MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jedd | 2025-04-10 12:23:25+00:00
> All of these examples are done by specialist because I don't see many cars being build by dentists.

I'm not sure how you get from pre-agricultural humans developing fire, to dentists building cars.

I don't doubt that after fire was 'understood', there was specialisation to some degree, probably, around management of fire, what burns well, how best to cook, etc.

But any claim that fire was the result of specialisation seems a bit hard to substantiate. A committee was established to direct Thag Simmons to develop a way to .. something involving wood?

Wheel, the setting of broken bones, language etc - specialisation happened subsequently, but not as a prerequisite for those advances.

> Even in mankind's beginning specialization existed in the form of hunter and gatherer. This specialization in combination with team work brought us to the top of the food chain to a point where we can strive beyond basic survival.

Totally agree that we advanced because of two key capabilities - a) persistence hunting, b) team / communication.

You seem to be conflating the result of those advancements with "all progress", as was GP.

> The people making space crafts (designing and building, another example of specialization) don't need to know how to repair or build a microwave to heat there for food.

I am not, was not, arguing that highly specialised skills in modern society are not ... highly specialised.

I was arguing against the lofty claim that:

"All progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization."

Noting the poster of that was responding to a quote from a work of fiction - claiming it was awful - that the author had suggested everyone should be familiar with (among other things) 'changing a diaper, comfort the dying, cooperate, cook a tasty meal, analyse a problem, solve equations' etc.

If you're suggesting that you think some people in society should be exempt from some basic skills like those - that's an interesting position I'd like to see you defend.

> Of course everybody still needs to know basic knowledge (how to turn on microwave) to get by.

FWIW I don't have a microwave oven.
by candreasen | 2025-04-10 12:24:18+00:00
They are unknowingly benefiting from a lot of prior work upstreaming support for the rk3399, mostly because of the pine64 pinebook pro which also uses that chipset. Any random newer ARM chipset probably wouldn't fare this well, but it's good to see that that upstreaming work is benefiting the whole community not just pine customers.

edit: Looks like one of the key people in making that happen is in this very thread! Hi Megi!
by crazygringo | 2025-04-10 12:24:52+00:00
No, you said they were loss leaders, which means Nike loses money on them.

Now you're saying they're not, that Nike makes massive, massive profits on them.

Sorry if I'm not seeing your "subtlety" here. But instead of blaming me for misunderstanding you, it's fine to just say whoops, that you were mistaken about the term you used, or meant something else. We all have brain farts sometimes ;)

Also, the article itself gives actual numbers. You don't need to make up your own here, which are not correct.
by animal531 | 2025-04-10 12:26:55+00:00
Doing a quick calculation from where I live in the third world for a price comparison: A Big Mac in the US/Europe is about $6 according to Google, which is about 13 of them for a $80 game.

Where I live that ratio turns into 36 for one of their games, its an astronomical price to ask.

I could feed myself (poorly) for a month on Big Macs for the same price.
Show HN: The Ultimate MCP Client
by eigenvalue | 2025-04-10 12:26:58+00:00
Over the past couple weeks, l've been really immersed in learning about MCP, a new protocol for equipping any LLM with a set of tools that can run on your own machine or a remote server you control and give all kinds of superpowers to Al agents to do things like search, etc.

As part of that research, l've already built one very fleshed-out and useful MCP server that l've shared here (I've added much more to it recently though!), the LLM Gateway MCP Server, which lets you use a big model to delegate to a cheaper model (and many more things in addition to that, like running automated multi-round LLM Tournaments, which I also posted about recently on X).

To actually use these MCP servers though, you need an MCP client. Most people seem to be using the Claude Desktop app. I tried this and got it to work just fine, but it was a bit annoying to set up and there were lots of things I didn't like about it. I wanted something better.

So two days ago I began work on what I call the Ultimate MCP Client. After ~24 hours of work, it's working and ready and I'm really proud of how amazingly well it turned out. This is going to be a workhorse tool for me personally.

It's pure python and all in a single large .py file which can be deployed as a self-contained uv script if you want. It offers all kinds of features and very rich console output for use interactively in a terminal, along with a CLI. But it can also be used in the background.

That kind of background functionality, orchestrating and coordinating several MCP servers nicely, is how I mostly intend on using it. But once I saw how nice the interactive terminal experience was, I realized that I could slap a FastAPl server on top of it and make a web GUl.

Because I hate unneeded complexity so much, I made the WebGUl a single self-contained HTML file you can just open in your browser (similar to my Your-Source-to-Prompt tool), and it looks awesome using Alpine and Daisy and other nice Ul libraries, all loaded via CDN.
by javidabd | 2025-04-10 12:27:06+00:00
Hey HN!

I’ve always been frustrated by how expensive and bloated email platforms are. Even “self-hosted” solutions usually mean running your own VPS, but at what cost.

So, I built SelfMailKit, an email platform you can deploy to your AWS account with a single command. No infrastructure knowledge is needed.

- Transactional and marketing emails - Notion-style visual template editor - Smart queueing, retries, and domain warm-up - APIs, analytics, unlimited domains, team roles, etc.

It’s already in production for a few customers (sending hundreds of thousands of emails), and it’s built to scale.

Happy email sending!
by ksec | 2025-04-10 12:28:37+00:00
Thank You. So backblaze for $6/TB a month. I could have a TB of Data backed up safely against file corruption? I wonder how have I missed that.

Now you could use it with Synology NAS and it is a lot cheaper than doing RAID 5 for ZFS / BTRFS with Muti redundancy.

I wonder if there are any NAS that does that automatically? Any drawbacks? Also wonder if the price could go down to $5 / TB in a few years time.
by sam-paech | 2025-04-10 12:29:10+00:00
Personally what I find interesting is getting insight into the trajectory of model abilities over time. Over the time I've been running these benchmarks, the writing has gone from pure slop, to broadly competent (at short form at least) and occasionally compelling.

I don't think it's much longer until they will be generating content you will actually want to read.

Meanwhile a lot of people are find use for LLMs for partner-writing or lower stakes prose or roleplay.
by zokier | 2025-04-10 12:29:23+00:00
I find the dismissal of buck2 pretty shallow. Most of the world is not already heavily invested to bazel, so compatibility is imho overstated; I don't see it being that far-fetched for something like buck2 to leapfrog bazel. That being said, buck2 definitely would need some love from outside meta to really be viable competitor, right now it still feels like half-complete code drop
by Ray20 | 2025-04-10 12:29:25+00:00
I don't understand your comment. People don't need money, people need food to eat, houses to live in, and so on. And the thing about all this food and houses is that Jesus doesn't produce them, other people produce them.

And since producing all this is not such an easy task, the people who produce the food and build the houses want something in return. That's what we call jobs.

So when you say that jobs is not needed - you mean that there is no need to live in houses or that there is no need to give the people who build the houses anything in return?
by rafaelmn | 2025-04-10 12:30:27+00:00
>It's kind of ironic that even today, the default .NET version baked into fresh Windows installs is 4.6 (or nearby), not the shiny new .NET 8/9.

This is because the distribution model changed ? You would probably publish self-contained .NET app these days ? Not sure - have not built a desktop app in .NET in a decade :)
by beAbU | 2025-04-10 12:31:44+00:00
I built exactly this in less than a day using Windsurf.

Come up with your data model, explain it to the AI, and tell it to give you a CRUD for it.

I'm pretty sure it's perfectly doable to ask it to give you a dynamic crud based on the "shape" of the data in Firestore.

Sadly it's an internal tool for work, so I can't share.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-10 12:31:51+00:00
The answer is that it's sometimes legal in the UK: https://www.youthemployment.org.uk/unpaid-internships-advice...

However, previous governments set up ""welfare-to-work"" schemes, effectively a government subsidy to employers, where people were required to work for free: https://www.recruiter.co.uk/news/2012/03/no-end-controversy-...

(absurdly huge controversy, the government tried to legislate the outcome of this specific lawsuit through retroactive legislation, in violation of ECHR https://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2014/07/08/retrospective-legis... )
by em-bee | 2025-04-10 12:31:52+00:00
that is a false dichotomy, just because a bad government that didn't give you any freedom implemented these benefits doesn't mean that any government implementing such benefits will automatically take everyone's freedom away. the freedom was taken away first. it did not understand that benefits are not enough and that freedom is also needed. we are discussing UBI as a means to give people more freedom, and not as a way to turn them into slaves.
by easton | 2025-04-10 12:32:12+00:00
It's not that my comments are infallible, but if I write something wrong/silly it'll be caught during code review. similarly if there's a comment missing before some arcane nonsense nobody will remember in 3 years, then i'd expect a PR reviewer to tell the dev to add one.

Copilot just likes to puke very useless comments whenever I type "//", especially in autocomplete mode (I don't really use the chat mode).
by ivolimmen | 2025-04-10 12:32:39+00:00
Java 8 to Java 9 is a huge change. Internal parts/utils where dropped. Modules where introduces that makes building your software slightly more complex. If your team is using an external product build on top of this JDK a migration to a newer is often delayed because of the external dependency (IBM WebShere took ages to migrate) plus it might require a new license and extra costs.
by KomoD | 2025-04-10 12:32:40+00:00
> as of 10 April 2025 W3Techs.com rankings Nginx - 33.8% Apache - 26.4% Cloudflare Server - 23.4% LiteSpeed - 14.7% Node.js - 4.3% Microsoft-IIS - 4.0% Envoy - 1.3% Google Servers - 0.8% Caddy - 0.3% IdeaWebServer - 0.1% Percentages of websites using various web servers Note: a website may use more than one web server

How is any of that relevant to parent? People using something doesn't mean it's maintained. (I'm not saying it's not maintained, I just don't see how those numbers are relevant)
by akimbostrawman | 2025-04-10 12:34:13+00:00
There is no reason outside of foolish brand loyalty to get a switch 2 over a cheaper (hardware and software) and more powerful steam deck that is also an actual PC instead of a locked down walled garden. As a bonus you don't fund there next legal bulling of fan projects.

Even switch 1/2 emulation will most likely have better performance on the deck.
by meowfly | 2025-04-10 12:34:28+00:00
Good luck coordinating the world.

Think SEA, Korea, Japan are going to feel better off with China empowered by a weak USA? They want trade for both national security and their economic interest. I'm sure Samsung and Sony want to pickup their share of the Chinese electronics exports.

Has Germany proven they won't sell out to do the right thing? I can't imagine German car manufacturers don't want in US markets for some greater cause. BYD is eating their lunch in China, but BYD is also non-existent in the US market.

We are possibly looking at the US kneecapping the world economy (including its own) but I'm highly skeptical country A isn't going to try to capitalize on country Bs expensive exports.
by joseda-hg | 2025-04-10 12:35:05+00:00
I've been given an old .NET Framework project, at least with .NET you can target .NET Standard 2.0, and that way additions can be done on top of the modern(ish) ecosystem, for progressive rewriting

At least MS won't kill .NET Framework until they've fully transitioned Desktop Office, Visual Studio and Sharepoint, so we at least have a couple decades ahead (Much to my chagrin)

Sidenote: Whoever is in charge of Microsoft naming schemes deserves to be taken behind the barn and shot, they can't keep getting away with this
by rufus_foreman | 2025-04-10 12:36:42+00:00
>> the US has never had an official language

The US has an official language. It is English. See https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/desi....

"To promote unity, cultivate a shared American culture for all citizens, ensure consistency in government operations, and create a pathway to civic engagement, it is in America’s best interest for the Federal Government to designate one — and only one — official language. Establishing English as the official language will not only streamline communication but also reinforce shared national values, and create a more cohesive and efficient society.

Accordingly, this order designates English as the official language of the United States."
by eterm | 2025-04-10 12:36:46+00:00
Porting .NET framework to .NET core / standard / 6+ really isn't as smooth as MS would like you to believe.

And the support lifecycle for .NET4.8 is ironically better than they are for .NET 6 (already dead) and .NET 8, because of the shipping-with-windows thing.

The odd-numbered .NET releases aren't even worth looking at from an enterprise perspective.

So yeah, there'll be a bunch of .net framework code around for a while.

That said, it's frustrating, because in some places the performance just isn't there, and there are so many nuanced differences between them there's a weird effect trying to switch between them.

You not only have to recall which APIs are available in each, but the performance differences between otherwise identical (or near identical) APIs.
by sruffatti | 2025-04-10 12:37:15+00:00
I work for a 40 year old private enterprise with a large Java 8 micro-service architecture. My current project is to facilitate the migration to Java 21.

As you point out, there needs to be a compelling business reason. In our case, we are migrating to K8s as well, which is easier to make the business case for.

Security helps make the case as well. Any enterprise using Java 8 and Spring Boot is riddled with CVEs.
by vintermann | 2025-04-10 12:37:37+00:00
I guess those are runtimes just predating a fairly large breaking change (actually I know they are for C#, and I have a vague idea of what broke from Java 8 too).

I think that updating from old version is prime AI work. It's not hard, usually. It's just a lot of boring, soul-sapping work, enough that if you set the famous 10x engineer to do it, they wouldn't be a 10x engineer by the end.

Then again, maybe a super-engineer would do something wild like the Minecraft 1.8 modding community did... despite being a pile of code injection hacks into a famously messy codebase, chock full of reflection and classloader shenanigans, they actually found a way to run it on a newer version of Java than the official, latest version of Minecraft can run on.
by greener_grass | 2025-04-10 12:38:12+00:00
Everyone says they want a "tiny" "minimal" "lean" build-system, but there is lots of real complexity in these areas:

- Cross-compilation and target platform information

- Fetching dependencies

- Toolchains

I'm not sure a system that solves these would still be considered minimal by most, but those are table-stakes features in my view.

If you don't need these things, maybe stick with Make?
by whiteandnerdy | 2025-04-10 12:38:34+00:00
They are not strictly speaking illegal in the UK, and were pretty common in the 2000s and early 2010s.

The law requires employers to pay minimum wage to anyone who is a worker (i.e. is doing work for the company) - but "sitting in" doesn't have to be paid. Exceptions are also made for volunteering, and placements as part of a university course (these can be unpaid).

Enforcement isn't consistently applied so some smaller outfits get away with it. The big FAANGs and other major companies pay.
by Ray20 | 2025-04-10 12:38:43+00:00
>Why on Earth would taxpayers give their hard earned money to other people to work on their "projects of interest"?

I don't know, but if suddenly someone really has a problem with the fact that the government is still not taking enough money from them to finance various unpromising projects, I am happy to take on the government's work and free of charge get any amount of money from them to implement the widest range of interesting projects.
by smallpipe | 2025-04-10 12:38:48+00:00
Fun. You can tell it's receiving some love right now

while true; do; sleep 5; curl http://susam.net:8000 ; done curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 11 ms: Couldn't connect to server curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection reset by peer curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 8 ms: Couldn't connect to server curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 8 ms: Couldn't connect to server curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 10 ms: Couldn't connect to server curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 11 ms: Couldn't connect to server curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection reset by peer curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection reset by peer curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed
by jtbayly | 2025-04-10 12:38:55+00:00
Why should you bother to look at an image nobody could be bothered to create?

Why should you watch a movie nobody could be bothered to film?

Why should you bother to run a program nobody could be bothered to write?

My gut response was to agree with you, but it seems like the most obvious answer is entertainment, with plenty of other answers along for the ride.
by pc86 | 2025-04-10 12:39:07+00:00
I've yet to find a simple-to-moderately-complex CRUD use case that Supabase can't handle with almost no manual configuration required. There are a few postgres things they hide that you need for more advanced uses but overall it's a great product especially if you're willing to go full vendor lock-in and use them for auth, blob storage, etc.

I have a side project that uses Clerk for auth but basically every other supabase product there is and it really is great for smaller use cases. I don't know how it stacks up once you start needing really fine-tuned database permissions or functionality though.
by scojomodena | 2025-04-10 12:39:25+00:00
I know the .NET story much better than Java. .NET Framework support is tied to the OS support for one thing, so as long as Windows is supported, so is the corollary.NET version.

One of the values of .NET Core is that it doesn't need to be installed at all in the OS.

We are migrating away from. NET as a SaaS company. Our Monolith is in Framework and being deconstructed into .NET (current) services. It's a journey, hoping to be done in 2 years. We did successfully migrate the frontend from webforms to React, page by page. I'm sure there are other teams as well. I just interviewed a lead that was on a team doing the same thing on a Java 8 platform with a monolith.
by smcl | 2025-04-10 12:39:43+00:00
Do you think with different naming or branding it would've been any better? I'm not sure it would - I think the big thing is that they've tried to move from a (legacy) Windows-heavy language/runtime to one that is more cross-platform, and that is inevitably going to be tricky no matter what you call it.

I think the naming does make sense, it's just been maybe been poorly communicated, because I've seen a few people getting tripped up by it.
by rambambram | 2025-04-10 12:40:41+00:00
Nice! I have this little corner in my home where I keep some stones from the Via Appia in Rome, some meteorite (or dinosaur dung, I still don't know) that my aunt found in some desert in Israel, a buddha elephant that my sister brought from India, and the mundane but funny Eiffel tower that I bought on the streets in Paris (I know, it's for tourists, but I have promised myself for years to buy one of these the next visit).

Last year, without asking, my family bought some small stuffed creature (taxidermy?) from a store. It's a flying dragon in a nice picture frame and it's still so weird to look at it.

From this moment on I call this corner my curiosity cabinet (rariteitenkabinet, in Dutch) and I'm looking forward to the next strange or exotic thing that I can add to the collection.
by abenga | 2025-04-10 12:40:42+00:00
You (the ostensible writer or publisher) have to lie forever for me to continue reading your content in this case. Immediately it comes out that any of the writing from an author/outlet is AI generated, I will blacklist them from my reading list forever. The point of reading (to me) is to commune with fellow humans and learn from their lived experience, it's not just to consume prose.
by itake | 2025-04-10 12:41:18+00:00
The article doesn't say. but if you google, you can find articles like this:

> Citing “serious and pervasive” problems uncovered through nearly 500 student testimonials, the faculty task force recommended revamped anti-bias training for students and staff and a revised system for reporting complaints about antisemitism.

> Jewish students felt pushed out of many clubs and organizations

https://apnews.com/article/campus-protests-israel-palestine-...
by yannis | 2025-04-10 12:42:02+00:00
How do immigrants impose their cultures on a host country? Can you give some examples? Historically populations mix by migration, wars, slavery, and trading networks. It is a process that cannot be stopped, maybe slowed down or accelerated. The disappointing aspect of it, is now this process has been hijacked by corporations. How did the West acquire a culture of coffee or coffee-shops? Now is McDonalds and Costa Cafes.
by ksec | 2025-04-10 12:42:22+00:00
I think there is an increasing number of Enterprise planning to move direct from JDK 8 to the latest LTS JDK 21. You get insane amount of improvement just from the JVM alone.

It is sad you dont often hear about any of these on HN. C#/ .Net, Java / JDK, PHP, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, or anything older, boring technology that is getting steady improvement, production usage, boring and never getting the upvote to get on main page for discussions. Everyone is chasing new hype and new JS front end.
by enaaem | 2025-04-10 12:42:51+00:00
Same guy recommending what the US should do: https://bsky.app/profile/dieworkwear.bsky.social/post/3lmb6y...

In short he argues that there is no point in making $50 chinos. Similarly to Italy, the US should focus on regional branding and high-end artisanal products.

I would argue that ship has sailed under Trump. The US was in a prime position to brand itself via soft power and the media, and now it's actively being boycotted.