MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-04-22 15:36:56+00:00
> If you run a regular models chat template with a reasoning tuned model, it can go back to acting like the base model, with no "thinking" process.

Well, of course. They've been "fine-tuned" with specific chat templates. Remove those and the fine-tune doesn't take precedence anymore. That's expected behaviour I'd say.

> "Reasoning" models are not any better than non reasoning models. It's a parlor trick, and benchmarks which claimed it wasn't are bad.

All of them? Including the closed ones, never public? I highly doubt that.
by yurishimo | 2025-04-22 15:37:58+00:00
Yea, this is the thing. Can you imagine transitioning over to a 0 income tax situation and then adding all of that infrastructure back? You know DOGE is going to nuke the servers that do it and rm -rf the repositories so if it's ever returned to law, everything will need to be done from scratch (likely making it untenable).

If you're an IT professional in the US Government, I would argue you have an obligation as a concerned citizen to make some local backups of the code powering the systems you work on every day and keep them somewhere safe...
by hackitup7 | 2025-04-22 15:38:38+00:00
I'm sure that a lot of the l33t h4x0rs here think that Supabase sucks and is only for amateurs but I'll say that as a former engineer who's getting back into building fun side projects again, Supabase has been incredible and just what I wanted. It's my favorite new product that I've started using in the last year. I hope they build out an enormous TAM of people who don't want to live inside a terminal and make a ton of money.
by Syzygies | 2025-04-22 15:39:06+00:00
Yes!

I used to divide my time between a concrete hulk of a NYC apartment building, and a California home insulated to notoriously poor California standards. I was plenty warm in New York winters just from my neighbors' heat nearly all of the time. In California, there was a narrow window (think "Apollo 13 re-entry") between too cold and too warm.

Then we modernized ceiling fans, and I hit on running them in "winter mode" drawing hot air up to flow back down the walls. Bingo! I love that ISO 7730 confirms this.
by Zak | 2025-04-22 15:39:21+00:00
They do have different semantics, but the more I think about it, the more I think that's better.

The blue check on your account doesn't tell me what about the account has been verified. It probably means you're the Steve Klabnik that shows up a bunch of places in a web search, but that would mean much less if someone else also had that name and a web presence.

Your verified domain name tells me much more, but I recognize that's not the right verification approach for everyone. What I think would be more meaningful is labels like "@rust-lang.org says @steveklabnik.com is a Rust core developer" or perhaps a label with some metadata given special treatment in the UI showing mutual affiliation, e.g. "@rust-lang.org and @steveklabnik.com say they're affiliated with each other".

Edit - a further refinement: instead of verificatiions, allow accounts to feature labels placed on them by others for special treatment in the UI.
by wing-_-nuts | 2025-04-22 15:39:56+00:00
>Trump wants to get rid of income taxes for those earning under $150k.

Getting rid of income tax will require legislation from congress. If we're in the midst of a tariff induced recession, what are the chances his party keeps congress in '26?

Also, remember when the British government tried to pass a massive tax cut funded with debt? Remember how that went down? The chances of the US being able to get rid of income tax in the next 4 years is basically zero.
by nextaccountic | 2025-04-22 15:40:04+00:00
But why? Tests can't catch everything. A single verified predicate is equivalent to a very large, potentially infinite number of tests.

Right now the Rust stdlib is being verified using Kani, a model checker, https://model-checking.github.io/verify-rust-std/

In Kani, a proof looks like this

https://github.com/model-checking/verify-rust-std/blob/00169...

#[kani::proof_for_contract(NonNull::new_unchecked)] pub fn non_null_check_new_unchecked() { let raw_ptr = kani::any::<usize>() as *mut i32; unsafe { let _ = NonNull::new_unchecked(raw_ptr); } }

It looks like a test, but actually it is testing that every possible usize, when converted to a pointer to i32 and built with NonNull::new_unchecked, will follow the contract of NonNull::new_unchecked, which is defined here

https://github.com/model-checking/verify-rust-std/blob/00169...

#[requires(!ptr.is_null())] #[ensures(|result| result.as_ptr() == ptr)]

Which means: if the caller guarantees that the parameter ptr is not null, then result.as_ptr() is the same as the passed ptr

That's a kind of trivial contract but Kani tests for all possible pointers (rather than some cherry picked pointers like the null pointer and something else), without actually brute-forcing them but instead recognizing when many inputs test the same thing (while still catching a bug if the code changes to handle some input differently). And this approach scales for non-trivial properties too, a lot of things in the stdlib have non-trivial invariants.

You can check out other proofs here https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amodel-checking%2Fverify-r...

It's not that different from writing a regular test, it's just more powerful. And you can even use this #[requires] and #[ensures] syntax to test properties in regular tests if you use the https://crates.io/crates/contracts crate.

Really if you have ever used the https://proptest-rs.github.io/proptest/intro.html or the https://crates.io/crates/quickcheck crate, software verification is like writing a property test, but rather than testing N examples generated at random, it tests all possible examples at once. And it works when the space of possible examples is infinite or prohibitively large, too.
by k2xl | 2025-04-22 15:41:43+00:00
I've been a lukewarm user of Supabase for my side projects. Unfortunately the amount of work to get off of it has been too high for me to leave.

The major issue is - cost. It is way more expensive than I realized as they have so many little ways they charge you. It's almost like death by thousands of paper cuts. My bill for my app with just a few thousand users was $70 last month.

I do like the tooling and all, but the pricing has been very confusing.
by drakenot | 2025-04-22 15:41:49+00:00
Something that really kills the 'effect' of most of the Voice > AI demos that I see is the cold start / latency.

The OpenAI "Voice Mode" is closer, but when we can have near instantaneous and natural back and forth voice mode, that will be a big in terms of it feeling magical. Today, it is say something, awkwardly wait N seconds then listen to the reply and sometimes awkwardly interrupt it.

Even if the models were no smarter than they are today, if we could crack that "conversational" piece and performance piece, it would be a big difference in my opinion.
by erikig | 2025-04-22 15:42:02+00:00
Congrats on launching and on the great name.

I'd suggest auto tabbing when users fill out an hour e.g Entering "7" in the hours field should auto-tab to minutes field. Entering "30" into minutes should auto-tab to the next field.

Also, I would default the break deduction to 0:00 so that the time can calculate automatically when the start & end times are filled in.
by alexdanilowicz | 2025-04-22 15:43:05+00:00
I mention this in another comment: v0 has been around as long as we have (October 2023), so it's very cool seeing how we have both iterated on the same problems, especially given Vercel is a $3B company and we are a team of two :-)

We have both evolved a lot and now have some major differences, given we focus on product teams more than developers:

- Magic Patterns has an infinite canvas

- Password protection on designs

- Feedback collection on prototypes

- Reusable components, so you can create a component library with us and then reference those components in your design

- We are only focused on frontend

A few customers actually use both us and v0! For example, they'll design in Magic Patterns and then copy paste the code into v0 to add a database.
by runjake | 2025-04-22 15:43:10+00:00
For the benefit of others' "imposter syndrome", I'll jump in and say it's not just you (the reader, not the parent). It's a really dense article and was really hard for me to follow.

And yes, the diagrams are great. I now must spend the rest of the day resisting the urge to redo all my network diagrams in this style.

Can anyone grok what diagram software the author is likely using?
by beloch | 2025-04-22 15:43:42+00:00
"Under this administration, you don’t go to Congress to debate legislation. If you want to change something, like closing down a major agency, you petition the king. So, we’re already in an authoritarian phase. That’s just on an institutional level."

...

"One problem we’ve got is what I regard as a kind of dumb version of what economists call “the principal-agent model.” It says the principal gives the orders, and the agents must obey the orders. But in any actual organization, most of the knowledge is on the part of the agents. It’s the civil servants at the bottom who really understand how things work when the principals have no idea. And so, the authority actually goes from the bottom of the organization up to the top. The U.S. Army understands this very well. "

-------------------------

On multiple occasions, the Secretary of Commerce has said one thing about tariff's and Trump has then done something completely different. The lesson learned is that, while you might use Howard Lutnick to try to get a sense of where Trump's mind is at on a given day, the SoC is pretty much irrelevant and you can't actually rely on anything he says. All that matters is what Trump puts his sharpie to.

If one person makes all the decisions, what is the upper limit on the quality of those decisions? Lutnick is not particularly qualified for his post, but he has a lot of people reporting to him, bringing knowledge of the situation up from the depths. Understanding of the current economic situation is supposed to work it's way up to the president through the secretary of commerce. Instead, there's a disconnect, and Trump is making decisions without this resource.

To pile onto that, countries such as Japan, that are currently trying to negotiate around the threat of tariffs, know this. They're going to view anything they negotiate with somebody other than Trump as writing in sand that can be brushed away in an instant. They're going to want to sit down with the only person who matters. So, now, not only does Trump have to somehow pack enough study of the current situation to stay abreast of it without relying on subordinates, he has to finalize all negotiations himself. Given how many nations are trying to do this in the next month, this is an impossible task for any human.

Even absolute monarchs of the past relied on council. The U.S. doesn't just have a King, they have another Æthelred the Unready. i.e. A King who wasn't necessarily a complete fool, but was notable for being "unrede" (poorly councilled).
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-04-22 15:44:11+00:00
This is where it’s useful for the menu bar to be system-owned rather than the responsibility of individual programs (whether that be a global bar as in macOS or attached to window decorations). That would make it easy to implement a toggle that hides menubars either globally or on a per-app basis and enable a Unity-type shortkey-summoned HUD to be used instead.
by swed420 | 2025-04-22 15:45:26+00:00
> Based on what, your personal experience talking to stoners in college? Plenty of people smoke socially

Yep. And plenty smoke privately, too. People see the public spectacles and incorrectly conclude it as wholly representative.

Many professionals use cannabis but choose to not advertise it since misinformation is still so rampant, originating from the "Reefer Madness" propaganda days. The tradeoff of potential career damage just isn't worth it.

Carl Sagan understood this, among many others:

https://bigthink.com/health/carl-sagan-on-smoking-marijuana/
Show HN: Creative Storytelling for Little Ones
by averma1988 | 2025-04-22 15:45:32+00:00
Hi HN,

I built StoryPup to make creating personalized stories for kids easier and more fun. It uses AI to help generate unique tales, and you can even use your own voice for narration to make them extra special.

Built this as a parent who wanted a better way to engage my kids with stories. Would love to hear your thoughts or any feedback!

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/storypup/id6744484541
by bloomingeek | 2025-04-22 15:46:27+00:00
You stumped most everyone when you used the word "reality". (Which is correct.) Most are so scared of where the country is heading, reality is pretty foggy. "Criminality", now there's a timely word we can all understand, except the big orange dummy has manipulated the supreme court so much we're not sure if we can trust it to maintain the rule of law. (After all, the tariffs seem to be a tool to crash the stock market, buy low/sell high, no?) Shamefully, it doesn't take much to completely fool the boomers (My generation, the stupidest of all time.) by making enemies of almost anything or anyone.
by vecter | 2025-04-22 15:46:28+00:00
It's very common for tech companies to go public without being profitable. As long as their growth is good and they have a reasonable story for how they will achieve profitability, then it typically makes sense. Of course every company is different and not all will reach their profitability goals post-IPO, but in many cases, it wouldn't make sense to wait for profitability before going public.
by geocar | 2025-04-22 15:46:46+00:00
No they really don't.

fallocate() failing is exactly the same as write() failing from the perspective of the user, because the disk is still full, and the user/operator responds exactly the same way (by waiting for cleanup, deleting files, adding storage, etc).

Databases (the example given) actually do exactly as koolba suggests, and ostensibly for the reason of surfacing the error to the application. The point is what to do about the error itself though, not about whether fallocate() always works or is even possible.
by erikig | 2025-04-22 15:46:46+00:00
Oh, also I noticed that you have a great network of useful utilities.

For SEO, I'd recommend creating a categorized utility directory (even if it is static) where you first list your own utilities and then charge other utility creators to list their own utilities. It will allow your apps to get lots more organic visibility and build a community of like-minded indiehackers.
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-22 15:47:05+00:00
I have an Ecobee and I like it. It comes standard with Home, Away, and Sleep but you can put in as many or as few as you want. You can manually change the temp and you can also set how long you want your manual temp to “stick”. Either until you cancel it, or until the next preprogrammed change. I like it cooler at night, so I have it change temp around my normal bedtime, which includes if I adjusted the daytime temp because I don’t want to have to remember to change it back myself, that’s why I have a smart thermostat. It detects when I leave the house and sets it to away, because I don’t need it running as if I am at home. If I go on vacation I can set it to keep the house safe, but not comfortable, and change back around the time my flight lands.

Unless you have a crazy random schedule, or you want the temp the same whether you are asleep, awake, or not at home, or i guess if you have different temp preferences every day. Otherwise you can program in a basic schedule and just adjust manually as needed. Nothing stops you from changing the temp manually if you wake up an hour early, but if you wake up on time, then you don’t even have to think about it.
by nullstyle | 2025-04-22 15:47:26+00:00
Perhaps you'd like to put some more words in my mouth.

When I say Democracy, I mean a form of government in which political power is primarily seated within the common mass of people, as opposed to political power being with those who bribe, cheat, scheme, lie and bribe some more to achieve more political power than their fellow citizen. This tension puts democracy on a gradient, one which I believe is currently and firmly seated in corporate command of political power. I recommend you go read Democracy Incorporated to add a little more clarity and contrast to your world view.
by jamil7 | 2025-04-22 15:47:41+00:00
Kind of the same feeling, I don't use all of services they offer either and when I looked at self-hosting, it all seemed kind of heavy and fragile to self-host. I ended up replicating the parts I used with a small API layer connected to a managed postgres db for a tenth of the cost or something. I'd say it's pretty handy for prototyping but not sure I'd want to build a business on the back of it.
by bmink | 2025-04-22 15:48:37+00:00
Exactly this, though for me a lot of boilerplate is actually a comfort zone that I often look forward to, the way an athlete might to a light jog. Earbuds in, forget about everything, crank it out.

(That said your point is valid — there is boilerplate that is tedious and the resulting pain will be motivation to improve things)
by alexdanilowicz | 2025-04-22 15:50:06+00:00
We always iterating and definitely need to improve! Anything you can point to explicitly that makes the canvas feel clunky/half finished? We're using a simple div under the hood!

To add some color: while we do generate code, we don't view ourselves as a code generator because our customers don't get value out of our tool from the raw code. They instead receive value from the interactive prototype, and for that reason it's lot of PMs, designers, founders using us versus developers.
by mithr | 2025-04-22 15:50:33+00:00
This. The idea is super cool in theory! But given how these sort of things work today, having a toy that can have an independent conversation with a kid and that, despite the best intentions of the prompt writer, isn't guaranteed to stay within its "sandbox", is terrifying enough to probably not be worth the risk.

IMO this is only exacerbated by how little children (who are the presumably the target audience for stuffed animals that talk) often don't follow "normal" patterns of conversation or topics, so it feels like it'd be hard to accurately simulate/test ways in which unexpected & undesirable responses could come out.
by cma | 2025-04-22 15:50:37+00:00
At least with Deep Seek math (with the same RL technique as the later R1) they noted similar things in their paper in the "Why RL Works?" section. Around the 1:04:00 mark of this Yannic Kilcher video review of the Deepseek math paper he goes over that section and points to basically the same limitations as the hn submission paper, starts at around the 1hr 4m mark and ends with this:

1:05:40 the Improvement is attributed to boosting the correct response from Top K 1:05:46 rather than the enhancement of fundamental capabilities this is something that we've come to learn in a 1:05:52 lot of different ways from like reinforcement learning on language 1:05:58 models or even supervised fine-tuning is that what's happening most likely is 1:06:04 more that the capabilities of doing all of these things are already present in 1:06:09 the underlying pre-trained language model

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAWV_yrqx4w&t=1h4m

from the paper:

> 5.2.2. Why RL Works? > In this paper, we conduct reinforcement learning based on a subset of instruction tuning data, and it achieves significant performance enhancement upon the instruction tuning model. > To further explain why reinforcement learning works. We evaluate the Pass@K and Maj@K accuracy of the Instruct and RL models on two benchmarks. As shown in Figure 7, RL enhances Maj@K’s performance but not Pass@K. These findings indicate that RL enhances the model’s overall performance by rendering the output distribution more robust, in other words, it seems > that the improvement is attributed to boosting the correct response from TopK rather than the enhancement of fundamental capabilities. Similarly, (Wang et al., 2023a) identified a misalignment problem in reasoning tasks within the SFT model, showing that the reasoning performance of SFT models can be improved through a series of preference alignment strategies > (Song et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023a; Yuan et al., 2023b).

In the video he reads into this that these methods alone may not at all get us over the data wall and are still fundamentally limited by the distribution of the base model they augment.
by momoschili | 2025-04-22 15:50:43+00:00
UV-C radiation is so rare in our lives and even in specific work environments that unless you have a very special need for it, you don't need to detect it. As far as I know, it's mostly just germicidal lamps and arc lamps that generate enough UV-C to be of any real concern, and in that case the operator knows about it.
by yesfitz | 2025-04-22 15:50:57+00:00
This is well-intentioned and incredibly damaging. There is no amount you can pay to uneat an animal.

How much would you need to donate to make it OK to throw your trash on the ground? For most people, the answer is "there is no amount". But by putting a price on it, you've normalized it.[1]

A "charity" like this makes any actions seem fungible and tradeable, some of the worst effective altruist/tech bro mindset. You shouldn't "hack" morality with capitalism.

1: https://econlife.com/2018/09/unintended-consequences-from-fi...
by jsheard | 2025-04-22 15:50:58+00:00
It's all fun and games until you realize the cool thing you made is locked into an overpriced cloud stack that will bleed you dry. "Vibe coders" seem to invariably end up offloading as much heavy lifting as possible to ultra-expensive PaaS/SaaS vendors, and those vendors are encouraging it (e.g. Vercel v0).
by breadwinner | 2025-04-22 15:52:06+00:00
NeXTSTEP's interface (1988–1989) used subtle shading and depth for buttons and windows, creating a dimensional appearance. Its visual design pioneered the use of shading for depth in GUIs.

Microsoft's timeline:

CTL3D.DLL: Introduced circa 1991–1992, primarily for Windows 3.1 applications (not the OS itself). It added 3D effects to dialog boxes and controls but was optional for developers.

Windows 95: Introduced native 3D controls (e.g., recessed buttons, drop shadows) as the system-wide default in 1995, eliminating the need for CTL3D.DLL
by Analemma_ | 2025-04-22 15:52:38+00:00
I enjoy this as an art project, but it does frustrate me as a reaction against the chickenshit minimalism of UI today, because I think it's the wrong reaction. I don't want a "love letter to 90s UI", I want a UI that takes full advantage of the hardware we have now. Graphics processing is a million times more powerful than it was in the 90s, and I now have a monitor with 220 ppi and 5K of horizontal resolution, which was the stuff of science fiction then. Surely the best UI for such hardware is neither the shitty low-density Jony Ive suckoff of today nor a carbon copy of the world as it existed 30 years ago just for nostalgia's sake.

(This is ranty but isn't really directed at the SerenityOS devs, they've delivered exactly what they promised and done a good job at it. I just wish someone, somewhere was interested in functional UI design for the current era)
by tomhow | 2025-04-22 15:52:58+00:00
These are interpretations that can be argued and debated (it's not appropriate for me to engage in any such debate here). But there are also major disconnects and deeply hostile disputes between key YC figures and those working with the administration.

The point is, none of it has anything to do with the way we moderate HN – which of the conflicting cues would we follow?

HN has had more front-page-visible, heavily upvoted/discussed stories about DOGE than anything else this year, along with several others relating to the administration, with the overwhelming sentiment in the articles and comments being critical.

Dang has commented at length on the matter several times:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...