest pain points are.

Happy to answer any technical questions too!
by Kye | 2025-04-11 14:49:16+00:00
>> "When you say "Account migration does not work" I am forced to ask "compared to what"? There are literally no alternatives. If you have a twitter account with 20k tweets, and you want to leave twitter, "GFY". Ditto if you get banned. A public, instance-independent list of banned and redirected accounts (which survives the death of an instance) could perhaps be a really useful service."

Quite a few people downloaded their entire Twitter archive and uploaded it to Bluesky. For example: https://bsky.app/profile/shortformernie.bsky.social

I can download my entire repo in one click and move it to another PDS, perhaps one I run, or save it for later when there are more options. Or come up with my own way to transform it.