MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dimal | 2025-04-17 13:21:56+00:00
Agreed, it's aesthetically beautiful. It should be a coffee table book. But for the web, it has terrible usability. Really, really terrible in multiple ways. My comments will be harsh, but since the creator is obviously very skilled, he should know better.

Why multicolumn text? So it looks like an old printed manual? At first view, it's not clear where the first column ends. This is not something we see on the web (because there's no need for it), so it's not clear that the content flows from one column to the next. When the viewport is sized to two columns, I need to scroll down to finish the first column, then scroll back up to read where it continues on the second column.

Justified text is bad on the web. We're starting to get some better features to make it usable, but it's not widely supported, so right ragged text is always more readable.

There are numerous animations that never stop. This is highly distracting and makes it very difficult to read the text.

I'm sure there are more issues but the site is so unusable for me, I won't continue trying.

So, yeah. It's gorgeous design. I love it. But it's for the sake of aesthetics, not for the user's sake. It's completely unusable to me. Since this is the first installment, I hope the designer will keep the aesthetics but improve the usability in future installments.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-04-17 13:22:00+00:00
Yes. One summer my friends asked me to join in a running program with them. We went from basically sedentary to running 5k a day within several weeks. They hoped to lose weight. I didn't expect to, because we weren't eating any differently, but I did it because I wanted to get stronger and less out-of-breath.

I was right; we didn't lose any weight, but we did get much better at running without gasping to a stop within a couple minutes.
by avsm | 2025-04-17 13:22:06+00:00
As the mentioned acquiree, I agree :-)

> I'm surprised the unikernel community hasn't focused on this application sooner.

There just wasn’t a compelling usecase before agents to need a serverless browser. And Chromium is basically an OS-in-a-box already, and Unikraft has now matured enough to supply the unikernel scaffolding to link it all together (coordinated by Dagger, it seems!)
by fasdfasdf11234 | 2025-04-17 13:22:11+00:00
Isn't this similar to https://aider.chat/docs/usage/copypaste.html

Just checked to see how it works. It seems that it does all that you are describing. The difference is in the way that it provides the files - it doesn't use xml format.

If you wish you could /add * to add all your files.

Also deducing from this mode it seems that any file that you add to aider chat with /add has its full contents added to the chat context.

But hey I might be wrong. Did a limited test with 3 files in project.
Show HN: Got fired from a YC-backed startup and built a no-code tool (not AI)
by bohdan_kh | 2025-04-17 13:22:37+00:00
Hi HN,

My name is Bohdan, and I'm the creator of Fomr (https://fomr.io), a no-code drag-and-drop form builder.

I know what you are thinking: "Urghh, another one..." - but hear me out!

After 2 years as the first employee at a YC-backed startup, I found myself suddenly free to build something I'd been thinking about for a while. During my time there, we struggled surprisingly hard to find a modern, reliable form builder that met our needs.

So, after leaving, I've decided to spend the next 5 months building a tool in a highly saturated, competitive, and boring market.

What makes Fomr interesting is its tech. I've used a local-first approach with a sync engine (Powersync) so that the form editor feels extremely fast and snappy, even though it's built for the web.

Try it here: https://fomr.io/app/guest/new (desktop only, there's no sign-up)

Quick demo video: https://fomr.io or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0enRJcqb3U

While it's early days, I'm committed to making Fomr the fastest, simplest, and most flexible form builder available.

Tell me why it'll fail (so I can try to prevent that).

Thanks!
by diggan | 2025-04-17 13:23:08+00:00
I don't think I've used any forums that at least publicly surface structured "reputation" although of course informal reputation exists everywhere, including forums.

Post count yes, that's pretty common. But if the forum you use is any good, they'd actively combat posts/threads that aren't actually contributing to the conversation.

One of the biggest and most active forum in Sweden is actually pretty good at this, probably mostly thanks to its ~100 iron fist moderators who do such a great job with cleaning up posts that aren't contributing to the discussions at hand. That it also have a really extensive set of rules also helps.
by guax | 2025-04-17 13:23:11+00:00
Research grants, laboratories, partnerships. Government funding of universities are usually not handouts but investments.

For example:

| Sarah Fortune, a professor and chair of the department of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, woke up Tuesday to a stop-work order for a large contract focused on unraveling how the immune system fights tuberculosis, with the goal of creating better detection and vaccines.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-04-17 13:23:12+00:00
It was. Wasn't the Atari's CPU 1.79MHz (3.58Mhz NTSC clock/3)? The NTSC C64 was close to 1Mhz. But it's worse: The C64's CPU was also slowed down by the VIC-II every 8 scan lines to fetch video data, and slowed down additionally if sprites were enabled.

The PAL C64 was actually slightly under 1Mhz but you had a lot more VBlank time to do stuff.
by sgarland | 2025-04-17 13:23:35+00:00
I’ve enjoyed making it go faster by finding quirks, but at this point it’s mostly become “OK, what else can I offload to C?”

I should really learn Rust. Or Zig. I tried Nim (best of both worlds, Python-esque code that compiles to C!), but it wasn’t nearly as fast as my Python + C for my specific use case.
by pseudalopex | 2025-04-17 13:23:55+00:00
> Harvard had various racially segregated graduation parties last year: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/harvard-university-to-of.... If you can’t have a “White Celebration” then you can’t have a “Black Celebration” either.

The affinity celebrations were open to all graduates according to the article's sources. The segregation claim originated seemingly from 1 student they interviewed whose comments about other aspects seemed speculative.

The celebrations were organized by students and hosted by alumni and community groups according to the university. The article did not contest this. Is there evidence students applied for and were denied recognition of a white celebration?
by mikelevins | 2025-04-17 13:24:10+00:00
As a person with a graduate education in psychology who makes his living by being considered technical, who has made his living around 35% of my 37-year career as a technical writer, and whose technical writing has been described in glowing terms by professionals in the tech writing field and the engineering leadership at FAANGs, some of them famous for their technical contributions, I disagree with your assessment.

I think it's a rather well constructed piece about social boundaries that is incidentally somewhat technical (though, I'm guessing, its technical aspects are from outside your field).
by Nick-W | 2025-04-17 13:24:22+00:00
I can scale up our worker count as needed, but we keep it at a minimum since our Azure bills are already insane. Fun tidbit, there's a little counter on the bottom right which tracks live app circuits on the site, we were cracking thousands yesterday, normally it's ~5-10 at most. Did NOT anticipate having this kind of attention from a comment, and we were out climbing in Boulder Canyon when the bulk of the traffic hit the site.
by diggan | 2025-04-17 13:25:31+00:00
> but it's extremely wasteful in screen real estate and not so intuitive to use.

Sounds like a theme issue rather than vBulletin issue. Most of the vBulletin forums (of yore at least) were so heavily customized you couldn't even tell it was vBulletin, except for the ever present smileys :rolleyes:
by BlueTemplar | 2025-04-17 13:25:42+00:00
Yes, but how is this relevant now that Harvard basically said "Screw you, we're going to do what we want even if it means going without your money." ?

How can they prevent students from attending, it's not like they are going to specifically target and refuse or void the visa of anyone known to be an Harvard student ?!? (Or I guess, yeah, this kind of arbitrary rule is the exact thing that can happen under fascism...)
by themaninthedark | 2025-04-17 13:26:15+00:00
I would say, not have to show up for Day 1 but how about have to show up at the collage with a state issued ID in order to have funds released to their account?

It looks like the main issue is that the people committing the fraud are able to create student profiles and request student aid with these profiles. I am unsure of California's requirements but this generally requires a SSN. California is issuing Real ID so verification should be relatively easy.
by londons_explore | 2025-04-17 13:27:14+00:00
Maybe someone like apple will make a "verify user looks over 18" neural net model they can run in the secure enclave of iphones, which sends some kind of "age verified by apple" token to websites without disclosing your identity outside your own device?

Having said that, I bet such a mechanism will prove easy to fake (if only by pointing the phone at grandad), and therefore be disallowed by governments in short order in favour of something that doesn't protect the user as much.
by apercu | 2025-04-17 13:27:35+00:00
I should have been clearer than I was, you're not wrong, I just find nearly everything is more nuanced than we allow for in discourse these days, and I have sympathy for people because I, too, found it hard to eat healthy and exercise enough when I was an executive with an 11 hour work day due to a 2:45 hour combined daily commute.

And I was a distance runner for 20 years.
by jmull | 2025-04-17 13:27:51+00:00
That's a cool project.

But I wonder if generating rust is the best approach. On the plus side, you can take advantage of the rich type and type checking system the compiler has. On the other hand, you're stuck with that compiler.

I wonder if the dynamic constraints can be expressed and checked through some more directly implemented mechanism. It should be both simpler to express exactly the constraints you want (no need to translate to a rust construct that rustc will check as desired), and, of course, should be a lot more efficient. Feldera may have no feasible way to get away from generated rust, but a potential competitor might avoid the issue. (That's not to say the runtime shouldn't/couldn't be implemented in rust. I'm just talking about the large amounts of generated rust.)
by mathieuh | 2025-04-17 13:27:52+00:00
The arguments from the other side are of the "think of the children" and "tough on crime" variety. They are purely emotional and if you try to dispute them they just respond with "so you don't care about children?". It's like trying to argue with a religious person on matters of faith, you're just not very likely to convince them.

*edited to add "on matters of faith"
by ivl | 2025-04-17 13:28:02+00:00
The arguments are mostly that they dislike what can be accomplished via math. “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia” isn't exactly an 'argument' so much as an insistence.

The article does address the flaws in some of their arguments (encryption inconveniences law enforcement, think of the children) by pointing out that the average person and children are kept save from criminal elements by encryption.
by itchyouch | 2025-04-17 13:28:04+00:00
Their view of the attendant as a cog in the machine appears to be a justification for their "learned helplessness" to situations. They've internalized that certain policies they come into contact with in the world are non-negotiable and to attempt to negotiate is shouting into the void, thus a waste of energy.

To them, it's irrelevant whether the helplessness is real or not. So they don't bother to take a moment to poke at the attendant's capacity for resolving the situation to their advantage.

I wouldn't say that its an unusual view, but it may indicate a deep desire for efficiency (don't argue, simply pay and be on ones way), financial privilege (an extra $20 charge is no big deal), or could be symptoms of deeper issues relating to self-worth (I am not worthy to ask for a break).
by threeseed | 2025-04-17 13:28:45+00:00
> This is over-reach. Both in the UK and Australia

2/3 of Australians support minimum age restrictions for social media [1] and it was in-particular popular amongst parents. Putting the responsibility solely on parents shows ignorance of the complexities of how children are growing up these days.

Many parents have tried to ban social media only for those children to experience ostracisation amongst their peer group leading to poorer educational and social developmental outcomes at a critical time in their live.

That's why you need governments and platform owners to be heavily involved.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/...
by michaelmcdonald | 2025-04-17 13:29:41+00:00
This was in the article (linked to from the blog); is it not what you are looking for?

"The federal Baby Food Safety Act of 2024, which is stalled in Congress, called for lead limits in kids’ food or personal care products like toothpaste of five parts per billion (ppb). California’s limit on lead in baby food is two ppb, but it does not include toothpaste."

"Most toothpastes exceeded those thresholds."

"The FDA’s current lead limit for children is 10,000 ppb, and 20,000 ppb for adults. None exceeded the FDA limits."

"The state of Washington recently enacted a law with 1,000 ppb limits – several exceeded that and have been reported, Rubin said, but companies have time to get in compliance with the new rules."
by elric | 2025-04-17 13:29:47+00:00
If we had trustworthy governments, or trustworthy police agencies, then maybe mandated backdoors wouldn't be all that bad. But if anything, recent events that clearly demonstrated that governments are not trustworthy, even if one is trustworthy today it couldn't become an evil regime tomorrow, and handing all your power over literally anything to such an organization does not seem wise.
by Rodeoclash | 2025-04-17 13:30:23+00:00
Undernet on the #zeraw channel is where I spent a bit of time hanging out. You'd trade open FTP servers, I assume sysadmins had misconfigured them, that other users had uploaded games to.

Games used to be split by disk files, i.e. 1.44mb individual files, and I would download 1 - 10 overnight while my friend would grab 11 - 20. We'd later call each other and use Zmodem to build a full set each.

Fun time to be on the internet.
by gravatron | 2025-04-17 13:30:31+00:00
I know this is not a new post at this point, but these claims are always wild to me from educated people. How on earth can you seriously believe that something is 100% not true, or debunked, when the claim could cover thousands of people in an environment over many months or years? Do you have video evidence of every second of every persons life over this timeframe that is indisputable? How can you possible know without a shadow of a doubt that this never happened? It's ludicrous.

What if you flipped the scenario and you heard of Americans living in India and locals claimed they have seen them killing and eating local cows? Would that just be incredibly unbelievable to you? Its just absurd to suggest that it just absolutely, 100% never happened, and everybody who has anecdotal evidence is just some racist idiot making stuff up.

And I know you won't believe me, but I actually live adjacent to one of the towns that received a large influx of Haitian migrants. Not Springfield, but a city that was also regularly mentioned on the news, and I saw evidence of the claims that were being spoken at those town halls myself. Our town literally had to put out city notices to ask people to refrain from shooting blow darts into the geese down at our local park, a place where the Haitians were known to loiter all day long for months on end, since they had nothing else to do or anywhere else to go. All of this shit was not just made up, I guarantee it. These were not all model citizens.

Now I am sure this is the part where you call me, a mixed race person who has a child with a minority mother, a racist.
by 609venezia | 2025-04-17 13:30:33+00:00
Man of the people:

> Ujiharu’s blind charges may actually have had a noble purpose. Japanese battles involving castles almost always turned into sieges, and those always ended the same way: with the nearby fields and peasant settlements being either destroyed to try and draw the lord out of the castle or looted to feed the occupying army. Some researchers believe that Ujiharu was trying to avoid a siege to save his subjects.
by pogue | 2025-04-17 13:31:13+00:00
Here are the full test results from the person/group who tested the toothpastes:

https://tamararubin.com/2025/01/toothpaste-chart/

I think there will probably be a great deal of controversy about this until some scientists/food scientists take a look at the results and give us their view.

Heavy metals are unfortunately found in soil and can result in contaminated food & other products. The issue is the amount in the product & the amount you're consuming.

You're most likely not going to get lead poisoning from using a pea sized amount of toothpaste twice a day through brushing & spitting it out. If you swallowed the entire tube of toothpaste that might be a different story. This could be a situation where the pros outweigh the cons and it's just one of those inevitabilities we deal with in life. But, it's entirely possible some brands are using very poor quality control and it's highly contaminated.

If you're concerned, you can always get a blood test for heavy metals from your doctor.
by diggan | 2025-04-17 13:31:18+00:00
> Some discussions benefit from real time communication, some don't

Agree :) Consensus in the development community seems to be "Everything should be in Discord/Slack/Teams", so moving towards what you mention would be great.

> I think that's where the real problem lies

That certainly does sound like an issue, but I cannot say I've ever experienced it myself, maybe I've been lucky. At "worst", sometimes there is one tool for private/internal use, but for public community, Discord would be chosen, for example. But never "We're using both Slack and Teams internally", that'd be crazy.

The number of times a development community I want to join is exclusively on Discord though, instead of a public forum, is something I constantly encounter.
by arkh | 2025-04-17 13:31:27+00:00
The author just want a medal saying they're Technical. Whatever this means, it is important to them. Like a child and a sheriff medal. "Technical" is the current cool club to be in and they want in. I guess technical is "techbros and their salary", not your average electrician and even less a Toyota Hilux with a 50 cal. in the back.
by sceptic123 | 2025-04-17 13:31:29+00:00
People are focussing on chess, which is complicated, but LLM fail at even simple games like tic-tac-toe where you'd think, if it was capable of "reasoning" it would be able to understand where it went wrong. That doesn't seem to be the case.

What it can do is write and execute code to generate the correct output, but isn't that cheating?
by apercu | 2025-04-17 13:31:41+00:00
>US hasn't started an illegal war

The US hasn't declared a war since WWII since executive privilege allows the President to pursue war without Congress declaring war. Does that mean that every time we take military action (which the US is doing daily, right now) we're pursuing what the founders of the country would (rightfully?) classify as an illegal war?

(I didn't take any political science, and I'm not really informed on constitutional law so I could have this partially wrong)
by dmurray | 2025-04-17 13:31:48+00:00
> curious how “an AI can do it” yields much difference in terms of result for the casual watcher

An AI can do it in volume, and therefore cheaper. I don't think a human could do everything I said in real time - maybe with a lot of training and custom software.

A human could transcribe the scoreboard, but the article still thinks that's an interesting application of cutting-edge machine vision.
by Khoth | 2025-04-17 13:31:56+00:00
NP-complete is indeed the intersection of NP-hard and NP.

If you can solve any NP-hard problem then you can solve any NP-complete problem (because you can convert any instance of an NP-complete problem to an NP-hard problem), so NP-hard problems are "at least as hard" as NP-complete problems.

(But an NP-hard problem might not be in NP, ie given a purported solution to an NP-hard problem you might not be able to verify it in polynomial time)
by Edman274 | 2025-04-17 13:32:12+00:00
This point is so obvious and self-evident that I'm really amazed that anybody is acting as if that's not the central thesis of the essay. One of the first links is to a PDF with a title by Mar Hicks called "Sexism is a feature, not a bug." Every single time someone argues sincerely or otherwise that sexism is no longer a problem in software development communities, please think back to the time that all these self described hackers couldn't read an essay spelling out in detail that the "technical" designation is socially constructed by everyone else without your permission and often is along gendered lines - they all read that, missing the point, and said "sure you can!" How many of these same commenters have described and will go on to describe a colleague with more mathematical, statistical, and scientific rigor than they and be like "oh, she's not that technical"? Will it be all of them?
by x187463 | 2025-04-17 13:32:24+00:00
I see a lot of comments here arguing age requirements are overreach and these decisions should be left to the parents. To those presenting such arguments, do you think that applies to other activities as well? What about smoking/drinking/firearms? Pornography? Driving?

I haven't researched the topic of social media's effect on young people, but the common sentiment I encounter is that it's generally harmful, or at least capable of harm in a way that is difficult to isolate and manage as a parent.

The people closest to this issue, that is parents, school faculty, and those who study the psychology and health of children/teens, seem to be the most alarmed about the effects of social media.

If that's true, I can understand the need to, as a society, agree we would like to implement some barrier between kids/teens and the social media companies. How that is practically done seems to be the challenge. Clicking a box that say's, in effect, "I totally promise I am old enough." is completely useless for anything other than a thin legal shield.
by bluGill | 2025-04-17 13:32:26+00:00
It may be a good thing to throw scripts off to someone else. Division of labor is a good thing. You cannot possibly learn everything to a good (not even high) standard. Even if you could, no lawyer would have themselves as a client - when a lawyer needs legal advice they go to a different lawyer because they want that different perspective: this is often a good perspective for other subjects as well.

The question is what you will/should learn for your limited time alive. Society needs well educated (I include things "street smarts" and apprenticeship in educated here) people in many different subjects. Some subjects are important enough everyone needs to learn them (reading, writing, arithmetic). Some subjects are nearly useless but fun (tinplate film photography) and so worth knowing.

Things like basic computer skills are raising to the level where the majority of people today need them. However I'm not sure that scripting is itself quite at that level. (though it is important enough that a significant minority should have them)