MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by owlstuffing | 2025-04-02 16:39:30+00:00
You're not entirely wrong, but when it comes to SQL, the trade-offs are unavoidable. You either embrace a conventional, not-SQL approach with all its limitations, or you treat the database as the single source of truth (SSoT). Both have downsides, but configuring a designated local or shared database for this purpose is no less reliable than conventional approaches.

As for type providers in general, I don't think databases are the best example of their typical use case. Most type providers don’t interact with external systems; they usually parse schemas, configuration files, or other structured data to generate strongly typed representations. The database-backed approach is just one variant, not the norm.
by dralley | 2025-04-02 16:39:39+00:00
> In mid-April 2022, about two weeks before the Wiesbaden meeting, American and Ukrainian naval officers were on a routine intelligence-sharing call when something unexpected popped up on their radar screens. According to a former senior U.S. military officer, “The Americans go: ‘Oh, that’s the Moskva!’ The Ukrainians go: ‘Oh my God. Thanks a lot. Bye.’”

> The Moskva was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The Ukrainians sank it.

> The sinking was a signal triumph — a display of Ukrainian skill and Russian ineptitude. But the episode also reflected the disjointed state of the Ukrainian-American relationship in the first weeks of the war.

> For the Americans, there was anger, because the Ukrainians hadn’t given so much as a heads-up; surprise, that Ukraine possessed missiles capable of reaching the ship; and panic, because the Biden administration hadn’t intended to enable the Ukrainians to attack such a potent symbol of Russian power.

And this is my biggest problem with the last administration's policies on Ukraine, despite the fact that they were vastly better than the current administration's. They acted like the goal was to step on Putin's toes without pissing him off too much, not enable Ukrainians to successfully fight a defensive war after 10 years of Russian aggression. The response to the greatest Ukrainian successes was dismay and pullback. After 2022, there was very little forwards thinking, only reactions that came months late and at the expense of thousands of lives.

I'm not saying that Ukrainians were perfect, they have a TON of problems and mistakes of their own. But they were also put under ludicrous constraints. It's totally absurd that ATACMS was only provided after Congress forced their hand (despite Congressional stonewalling otherwise!). Imagine if Ukraine had been able to hit Russian airfields on Ukrainian soil with cluster ATACMS in spring 2023 before the offensive instead of after it had fallen apart, partially due to those same airfields. Or if cluster shells were provided before Bakhmut fell rather than after.

There was no coherent strategy, only endless handwringing and over-intellectualization and Kremlinology.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-04-02 16:39:54+00:00
As if this has anything to do with locality? Rulers of parcels of land small enough you could see it all from a single hill have been utter despots before. Heck, just look at how some parents treat their children.

This is what happens when you elect a convicted felon, rapist, bullying loser compromised by the Russian state who outright says he wants to be a dictator and he puts sycophants and bullies into positions of power to do exactly that.

Saying this is about local vs nonlocal governance is nothing more than shirking the responsibility of 70,000,000 Americans who wanted this and 100,000,000 Americans who couldn't be bothered to stop it.
by y-c-o-m-b | 2025-04-02 16:40:21+00:00
I have more issues with it when there's food in my stomach vs when there's not. In fact if I eat anything within 15 minutes (in either direction) of consuming creatine, I will for certain have diarrhea. I have zero issues with it on an empty stomach. These days I just make sure not to eat anything within an hour of the creatine and I'm good.

Agreed on the loading phase. It's not worth it.

EDIT: should add that I've been taking creatine for several years
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-04-02 16:40:34+00:00
> You're both complaining about extra keywords while trying to make the case of adding yet another one

I did no such thing. async is already a keyword in F#, I'm just saying they should drop the brackets and remove the required return statement.

> In language design there are always tradeoffs but I'm unable to see how your suggestions would improve the language in the general case or even in your specific case

It would make the language easier to read, for one, and would reduce the amount of specialized syntax needed for specific features. It would preserve the original ML-style syntax for an extremely common operation and not force users into wrapping anything upstream of an async call in a computation block, which is the ugliest syntax feature of F#

> Computation expressions are a generalized concept which are there to add the exact kind of syntactic sugar that you're after

I understand that, and my argument is they failed to do so. The syntax looks bad. They could keep it for all I care, but they should add even more sugar on top to make it not look so bad.
by packetlost | 2025-04-02 16:40:38+00:00
they're routinely very short, and the only non-obvious syntax for someone familiar with a C-like language is the ~ command and redirecting to stderr. They're pretty much always easier to read (and write) than bash scripts in general because of how little weird/surprising syntax there is. Not being a derivative of ALGOL has its perks.

Most scripts are write-once:read-never, especially if you actually implement -h/--help
by Hasu | 2025-04-02 16:41:03+00:00
I think we're talking past each other.

> I took a small company that was living contract to contract into a world where they started making millions in annual recurring revenue.

> There's no secret, magic bullet. All I did was make sure we were delivering progress at a regular cadence. Kept communication channels open. And tried to, but ultimately failed at, training the sales team to stop with the secret deadline negotiation

This is what I call hitting deadlines.
by techpineapple | 2025-04-02 16:41:37+00:00
Does Amazon have any consumer product that people actually like because it’s a good product? Maybe kindle? Which always felt half assed compared to competitors. Obviously people like Amazon, but I think that’s for objective reasons (convenience/price) and not emotional/subjective ones like your need for Tik Tok/Twitch.

Even Amazon studios feels more miss than hit.
by fguerraz | 2025-04-02 16:41:56+00:00
I would argue that the main reason is because everything is about money, and the shorter marketability of everything. Colors are polarising, and affect the unsold inventory and perceived resale value.

Why manufacture objects in 10 different colours if you know the green one is going to be a tough sell? Why buy a blue car if you think you’re going to sell it back after 2 years and struggle to do so?

You don’t want things you don’t intend to keep to have personally, period.
by Lammy | 2025-04-02 16:42:25+00:00
Fun fact: in the G4/G5 era, the SuperDrive was a Pioneer DVR-1xx rebadged. That's how I got into them in the first place :)

This is also why the Pioneer-branded models work just perfectly in Mac OS 9 and every version of Mac OS X with no PatchBurn necessary: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/patchburn
by graypegg | 2025-04-02 16:42:54+00:00
I won't pretend to be an expert on the cultural aspects of this, but the most compelling historical proof they have of their thesis is that chart showing the measurement of hue over a whole bunch of objects in museums, by era.

Is it possible this is a bit of... https://xkcd.com/1138/ ? The Y axis is 100% because you can only look at the objects we have, but that doesn't reflect the fact we don't have 100% of objects from 1800. We only have the objects we cared enough about to protect.

So... in someways, (in no way proof of anything) this could show the opposite? We produce a lot of junky monochrome things that get thrown away fast, and things that we care enough to protect for generations tend to be coloured. We're sort of seeing the half-life of things by colour in that chart.
by psunavy03 | 2025-04-02 16:42:56+00:00
> You also see the sanitization with how war is conducted, increasingly from a distance. Bombing an enemy rather than putting in ground troops (or at least delaying putting them in).

. . . because the American public ever since Desert Storm has demanded sanitized, bloodless wars. As soon as you have so-called "boots on the ground," it magically becomes a "quagmire." Yet everyone insists we prevent the next 9/11.
by light_triad | 2025-04-02 16:43:08+00:00
Interesting article. It seems every war post-Cold War has turned into some kind of proxy war. No matter how much US politicians who are isolationist try to spin the Ukraine war as a "territorial dispute" and how well it plays with their domestic base, the US has been intimately involved since the start.

Perhaps the Cold War never really ended and there's been a secret conflict in the background ever since?
by osigurdson | 2025-04-02 16:43:38+00:00
I've had a bit more success on the front end as it is possible to see the results of a change very quickly. In fact I would prefer it to just auto-apply the changes and I would visually inspect. It isn't bad but the workflow is pretty slow. The resultant code is also very verbose - likely 3X more code than an experienced engineer would create (this is one part that I am certain will improve dramatically in time). While I do use this workflow, sometimes I feel like I am just being lazy as opposed to productive.

I'm just being honest. For my use case, I would be much better off if LLMs could just do everything.
by uses | 2025-04-02 16:43:46+00:00
This was obviously designed as a customer-friendly way to cut scalpers out of at least part of the initial supply chain. Scalping has been an incessant problem in console gaming due to supply shortages, and it makes everyone miserable except the scalpers. Valve provided a similar release strategy with the Deck as what Nintendo appears to be doing here, and it was extremely successful and welcome by the community.
Show HN: Agent File (.af) – A standard file format for serializing AI agents
by wooders | 2025-04-02 16:44:00+00:00
Hi HN - We’re building Agent File (.af), which makes it possible to re-create the exact same agent (including memories, tools, message history, configs, etc.) across different machines.

A big difference between LLMs and agents is that agents have associated state: system prompts, editable memory (personality and user information), tool configurations (code and schemas), and LLM/embedding model settings. While you can run the same LLM as someone else by downloading the weights, there’s no “representation” of agents that allows you to re-create an instance of an agent across services.

Agent File (.af) is an open standard file format for serializing stateful agents. Originally designed for the Letta framework, .af is a human-readable representation of all the associated state of an agent to reproduce the exact behavior and memories.

To demonstrate .af, we also made a few example agents with download links to .af:

- MemGPT: An agent with memory management tools for infinite context, as described in the MemGPT paper Deep Research: A research agent with planning, search, and memory tools to enable writing deep research reports from iterative research

- Customer Support: A customer support agent that has dummy tools for handling order cancellations, looking up order status, and also memory

- Stateless Workflow: A stateless graph workflow agent (no memory and deterministic tool calling) that evaluates recruiting candidates and drafts emails

- Composio Tools: An example of an agent that uses a Composio tool to star a GitHub repository

We’d love to hear what people think of the agent schema we chose and if we’re missing anything (we included everything that we need from Letta, but there may be other features in other frameworks).
by teejmya | 2025-04-02 16:45:00+00:00
I'm very fond of my Pixelbook Go. They are not new but still can be had at a somewhat decent price: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YMM4YC1

It's fairly simple to get it running Linux via this project: https://docs.chrultrabook.com/

The screen is 165.63 PPI, nearly what you're looking for. It's plenty crisp and clear for me at 1,920 × 1,080.

And most importantly, it's thin, fanless, and the battery is decent.
by freedomben | 2025-04-02 16:45:02+00:00
100%. I bought into the "thumbs up what you like and get more of it" when I signed up for Pandora, and that quickly led to getting the same thumbs up songs over and over...

Fortunately with Pandora you could create a new station that wasn't aware of the thumbs so it was able to work around, but it took me a while to figure that out and stop thumbing up
by numpad0 | 2025-04-02 16:46:19+00:00
This is flip/scalping prevention. Gang-type groups would arrange squatting campaigns at retailers to soak up stocks, some shipping to China in bulk. It fizzles launches and it had been damaging to brands just as pirating, if not more, and so a loyal customer purchasing program is absolutely necessary.

I suppose scalping hadn't been as severe globally or in US until recent NVIDIA GPU launches? But it's been a major problem for past ~15 years in Japan for all sorts of hyped products.
by nonethewiser | 2025-04-02 16:47:31+00:00
Im curious what the process looks like to implement this. It seems like it would be easiest to start with the animal using only perfectly(?) curved lines and then complete them into circles after the fact. Although that seems kind of pointless and I imagine they start with circles. And I guess it would hard to have a curve from a perfect circle without the circle?

I just have a hard time imagining you start with circles, lay them down (resize as needed) and continue. I mean I guess that doesnt sound so crazy after I say it... it just seems like it would add a lot of extra noise to the image that would make it much harder to draw.
by pacjam | 2025-04-02 16:48:03+00:00
If you're interested in the full schema you can look at the Pydantic models here: https://github.com/letta-ai/letta/blob/main/letta/serialize_...

Agent File is intended to support "one thread" agents, ie agents that have an indefinite conversation/event history, even if the underlying in-context message history is limited. That's why there's a distinction between just "messages" and "in-context messages" (a subset of messages).
by bigyabai | 2025-04-02 16:48:14+00:00
> His stated reason for not doing more sooner was that he thought it would bring about immense unrest.

What a ridiculous reason in hindsight, huh? "Yes, the inevitable reconciliation of our gross injustices against fellow man will be fixed one day. But not now, because I like the comfort of the status quo and would prefer white people not die for a principled cause."

To say nothing of his own slaves, this fickleness of leadership is not what American politics should aspire to.
by diob | 2025-04-02 16:48:27+00:00
Maybe I’m just too deep into coffee at this point, but unless yaupon has different origins, processes, or varietals, I don’t really see folks in the specialty coffee world making the switch.

That said, it is interesting, and I’d definitely give it a try.

Some people do drink coffee just for the caffeine—but those folks aren’t usually worried about beans or brew methods. They’re just as likely to grab an energy drink or whatever’s convenient.

But for a lot of us, coffee’s more than that. There’s a whole culture around it, and I don’t see that going away anytime soon.

Then again, I'm deep into coffee, so I'm probably biased.
by firefax | 2025-04-02 16:48:35+00:00
>Maybe the NSA is on this and spends a lot of time reverse engineering consumer electronics but sadly I tend to doubt it.

It's more likely the CIA[0] is exploiting consumer electronics that the NSA -- the Joshua Shulte trial cast a lot of light on the tools folks deploy locally.

There's a LOT more of these exploits that need a human in the loop to deploy -- I'd be more worried about who you let near your electronics than where they were made.

I don't think anyone is deliberately inserting backdoors, but existing business pressures lead to rushed, sloppy code which due to the nature of the internet of things is difficult or impossible to patch.

While these devices may be manufactured in China, they are designed all over -- Korea, Taiwan, and of course, right here in the USA.

Keep in mind how hard it is to avoid "showing your hand" if you have access to information -- even if "The Chinese" (or "The NSA" or any other entity) had some godlike ability to spy, you need a human analyst to listen to the interception. Perhaps a second to translate it. And then someone needs to decide what to do with it. Multiple that by soooo many interesting people having interesting conversations...

I'd focus on things like using E2EE comms, MFA on your accounts, etc rather than some boogieman exploiting nation level tradecraft to own you in particular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Schulte#Leaks_of_classi...
by delichon | 2025-04-02 16:49:09+00:00
> It's visually exhausting.

This. It's about managing stimulation levels and contrast. If the environment is continually shouting at you it's hard to hear the whispers, where the meaning is.

I bet one of those color comparison graphs of the average website in 1998 through today would show the same trend. I wish the inflationary trend in linguistic overstatement did the same.
by nathan_douglas | 2025-04-02 16:49:25+00:00
You might (discuss with your care provider, disclaimers, etc) try an SNRI. I'd tried SSRIs multiple times and never saw an improvement. I've also been on various dosages and formulations of stimulant medication for ADHD and did not see unambiguous positive changes. I've been on Effexor for a shade under a month, and while it started off a little eh, with nausea and some mild unpleasant mental symptoms, I feel like it's unlocked the person I was meant to be. I hope it continues to work as well as this, because I feel like it's the most powerful change I've ever experienced in my life.
by bitpush | 2025-04-02 16:49:27+00:00
To really answer the question, you have to understand what user problem is it solving.

Lets look at it from couple of different angles. First a solo developer. If you've ever developed against an API, you know how difficult it is to pass headers, cookies, change GET/POST/PUT requests. You might want a way to repeat a previous API request again and again. You might want to create a collection of requests that you can refer again. If you're using curl, you'll soon start having a myraid of shell scripts with variables and control flow. At some point you might want a UI, and soon you've invented Postman/Insomia and the likes.

Now imagine you're a team. In a team, there are cases where you might want to share "requests collections" with others in the team. What are the options for headers, what flag configuration works best for a certain scenario and the like.

So yes, while postman looks like curl, it adds so much value over curl and that's why it exists.

It will be similar to dismissing dropbox/google drive, because rsync exists (yes, I'm aware of the HN lore)
Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
by dang | 2025-04-02 16:49:56+00:00
Hi all,

Tom Howard is going public as HN moderator today. He has been doing HN moderation work for years and knows the site and its practices inside-out, so the only new thing you'll see is mod comments from Tom showing up in the threads the way mine do. I'm not going anywhere, so you'll have two of us to put up with going forward :)

I've known Tom since he was sctb's and my batchmate back in YC W09. Many of you know him as the kind and thoughtful community member tomhoward (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomhoward). He's still kind and thoughtful, but he's going to post as tomhow from now on (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomhow), the same way I switched to dang when I went through this rite of passage years ago.

Below is a bit from Tom about himself. Please join me in welcoming him to this new status which he was crazy enough to say yes to!

---

YC and HN have been a huge part of my life for nearly two decades. I read pg's essay How to Start a Startup in 2005 after my friend (and later, co-founder) Fenn found it on Slashdot, and it opened our eyes as to how to go about building products and companies. I first signed up in late 2007, and since then HN has been the place I come to find interesting news and discussions.

Hacker News gave me a window into the big wide world of technology and startups, that had previously seemed so remote and opaque from where I lived (and still live) in Australia. We were lucky enough to be accepted into the W09 batch of YC, and since then HN has been a place where we could share announcements about the startup, but also where I could share the challenges and struggles I experienced in the startup journey and other aspects of life, particularly to do with health and wellbeing.

From the discussions that have happened about these topics I've ended up making enduring friendships with people all over the world, and have been able to learn many things that have improved my life in profound ways. I love HN's ethos - of being a place people come to engage their curiosity. That's what it's always been for me and what I hope I can help it to be for everyone!

--Tom
by treetalker | 2025-04-02 16:50:27+00:00
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

I had heard this before but didn't know it by name. According to Slate (https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...) Frank Wilhoit is an Ohioan classical-music composer and first expressed the statement in a 2018 blog comment.
by notesinthefield | 2025-04-02 16:50:28+00:00
I only take the guidance of my doc as recommendations for AI's have always been all over the place and ive been with him forever - I started at 2x/2weeks and now its once every other week. On top of that my estrogen numbers have always been high so it makes sense. Its been an experiment - I did tank it once and uhh, the side effects were interesting
by vkou | 2025-04-02 16:50:39+00:00
That's just upmarket-priced vendors using influencers to advertise.

You're not going to get people to pay you $80 for a meal, but you could get them to pay you that much for an experience.

You didn't see as much of that before social media because it was a waste of money to run ads for that stuff on TV. (But you could find no shortage of them in print magazines.)
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-02 16:51:15+00:00
It may be the first time a President pardons a corporation but it is a little sensationalistic to suggest that Trump is on a power grab or is "expanding" anything as the Constitution indeed only states which offences can be pardoned:

... he [The President] shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
by fcantournet | 2025-04-02 16:51:28+00:00
"Participants had 5 minute conversations simultaneously with another human participant and one of these systems before judging which conversational partner they thought was human. When prompted to adopt a humanlike persona, GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time: significantly more often than interrogators selected the real human participant."

That's the opposite of a Turing test pass : it shows a very clear bias in selection is present, which means the LLM is significantly different from humans (at least in this test setting).

If the test setting was : 1 humans talk to chatbot and after 5m decides yes/no on human, then yeah that would be a very impressive result.

But in the test setting of this paper, surely a success would be as close as possible to a 50%, i.e: statistically impossible to separate humans and LLMs.