MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Suppafly | 2025-04-11 17:20:30+00:00
>I have a very horrible case of this. One day at night, I slept listening to lofi playlist. The next week all my recommendations were screwed. Horrible assumption on the part of algorithm.

None of the music services seem to understand that just because you like multiple genres, that doesn't mean that you want it to randomly jump around between them without any consideration for how they flow together.
by hackingonempty | 2025-04-11 17:20:39+00:00
If you wanted to go skiing at Heavenly in Lake Tahoe in 1997 or 1998 you would pay about $98 in March 2025 dollars, according to the US BLS CPI calculator. This season a lift ticket is $232. Incline/DiamondMountain was $58 in 82-83, now $165.

Likewise when I looked at concert ticket stubs for the 1970's - 2000 the prices were consistently about $40-50 in todays dollars for top acts in big venues.
by sokoloff | 2025-04-11 17:21:03+00:00
I am ~98th percentile car guy. I own two classic Mustangs, one stock, one restomodded by me, and have had a variety of interesting daily drivers over the decades, including dailying an 80s Alfa Spider year-round including 4 winters in Boston.

It’s comfortable, safe, and dead-nuts reliable, but no one gives a shit about or even notices my hybrid RX450h.
by GolDDranks | 2025-04-11 17:21:09+00:00
I am definitely not an expert in 3D graphics... but this looks such an astonishingly simple and effective method, it makes me to question why this wasn't already thought of and picked up?

I get that with fixed-pipeline GPUs you do what the hardware and driver make you do, but with the advent of programmable pipelines, you'd though improving stuff like this would be the first things people do?

Anyway, gotta run and implement this in my toy Metal renderer.
by palata | 2025-04-11 17:22:05+00:00
The problem with the ultra-rich is not that it's hard to get there, but rather that it is possible. Nobody is personally worth billions, period. The fact that some individuals get there shows a flaw in the system.

The second thing that I wanted to say is that even though there are examples of originally not ultra-rich people becoming ultra-rich in the US (e.g. Zuckerberg and Besos), the likelihood of this happening is almost zero. Why is it that people keep hoping that it may happen to them? We should not build a system for a handful to become ultra-rich, but for most to live as well as possible.
by olyjohn | 2025-04-11 17:22:26+00:00
Win2k also had the smoothest mouse movements that I had ever seen. If you had a PS/2 Mouse, you could turn up the sample rate up to the max. Dragging windows looked incredible. Even my Mac to this day with a fancy brand new 4k display can't match it. My mouse still looks blurry as it moves across the screen.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-04-11 17:22:38+00:00
There is no such thing as "get as good as a human artist" unless it becomes an actual human that lived the human experience. Even bad art starts with something to express and a want to express it.

Without that, it's only as good as a human artist in the way a picture of a work of art is.

Actual AI art would first require an ai that wants to express something, and then it would have be trying to express something about the the life of an ai, which could really only be understood by another ai.

The most we could get out of it is maybe by chance it might be appealing like a flower or a rock. That is, an actual flower not an artists depiction of a flower or even an actual flower that someone pointed out to you.

An actual flower, that wasn't presented but you just found growing, might be pretty but it isn't a message and has no meaning or intent and isn't art. We like them as irrelevant bystanders observing something going on between plants and pollenators. Any meaning we percieve is actually only our own meanings we apply to something that was not created for that purpose.

And I don't think you get to say the hate is misdirected. What an amazing statement. These are the paying users saying what they don't like directly. They are the final authority on that.
by ruben_varnish | 2025-04-11 17:22:45+00:00
I do owe you an email reply on that. I haven't forgotten that, just so you know.

But yes, Varnish Cache is not exactly what you would call Cloud Native.

Varnish Software have launched Pro currently on AWS only at a much lower price point, but it is still somewhat limited. I think that a Free-tier providing some of the goodies you mention would also cover much of what's needed for today's workloads including better memory management, in-core TLS and a better developer experience by having much better K8s support. Much of this could and should go into Varnish Cache, but that is a longer road as the project as such has a different focus than we do.

Expect more on that front this year @pbower :)
Ask HN: When you've built an MVP, how do you validate that people want it?
by sholajegede | 2025-04-11 17:23:16+00:00
I’m working on a tool called ValidateAnIdea designed to help early-stage founders quickly test demand for their ideas, get real user feedback, and even collect payments, all before writing a single line of code.

Kind of like bolt.new, but focused entirely on pre-product validation: you go from prompt to waitlist in seconds, with built-in email + feedback collection and payment integration for paid interest.

Here’s the interesting part: I’m using ValidateAnIdea… to validate ValidateAnIdea.

I’m trying to talk to as many early-stage founders and idea people as possible.

Would love to hear:

- Have you ever tried validating before building? What worked or didn’t?

- What would you want in a tool like this?

Also, you can join our waitlist here: https://validateanidea.com
by jerf | 2025-04-11 17:24:09+00:00
"This begs the question: why aren’t language and library designers stealing the structure behind Erlang’s behaviours, rather than copying the ideas of lightweight processes and message passing?"

Because the function signatures of Erlang's behaviors are critically tied to Erlang's other functionality, specifically its unusual use of immutability. You need a separate init call for its servers because of that, and a very distinct use of the state management to work exactly the same way.

But to achieve the same goals in other languages, you almost always shouldn't directly copy what Erlang is doing. In fact when I see "Look! I ported gen_server into $SOME_OTHER_LANGUAGE" and I see exactly and precisely the exact interface Erlang has, I know that the port doesn't deeply understand what Erlang is doing.

When I ported the idea of supervisor trees into Go [1], I did so idiomatically. It turns out in modern Go the correct interface for "a thing that can be supervised" is not precisely the same signature that Erlang has, but

type Service interface { Serve(context.Context) }

That's all you need and all you should use... in Go. Your other language may vary. Go doesn't need a "handle_event/2" because it has channels, and you should use those, not because they are "better" or "worse" but because that's what this language does. In another language you may use something else. In another infrastructure you may end up sending things over Kafka or some cloud event bus rather than "calling a handle_event/2". The key is in building an event-based system, not copying the exact implementation Erlang has.

A peculiar issue the Erlang community has is getting excessively convinced that there's something super-mega-special about the exact way Erlang does it, and that if you do it any other way it is ipso facto wrong and therefore not reliable. This may have been true in 2005; it is not true in 2025. Where once Erlang had almost the only sensible answer, in 2025 the problem is poking through the ocean of answers deluging us! While I recommend learning from Erlang about reliable software, I strongly recommend against just blind-porting out the exact way Erlang achieves it into any other language. It is in almost any other language context the wrong answer. Even other immutable languages generally vary enough that they can't just copy the same structure.

[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2930/
by senderista | 2025-04-11 17:24:27+00:00
For me the most interesting concept in Erlang/BEAM is that partial recovery is built in from the ground up. When an unexpected state is encountered, instead of either killing the entire process or trying to proceed and risking corruption, you just roll back to a known good state, at the most granular level possible. This idea was researched many years ago under the name of "microreboots"(associated with "crash-only software"), but only Erlang/BEAM made it a first-class concept in a production system.
by theamk | 2025-04-11 17:25:06+00:00
you only think until you have to extract some information from it. "Here is a dir full of CI job definitions, find all the ones which require extra permissions" - trivial in yaml or json or toml, could be hard to impossible for Python/nodejs.

or "I am doing ci job frontend, for each job I need to get a list of inputs it takes and their description, but without doing full code checkout" - good luck doing this if your jobs are in python/nodejs.

(to be fair, there are programming languages that are also severely limited and can be evaluated mostly safely, like Starlark, but I don't think they'd match your definition)
by FloorEgg | 2025-04-11 17:25:14+00:00
I agree, but what was fair and effective in 1970 might not be anymore, right?

Do you agree that these processes need to evolve over time?

And if so, what if they haven't been evolving as fast as the rest of the world and have fallen behind?

What is a leader to do, when many processes no longer are in anyone's best interest other than the people who maintain them and those have learned to exploit them?

The government doesn't seem like a machine to me, more like society's nervous system. It's a very scary idea that it has become so rigid and so outdated that a massive overhaul is necessary. It does seem like an opening for extremism (fascism, tyranny), which I'm sure we both fear. I just find it very hard to tell whether disrupting the system or letting it continue will lead to a better outcome for Americans.
by vlovich123 | 2025-04-11 17:25:31+00:00
From your own link:

> Arch Linux is 87.7% reproducible with 1794 bad 0 unknown and 12762 good packages.

That's < 15k packages. Nix by comparison has ~100k total packages they are trying to make reproducible and has about 85% of them reproducible. Same goes for Debian - ~37k packages tracked for reproducible builds. One way to lie with percentages is when the absolute numbers are so disparate.

> This is completely the wrong way around. Debian spearheaded the Reproducible Builds efforts in 2016 with contributions from SUSE, Fedora and Arch. NixOS got onto this as well but has seen less progress until the past 4-5 years. The NixOS efforts owes the Debian project all their thanks.

Debian organized the broader effort across Linux distros. However the Nix project was designed from the ground up around reproducibility. It also pioneered architectural approaches that other systems have tried to emulate since. I think you're grossly misunderstanding the role Nix played in this effort.
by Towaway69 | 2025-04-11 17:25:41+00:00
I've just gotten back into Erlang becuase of the lightweight processes and message passing, so far behaviour has been secondary (i.e. just learning about them)!

The project is about bring visual Flow Based Programming(FBP)[1] to Erlang. FBP seems to be made for Erlang and I was surprised there was something already but there does not seem to be.

My goto tool for FBP is Node-RED and hence the basic idea is to bolt a Node-RED frontend on to an Erlang backend and to have every node being a process. Node-REDs frontend is great for modelling message passing between nodes, hence there is a very simply one-to-one mapping to Erlangs processes and messages.

I've implemented some basics and started to create some unit tests as flows to slowly build up functionality. I would really like this to be 100% compatiable to Node-RED the NodeJS backend. For more details, the github repo --> https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red

Overall Erlang is amazingly well suited to this and astonished that no one else has done anything like this - or have they?

[1] = https://jpaulm.github.io/fbp/index.html
by kashunstva | 2025-04-11 17:25:45+00:00
> All you have to do is lay low and not break any laws or do things that attract attention of the authorities

More likely what you suggest is necessary but not sufficient. The Administration claimed that all of the people sent to the El Salvador prison were violent criminals. In fact, 90% were no such thing. I think you are overestimating the degree to which the rule of law - due process in particular- is now operative in the United States.
by fxtentacle | 2025-04-11 17:25:59+00:00
I fully agree with this.

I was involved very early with automated speech recognition for transcribing meetings, but then both UberConference and Google Meet just integrated it into their existing offerings, thereby massively reducing the market size for standalone solutions. And given how heavily subsidized AI API calls are at the moment, just relying on them is a huge risk for your business model, because you never know when your suppliers' prices will 10x to represent the true cost of providing those AI services.

In my opinion, the sales of many of these new AI tools are mostly driven by the existing audience of the creator. In many cases, you could just ask an LLM to quickly build you your own competing solution, which you can then use for free. E.g. all those SEO content and LinkedIn blog post bots. Vibe-coded AI "businesses" are the software equivalent of branded white t-shirts.
by ruben_varnish | 2025-04-11 17:26:13+00:00
Imagine having all that being run by Varnish as the data plane?

Do you think the whole MACH stack users would then move their workload to such a controller/ingress/gateway?

I think they wouldn't, because they don't necessarily understand (or need?) the advantages of caching at scale and flexibility that Varnish provides.

But if you say that you will accelerate everything in their K8s cluster... Then maybe ;)

We'll see. I have a wish for Kubecon in Q4
by randcraw | 2025-04-11 17:26:18+00:00
Here's the FDA announcement:

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-anno...

Fact is, pharmas already pre-screen immune response in vitro using various stat and ML algorithms, a no-brainer that's been done for years. Organoids are useful to detect only the obvious toxicities in the most obvious tissues (liver, kidney, neural). Also a no-brainer that's been done for years mostly in animal studies.

The acid test is what FDA criteria will change now in trusting nonclinical data and novel biomarker thresholds in novel criteria like simulations (much less AI black boxes). Attempts to address this also has been in development in the industry for decades, to invent new standards in a precompetitive space -- to be shared among drug developers so they can be freely employed by all. I don't see AI moving the needle, especially how inexplicable AI continues to be (as opposed to classical statistical ML methods, which CAN explain themselves).

Caveat patiens.
by lyime | 2025-04-11 17:26:25+00:00
Lots of founders go through this. You should have an honest conversation with your co-founder. Probably couples therapy. One option is to do it with another founder who has been there (me).

You both are going through a challenging time. Of-course you are going to find some things that are more interesting to you than your founder, and vice versa. Especially if you are pivoting every month (which is a whole different problem).

Going through tough times can build resentment, the way to get on the same page is to talk.
by mattdeboard | 2025-04-11 17:26:44+00:00
Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my opinion.
by UncleEntity | 2025-04-11 17:26:57+00:00
I have to say, as an American citizen, that maybe, just maybe, we can give just a little benefit of doubt to a scientists who followed all the rules to come to this country and maybe, just maybe, isn't all that familiar with the subtle nuances of the anti-frog smuggling statute.

Back in the day they would just be, like, "yeah, sorry, we can't let the frogs in."
by _mlbt | 2025-04-11 17:27:26+00:00
Federal IT workers are hardly working for poverty wages. In addition to their base salaries, they receive additional locality pay, generous benefits like paid time off, retirement benefits, inexpensive health insurance and life insurance, training and advancement opportunities, and the opportunity to receive monetary and time off awards. It’s not FAANG salaries, but they are very well compensated and the working conditions are usually great.
by razemio | 2025-04-11 17:27:49+00:00
I am not Parkash. Just check my profile. I am not a bot. github.com / razem-io. I checked his youtube videos. He seems to lack presentation skills but his app is very usable at its current state.

I have both apps open. The STT seems to be faster with VoiceInk. Like it is instant. I can send you a video if you want.

I am sorry. I did not want your product to look bad. You are right you still need to offload the llm part to openrouter and the like if you want this to be fast too. However, having the ability to switch AI on/off on demand and context aware with custom prompts is perfect. It can use ollama too. Yes this will be much slower but local. Best off both worlds. No subscription, even if you use cloud ai.
by browningstreet | 2025-04-11 17:27:58+00:00
Going from a basic template to all the little changes you need to make to build the basic shell you need for a new site is still a lot of work. Think of all the best practices cruft required for the pages typically linked to from the footer. A sporting good site is different than a directory blog is different than a single serving social media aggregation site.

I think it's plausible for AI to help with the tedious setup stuff and get you to the part where you start making it your own.
by colechristensen | 2025-04-11 17:28:07+00:00
Yes, that's what civilization -> industrialization -> automation does: eliminate jobs, which opens up opportunities for new jobs.

you are no longer an animal spending most of your waking life searching for food, nor do you build your own shelter, make your own clothes, construct tools, etc

yes, automation seeks to eliminate factory jobs, most of them are pretty awful anyway. this opens up new options as every step along the way always has

and yes, the change isn't always easy for the folks that have to find something new
by hinkley | 2025-04-11 17:28:09+00:00
I’ve worked with a few individuals, mostly managers, who intended to write books informed by our experiences. It was always frustrating for me to see that we disagreed about what aspects of our work made us successful. There was always something they minimized as being nice that I felt was essential.

And here we see someone claiming that lightweight processes and message passing aren’t the secret sauce, missing that Erlang as Communicating Sequential Processes is indivisible from those qualities, and then repeatedly mentioning CSP as part of the secret sauce.

Examples:

> The application programmer writes sequential code, all concurrency is hidden away in the behaviour;

> Easier for new team members to get started: business logic is sequential, similar structure that they might have seen before elsewhere;

> Supervisors and the “let it crash” philosophy, appear to produce reliable systems. Joe uses the Ericsson AXD301 telephone switch example again (p. 191):

Behaviors are interesting and solve a commonly encountered problem in the 80’s that was still being solved in some cases in the 00’s, but it’s a means as much as an end in Erlang. It’s how they implemented those other qualities. But I don’t know if they had to, to make Erlang still mostly be Erlang.
by valorzard | 2025-04-11 17:28:16+00:00
WebRTC is lowkey one of the most underrated technologies out there, ESPECIALLY WebRTC data channels.

WebRTC data channels are basically “UDP on the web” but they have lots of controls to change how reliable they are, so they can be used as TCP style connections as well.

I still don’t fully understand why more people don’t use them over something like QUIC. (I think I’ve asked this question before here, but I wasn’t really satisfied with the answers)

I sadly switched off of using them, but mostly because the ecosystem around there is super underdeveloped compared to the ecosystem around QUIC/quinn. There is a LOT of boilerplate involved that feels unnecessary.

But, if you’re making a multiplayer game in the web, it’s basically the best technology to use cuz it already works. And if you use a library like libdatachannel or pion, you could make the game in Go or C++ and compile it for both Steam and the web!

Here’s a project I did with them that shows off compiled for both web and desktop: https://github.com/ValorZard/gopher-combat
by Foxboron | 2025-04-11 17:29:37+00:00
> That's < 15k packages. Nix by comparison has ~100k total packages they are trying to make reproducible and has about 85% of them reproducible. Same goes for Debian - ~37k packages tracked for reproducible builds. One way to lie with percentages is when the absolute numbers are so disparate.

That's not a lie. That is the package target. The `nixpkgs` repository in the same vein package a huge number of source archives and repackages entire ecosystems into their own repository. This greatly inflates the number of packages. You can't look at the flat numbers.

> However the Nix project was designed from the ground up around reproducibility.

It wasn't.

> It also pioneered architectural approaches that other systems have tried to emulate since.

This has had no bearing, and you are greatly overestimating the technical details of nix here. It's fundamentally invented in 2002, and things has progressed since then. `rpath` hacking really is not magic.

> I think you're grossly misunderstanding the role Nix played in this effort.

I've been contributing to the Reproducible Builds effort since 2018.
by killjoywashere | 2025-04-11 17:30:40+00:00
A major incentive for hiring work out to the private sector is the impossibility of firing GS-series employees. Ultimately, whomever the elites are who happen to be taking a lap through government today are interesting in maintaining a responsive chattel workforce capable of reaping and sowing the crops of the day. They depend on their slave drivers, I mean senior HR staff, to keep them informed about how their current staff mix affects their ability to react to the crises of the day. If you have tons of highly trained agroconomists in GS billets, what are you going to do with them?
by nabla9 | 2025-04-11 17:30:43+00:00
Apple, Amazon, Dell, Boeing, Nike, get hurt badly immediately. US farmers within weeks. If this fight escalates Xi, can start putting pressure to Tesla. Musk would probably throw $1B to Trump to end the pain.

Trump will cave within 1-2 weeks is my prediction. He will declare losing as winning and that will be it. Tariffs will return to more manageable levels.