MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yes_man | 2025-04-24 07:04:37+00:00
Fair enough, but now your application is relying on 100% uptime of AWS and S3 and no network failures in between. And what happens if your transaction goes through, but the request to AWS doesn’t? What happens if another operation mutates the target meanwhile before you can retry with current state? Your app is also slowing down since it needs to send the events to S3 and guarantee they got there. Now you are reinventing two-stage commits. Unless you aren’t actually making an audit log and don’t care if events are guaranteed to be logged?

So like OP said, no silver bullets exist for auditing.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-24 07:05:00+00:00
It makes sense if consumerism is your only connection to human society.

It is a form of trained helplessness to fixate perpetually on consumption.

If someone wants to do good in the world, go out and do it. help someone for real. I think it is lack of real connection that leads people to navel gaze about the third order consequences of their clothes or software.

I think this substack [1] summed it up perfectly:

>I was 16 when I realized I had to kill myself. I was in a Denny’s with my friends, looking at an empty glass of Diet Coke. The glass was produced by taking the raw resources of a foreign country, exploiting its workers in horrible factories, and sent to me to drink out of. And I didn’t really have any other option for getting liquid from a nearby water source into my body, it had to travel through moral atrocity along the way. It wasn’t just one glass, of course. It was everything. It was the shoes I was wearing (shoes were a big deal in those days) and the flooring I walked on and the food I ate. The only moral act was to kill oneself, and failure to do that meant you accept your role as a vicious monster. (The depression helped, but maybe the depression/guilt causality was reversed.)

https://deathisbad.substack.com/p/does-the-omelas-kid-have-a...
by onion2k | 2025-04-24 07:05:04+00:00
I think it's slightly more accurate to say people like attention, and choose not to spend much time thinking about whether it's from a person or a bot. The amount of time people spend talking to, or arguing with, bots on sites like Twitter is staggering, and yet the people don't seem to mind that much. They like the interaction. Maybe it's realistic enough to fool them into thinking they're talking to a person.
by watwut | 2025-04-24 07:05:34+00:00
> If you don’t trust the department staff

I find the argument the most absurd in relation to DOGE. There is no reason to give them more trust then to anyone else in goverment ... and multiple reasons to trust them less. Starting from personal histories of some of them and how they were selected.

As such, this "I dont trust" is just reflection of their incompetence, arrogance and a lazy excuse.
by moralestapia | 2025-04-24 07:06:12+00:00
(I don't know)

But I would guess the answer is "no".

If you can prove, as they claim, that you have an algorithm that gives you the optimal solution (aside from the obvious, brute-forced one), you might be one stone throw away to make an argument for some P == NP, that would be HUGE.

But it seems that some people get offended when you tell them their perpetual motion machines are not real.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-04-24 07:06:52+00:00
I hate what is often sold as modern UX. Every criticism is brushed away as just being nostalgic while they are objective design disadvantages to something that often is inherently subjective.

But some design decision are just timeless crap. This is such a fitting example of bad design but there will be still people defending it because of some alleged grandma not finding her settings. Just wait, there are a lot of those.
by aitchnyu | 2025-04-24 07:07:35+00:00
Would LLMs be guilty of trademark infringement?

Llama said its in CM. Gemini said "aiming for Crystal Mark". OpenAI called its output "plain, clear" without mentioning CM. Claude didnt comment its output. Deepseek returned "Here is your passage rewritten in clear, polished English with a refined and elegant tone—what you might call "Crystal Mark English"".
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-04-24 07:08:02+00:00
This is good advice except for deleted_at. Soft deletion is rarely smart. Deleted things just accumulate and every time you query that table is a new opportunity to forget to omit deleted things. Query performance suffers a lot. It's just a needless complexity.

Instead, just for the tables where you want to support soft delete, copy the data somewhere else. Make a table like `deleteds (tablename text not null, data jsonb not null default '{}')` that you can stuff a serialized copy of the rows you delete from other tables (but just the ones you think you want to support soft delete on).

The theory here is: You don't actually want soft delete, you are just being paranoid and you will never go undelete anything. If you actually do want to undelete stuff, you'll end up building a whole feature around it to expose that to the user anyway so that is when you need to actually think through building the feature. In the meantime you can sleep at night, safe in the knowledge that the data you will never go look at anyway is safe in some table that doesn't cause increased runtime cost and development complexity.
by oofManBang | 2025-04-24 07:08:42+00:00
> As far as I can tell, water-drinking was not particularly common

Based on what? You certainly haven't given any indication of having read what historians have to say.

Granted, that subreddit could be a cabal of people colluding to make us think humans didn't go through a phase of drinking beer rather than water. It seems easier to believe you're trying to justify your own talking out of your ass if you can't respond to specific claims.

> In the old days, clean water was rare

What does this mean? Clean water was arguably much more common than it is today because of industrial contamination.

> What I do claim is that people did drink lots of beer for thirst in various contexts (listing exactly which would make this too long).

Nobody contests this. What is contested is fear of drinking water.

> I've worked on this for a decade, collecting archive accounts from around Europe. I can quote you pages and pages and pages and pages of people writing about how they used to drink beer against thirst every day.

Great! Pay up! I ain't reading your book.

Btw, you don't need metal to boil water. And beer is healthy if you're faced with a calorie deficit; it's loaded with nutrients. Perhaps you should use this as an argument for why people drank beer (allegedly and confusingly instead of water)

> I don't claim that people explicitly avoided water

Yes you did:

> And was this why people drank beer instead?

If you did not mean to imply that beer drinking came at the deficit of water drinking, you should consider rephrasing.

> What I do claim is that people did drink lots of beer for thirst in various contexts (listing exactly which would make this too long).

I have no doubt that someone in history said this, just as they did now; what I find hard to believe is that this was in any way normal or typical. One citation might be more meaningful than this entire thread. If you can provide a source, please do so.

Hell, I drink beer for thirst myself; against all rational judgement. This doesn't imply my tap water is unclean.
by anonzzzies | 2025-04-24 07:09:39+00:00
> fall behind JS or Python environments.

I dunno what you are using but we are a small team working on large codebases; one in js/ts mix, one in python and one in cl. Everyone cannot wait for it to be CL time; everything js and especially ts feels so incredibly clunky and half baked. The debuggers are awful and actually don't even stop on breakpoints a lot of the time for no apparent reason.

For most things in cl you have libraries (async etc) and for the rest you roll your own (much) faster than you can try out the tearinducing garbage on npm to figure out what half baked buggy thing might fit your purpose (before it gets hijacked by some north Korean hacker group of ofcourse). With LLMs this has become way easier.

Using the strong typesystem cl has and then adding on coalton when you need it, I prefer over typescript, if only for the speed of dev / no noticeable recompile.
by dwaite | 2025-04-24 07:11:36+00:00
San Francisco is a great font. Arial is a perfectly functional semi-clone of Helvetica, Times New Roman is a decent interpretation of Plantin. Roboto is an interesting mash-up of Helvetica, DIN, and a few others.

System font from a web standpoint means you get one of these depending on the user's choice of phone, desktop, and/or browser.

It is somewhat like buying art because the frame covers a blemish on the wall. That the print inside the frame might be of a famous impressionist painting does not mean that the frame or the print necessarily go with the room.

The car analogy involves a car rental place - that they may give you any one of several newish, functional and even stylish vehicles does not change that you may often wind up being paired with a vehicle mismatched for your function.
by jll29 | 2025-04-24 07:12:20+00:00
Yes.

The output of the LLM is determined by the weights (parameters of the artificial neural network) estimated in the training as well as a pseudo-random number generator (unless its influence, called "temperature", is set to 0).

That means LLMs behave as "processes" rather than algorithms, unlike any code that may be generated from them, which is algorithmic (unless instrcuted otherwise; you could also tell an LLM to generate an LLM).
by kybernetikos | 2025-04-24 07:12:21+00:00
I would describe that as a method or implementation, not as an application.

Almost all knowledge work can be described as "generating a useful sequence of words or word like tokens", but I wouldn't hire a screen writer to do the job of a lawyer or a copy editor to do the job of a concierge or an HR director to do the job of an advertising consultant.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-24 07:12:46+00:00
Well, if the legislature truly cannot make any statue affecting the President, that has some terrifying implications.

It would mean a President is is legally permitted to ignore laws against raping a child on the sidewalk outside 1600 Pennsylvania avenue Ave then murdering all of Congress by blowing up the Capitol.

Recently, a majority on the Supreme Court has claimed there's immunity for "Official Acts", but hasn't laid out any rule for when an official-looking act is actually an unofficial one... They're basically reserving the right to decide later. (Ex: Officially ordering the US military to kill Congress and Supreme Court Justices.)

Not that I want to give the current one any more evil ideas.
by jrflowers | 2025-04-24 07:13:02+00:00
This post has nothing to do with nazis at all, but it does amusingly refer to somebody getting kicked from an organization in the same way one would talk about state sponsored kidnapping and murder.

It is refreshing to see a blog post that is very clear about not wanting to be taken seriously in the slightest that ends with a request. The combination of style and subject matter reduces it to a syntactically legible lorem ipsum.
Show HN: RotaHog rotas for teams. No more spreadsheet hell
by joaoqalves | 2025-04-24 07:13:42+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m a manager who’s been burned by the chaos of organizing rotas in spreadsheets. Think all-hands facilitation, retros, or even team newsletters. It’s unfair (someone always gets stuck), messy, and forget about reminders. And it’s not just work; my partner and I have had our share of “who’s cooking this week?” squabbles.

So, I built RotaHog: a tool to make any rota fair, trackable, and automated with smart notifications. Whether you’re a team lead juggling meeting duties or a couple splitting chores, it’s designed to kill the spreadsheet nightmare. The MVP is live. Basic task rotation, fairness algorithm, and Slack/email notifications. It’s rough around the edges, but it works.

Right now, I’m iterating fast based on feedback from early users (shoutout to the Eng managers and couples who’ve kicked the tires!). Features on the horizon: calendar sync, Teams integration, and a slicker UI. Tech stack: Ruby-on-Rails + Hotwire + Postgres + Kamal

Try it at rotahog.com (free, no login required). I’d love your thoughts. What’s your worst rota pain? Any must-have features? Or just roast the landing page and that I'm still using Bootstrap in 2025. I can take it. :)

— João

P.S. If you’re curious about the build journey, I’m sharing updates on X (x.com/joaoqalves)
by lud_lite | 2025-04-24 07:18:34+00:00
What if you send the facts in the email. The facts that matter: request to book today as sick leave. Send that. Let the receiver run AI on it if they want it to sound like a letter to the King.

Even better. No email. Request sick through a portal. That portal does the needful (message boss, team in slack, etc.). No need to describe your flu "got a sore throat" then.
by 59nadir | 2025-04-24 07:18:36+00:00
> All hollow talk. It will lose all of its aggression the moment that Apple leaves the EU, and EU citizens are left with the remaining options.

People in Europe (and everywhere else that isn't the US) are already using these "remaining options" more than they use Apple products by a massive margin. Apple products are not nearly as popular in Europe as they are in the US because more people realize that the price tag is not proportional to the quality you get.
by frabonacci | 2025-04-24 07:18:46+00:00
Thanks, really appreciate it!

The LLM interacts with the VM through a structured virtual computer interface (cua-computer and cua-agent). It’s a high-level abstraction that lets the agent act (e.g., “open Terminal”, “type a command”, “focus an app”) and observe (e.g., current window, file system, OCR of the screen, active processes) in a way that feels a lot more like using a real computer than parsing raw data.

So under the hood, yes, screen+metadata are used (especially with the Omni loop and visual grounding), but what the model sees is a clean interface designed for agentic workflows - closer to how a human would think about using a computer.

If you're curious, the agent loops (OpenAI, Anthropic, Omni, UI-Tars) offer different ways of reasoning and grounding actions, depending on whether you're using cloud or local models.

https://github.com/trycua/cua/tree/main/libs/agent#agent-loo...
by gadders | 2025-04-24 07:18:56+00:00
In the UK, most supermarkets offer their own home delivery services.

I was hoping that an LLM would do the heavy lifting of working out who can get your shopping cheapest from various supermarkets.

Probably not worth it if you're buying lettuce and tomatoes, but if you have a large family with a £100+ grocery bill per week it might be worth it?
by globular-toast | 2025-04-24 07:19:00+00:00
Right. I have to wonder how often people are building "APIs" that are just direct CRUD interfaces to SQL DBs. SQLModel seems like taking DRY too seriously. I get it, SQLAlchemy models and Pydantic models look very similar, but they are doing completely different things. SQLModel is just causing you more work later that could have been avoided by just copy/pasting the SQLAlchemy models to Pydantic in the first place.

But even then you'll get people implementing business logic in Pydantic validators. I feel like basic layered architecture is being forgotten.
by rcarmo | 2025-04-24 07:19:10+00:00
As someone who enjoys doing CAD and spends a fair amount of time doing contortions to get OpenSCAD to do relatively simple things like bevels and chamfers, I’d say this is interesting because of the model ranking, but ultimately pointless because LLMs do not really have a mental model of things like CSG and actual relative positioning - they can do simple boxes and cylinders with mounting holes, but that’s about it.
by danielpetrica | 2025-04-24 07:20:44+00:00
Me too! I went there for the same reason and met some interesting people. I also had great conversations with others.

Personally, I’m very introverted, especially around people I don’t know. But talking to those in the same field or about shared interests feels different. Even though I’m shy and introverted, I was still able to have long conversations about these topics.
by jll29 | 2025-04-24 07:21:39+00:00
The inertia argument is real, and I would compare it to the mistaken believe of some at IBM in the 1970s that SQL would be used by managers to query relational databases directly, so no programming was needed anymore.

And what happened? Programmers make the queries and embed them into code that creates dashboards that managers look at. Or managers ask analysts who have to interpret the dashboards for them... It rather created a need for more programmers.

Compare embedded SQL with prompts - SQL queries compared to assembler or FORTRAN code is closer to English prose for sure. Did it take some fun away? Perhaps, if manually traversing a network database is fun to anyone, instead of declaratively specifying what set of data to retrieve. But it sure gave new fun to people who wanted to see results faster (let's call them "designers" rather than "coders"), and it made programming more elegant due to the declarativity of SQL queries (although that is cancelled out again by the ugliness of mixing two languages in the code).

Maybe the question is: Does LLM-based coding enable a new kind of higher level "design flow" to replace "coding flow"? (Maybe it will make a slightly different group of people happy?)
by svnt | 2025-04-24 07:21:49+00:00
This is a response that lacks imagination and depth of understanding of capital markets.

No, VC money is what enables the entire multi-billion-dollar loss-leading front end effort that creates the network that is sold in an IPO.

No one else will take that level of risk, and the first eight years of its existence wouldn’t occur without VC money.

You’ll also notice how I didn’t say VC money was the problem. That was a long list of very specific qualifiers I wrote that you strawmanned very efficiently.
by Nevermark | 2025-04-24 07:21:59+00:00
> Slave wages? Like the wages for a factory worker in 1918[1]? $1300 after adjusting for inflation.

I think they were using “slave wages” as a non-literal relative term to the era.

As you did.

A hundred years before your example, the “slave wages” were actually slave wages.

I think it’s fair to say a lot of gig workers, especially those with families, are having a very difficult time economically.

I expect gig jobs lower unemployment substantially, due to being convenient and easy to get, and potentially flexible with hours, but they lower average employment compensation.
by amscanne | 2025-04-24 07:23:00+00:00
The proof here is essentially the execution log of the bounding program. I imagine that this would be TB, PB or beyond. Not every proof is some clever paper, some are just brute force. Like proving a number is prime, or calculating the Nth digit of Pi. A paper doesn’t always make sense, but you can still announce what you’ve done (and maybe you get a paper with algorithmic details, but it’s not a proof for specific the instance).
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-24 07:24:26+00:00
> They work for Trump so they'll never be held to account, even if a Democrat wins the next election

Why? If Democrats take the House in the midterms, which looks more likely the longer Navarro and Musk have West Wing access, they can basically turn these folks' lives into a living hell of back-to-back hearings (and contempt charges down the road). And if Democrats win the next election, they'll presumably put someone with a pulse in charge who doesn't take two years to bring the most important cases of their administration to the docket.
by godelski | 2025-04-24 07:25:32+00:00
I blocked reader mode and it worked fine. Not an excuse, but it is common for sites to not work well for phones. I find it a bit surprising these days but hey, Wikipedia knows how to redirect desktop links to mobile versions but not the reverse and they have the great foresight to add an automatic option to dark mode settings but wild idiocy to set the default configuration to light mode.

I guess I'm with you man. I'm often baffled at how much low hanging fruit never gets fixed
by tomdekan | 2025-04-24 07:26:17+00:00
That’s a very cynical view.

Do the biggest companies not create the most value for the world?

Consider this. If the most successful companies are simply cheating customers, then most consumers are stupid; handing offer their hard-earned money for bad deals and to be exploited.

But most people are not stupid, and most people highly value their money. So, they only buy something because they want what the seller is offering even more than their money. This means that companies create great value because they offer something that people really want.
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-04-24 07:26:20+00:00
Linux desktop is very pleasant to use now compared to 5 years before. I tried a lot of times to switch to linux before but it never stuck, now I use only linux on my desktop.

But need all that software for phones, make it compatible, stable, easy to install etc. maybe it will happen if some company invests in it. Like gaming on linux and valve
Ask HN: Trump's return affecting freelance work?
by vincent_s | 2025-04-24 07:28:37+00:00
I'm a Laravel/Vue freelancer in Germany with 10+ YOE. After 3 years of steady well-paid work, I've seen a significant slowdown since January when Trump returned to office.

Projects postponed, leads going cold, follow-ups unanswered. One American client specifically mentioned "caution around tariff discussions in the US" when canceling my project.

Are you experiencing this as a freelancer? If you hire freelancers, have you pulled back recently? Particularly interested in perspectives from different countries.

For more on my experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43780044
by Tepix | 2025-04-24 07:29:16+00:00
Isn't every Android phone a Linux phone? OK, i guess we want something that is less encumbered and more transparent with more digital sovereignty for the user than the Android that we get from the various big phone vendors.

What's the difference between an AOSP Android phone and a Linux phone? For me, there is no substantial difference. The Android based phone is likely to be way more usable the various "Linux phones". The linked article states "Linux phones and their apps are all open-source and do not depend on ads or surveillance to sustain some nefarious business model, which means there is much privacy to be won." but this also applies to AOSP Android devices with open source apps.

In other words: If you seek a Linux phone, why aren't you picking GrapheneOS or LineageOS? Is there anything else that's missing?
by jll29 | 2025-04-24 07:29:44+00:00
We have always automated, because we can.

What is qualitatively different this time is that it affects intellectual abilities - there is nothing higher up in the work "food chain". Replacing physical work you could always argue you'd have time to focus on making decisions. Replacing decision making might mean telling people go sit on the beach and take your universal basic income (UBI) cheque, we don't need you anymore.

Sitting on the beach is not as nice as it sounds for some; if you don't agree, try doing it for 5 years. Most people require work to have some sense of purpose, it gives identity, and it structures their time.

Furthermore, if you replaced lorry drivers with self-driving cars, you'd destroy the most commonly held job in North America as well as South America, and don't tell me that they can be retrained to be AI engineers or social media influencers instead (some can only be on the road, some only want to be on the road).