MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by samuell | 2025-04-09 16:07:20+00:00
So now we are going towards using models to more efficiently store information, and let them talk to each other, instead of moving massive datasets around, as briefly outlined in 2023 in [1] & [2] (although I would anticipate that linked data might help here too)?

[1] https://livingsystems.substack.com/p/the-future-of-data-less...

[2] https://livingsystems.substack.com/p/will-data-served-as-lan...
by jodrellblank | 2025-04-09 16:07:41+00:00
I believe that is not a concern in my code; if "a=a" then commiting to that cannot hide any possible solutions where either side of the equals could be different because we've already tested and found them equal (they unify). One can avoid that worry by swapping in this version instead:

score(X, X, Adder, NewScore) :- NewScore is Adder + 10. score(X, Y, Adder, Adder) :- dif(X, Y).

Leaving choicepoints where I don't want them is an annoying part of Prolog when I know the answer is deterministic - that's where I used zcompare/3 in my other answer in this thread, but it's far too much effort to write that pattern for every test situation. For people who object to `is` then make it `succ(Adder, NewScore)` and adjust the player scores down by a factor of ten as per the blog post. For people who comment that succ/2 doesn't always work, note that the Adder is always initialised to 0 in the foldl goal so succ/2 always has one instantiated value.

[It just wouldn't be a Prolog solution if it wasn't hard to write, hard to read, hard to verify that it's working properly, full of single letter variable names OrLongWordVariableNames and immediately making people talk about cut and constraint handlers and ISO compatibility and Prolog internals rather than the problem. On that note, PabloLife's code has "flip(correct, incorrect)" which is imperatively named but doesn't do anything imperative, uses nested lists instead of Number-Answer pairs which is more visually cluttered and uses more memory...].
by pseudocomposer | 2025-04-09 16:08:28+00:00
At least on iOS, I've found ScreenZen (https://www.screenzen.co) to be pretty ideal. I'll definitely try SpeedBump if they add me to the beta, though.

Like SpeedBump, ScreenZen also has a "wait before using addictive apps" function (though, it doesn't have the "wait a bit longer to get 15mins vs. 2mins" - that would be really nice).

ScreenZen also keeps track of "streaks" of days not going over your overall limit in addictive apps. Unfortunately, that limit is counted by number of sessions, not the actual overall app screen time (by default, if you set your limit to 1 hour, it gives you 6 sessions of 10 minutes per app). It would be nice to combine this with SpeedBump's different-time-limit feature: if I want to quickly check a post or show a friend something on Instagram, I could use only 2mins out of my overall hour limit, instead of 10mins.
Show HN: Haystack – Review code as a visual story on an infinite canvas
by akshaysg | 2025-04-09 16:08:36+00:00
Hi HN!

Code reviews today are line-by-line diffs. This format makes reviewers focus on individual changes to catch bugs, style issues, and bad variable names, rather than the bigger picture of what the code is doing and why.

However, I don’t think that’s what code reviews are for. Tests (and angry users) catch bugs. Linters catch style issues. And nitpicks almost always bog down the review and make it take longer for the code to merge.

I believe that the point of a code review is to help teammates understand how the author is trying to achieve their goal, whether that’s a bug fix, a new feature, or a refactor. A good review requires understanding the narrative behind a change, determining whether the structure of a pull request reasonably fulfills that narrative (interface changes, new data structures, etc.), and deciding whether the team is OK with maintaining this new shape of the codebase.

The current pull request interface makes this hard. It's just a wall of unordered diffs that you're left to piece together by jumping between files. When reviewing a pull request from a teammate, I found myself spending more time reconstructing the big picture of the changes than reviewing the code itself.

So I built Haystack to help with that. It breaks down a pull request into logical chunks and lays them out on an infinite canvas. It guides you through the changes as a structured visual story, helping you focus on architecture, intent, and maintainability instead of chasing nits. I hope that Haystack makes code reviews less of a last-minute, unwanted chore. And if it doesn’t, I want to hear about it!

If you’re interested:

1. Take a look at the demo playground https://haystackeditor.com/playground

2. Watch a walkthrough https://youtu.be/K_qLwXFwr8I

3. Try it at https://haystackeditor.dev

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42935218
by NauticalStu | 2025-04-09 16:08:42+00:00
TGM actually has a pretty interesting 1v1 system. I wish it was more popular.

Most other Tetris games (all that I've played, at least) throw randomized garbage at the opponent. It scales with the number of lines you clear, but it always has a one column gap in a random position, no control over that.

But TGM's garbage is deterministic. Basically, imagine taking the lines you just cleared, but remove the piece that completed them. That missing piece will be the gap. Flip what's left upside down and add it to the bottom of your opponent's stack.

Now you have full control over the position and shape of the garbage you send!

This adds a nice layer of strategy and makes the game feel more interactive since you need to constantly watch your opponent's stack and act accordingly. You want to add garbage where your opponent will struggle to clear it while also being on the lookout for what kind of garbage they'll be sending you and try to play around it.

And there are powerup items to spice things up, which admittedly vary widely in power level and can be very swingy. Although that's not necessarily bad as it allows players of different skill levels to play together (although the stronger player will still win most games), as well as just add some exciting or funny turnarounds. There's also a timing element to triggering the items, which adds even more strategy.

https://tetris.wiki/TGM_Versus_Mode_Guide
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-04-09 16:09:04+00:00
> If Americans want a snowballs chance in hell, there need to be special elections around the country in 2025, to take control of congress.

Perhaps, though I don't see how you're going to get them without changing or violating the Constitution. And changing the Constitution would mean acceptance by those you're trying to get rid of.

Bluntly, the only way this could happen is a civil war - a real, shooting civil war, with bullets and dead bodies. I'm not yet at the point of cheering for that, much as I dislike the current status quo.

> Republican senators and congressfolk are threatened by the voting base if they break with Trump, which they wont anyway.

Then I don't see how a special election in 2025 would help. You say we need a special election to get rid of these folks, but you also say that these folks would be threatened by the voting base if they break with Trump - which to me means that they won't be threatened by the voting base if they stick with Trump.

So I don't think your point 4 offers any hope at all.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-09 16:09:17+00:00
> Sure, but aren't we past rational debate on this point?

No.

> Not only are the new trade policies irrational, it's quite possible that they're intentionally irrational as a bargaining or maneuvering tactic.

Not really, at least not a well-considered bargaining or maneuvering tactic. There is no incentive to comply if there isn't a clear compliance goal and a clear willingness to reward progress toward it as well as punish noncompliance. Irrationality is poor bargaining.

More to the point, though, the space for rational debate is NOT with the architects of the policy, who, yes, seem beyond reason. The space for debate is among everyone else, including the people who have the Constitutional power to arrest the executive policy in this area (whether that debate centers on the merits of policy in the broad sense or their own narrow future political fortunes or some combination of those.)

> As I commented yesterday, there's a playbook for reshoring that's being totally ignored

Broad reshoring of industries or broad sectors that have left the US because its comparative advantage in the present world trade regime has shifted elsewhere is an objectively economically harmful idea, and expending resources on it consumes resources that could be productively employed in pursuit of relative economic inefficiency. There may be select industries that can be identified where there is a rational argument that that would be only a short-term hit and that there would be long-term benefits, or where security or stability issues given real expected international threats make that a cost worth bearing (though in the latter case it is still generally probably better to work to maintain existing alliances and work jointly to "reshore" critical industries broadly within our international political alignment rather than making it an isolated national policy, both because there are often going to be other places in the alliance where it is less out of line with present comparative advantage and because it is a broadly shared benefit where it makes sense to share the costs.)

We don't need a better playbook to achieve autarky, we need to reject it as a goal.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-09 16:09:19+00:00
Probably because they've become accustomed to the taste so that taste is what their brain associates with as Ketchup. Switching to someone's local brand that will have a different recipe/formula (probably a lot less sugar), the taste will be different. To their brain, this is not ketchup rather some tomato paste sauce.

Obviously, ketchup is not going to be the only thing that this fits. Pretty much any processed food sold in the US under major labels are going to be loaded with sugar that decent folks would question why it's being used.
by ralferoo | 2025-04-09 16:09:25+00:00
This still doesn't justify lying to a potential employer. If your CV won't get you to an interview, then you don't have the skills they are looking for.

Aside from lying, you have other choices - spend some time working on personal projects to get the skills you need, obtain a recognised qualification in the skills you need, or try to find some way to obtain those skills in your current job. All of those will increase your real value to the potential employers, and gain you the opportunity to get the interview you want.

If a company catches you lying in an interview, they're absolutely right to blacklist you forever. How do you expect them to ever trust you to be telling the truth in the future if your very first contact with them is built on a lie?
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-04-09 16:09:30+00:00
To be clear: the law DOES NOT give the president power over tariffs. It gives him some ability to massage them, but Congress has this power.

To do this, Trump declared a national emergency so he could use emergency powers that are designed for events like war. Congress is supposed to check this power, but Republicans are bowing to Trump as their all-knowing ruler.
by mturmon | 2025-04-09 16:09:49+00:00
> And besides, why argue hypotheticals here ...

You are the one who raised the 1940s optical rangefinder question, and now talking about autofocus, which is a totally different problem than dense ranging from optical stereo disparity.

If you don't want to argue hypotheticals, don't do it.

If you choose to argue technical details in the absence of expertise, expect pushback from people with domain knowledge.

I spent 5 years working on long-distance optical stereo as part of a DARPA program, with a team that was very committed to stereo vision. Our limited success left me with an appreciation of the challenges versus lidar.
by lief79 | 2025-04-09 16:10:14+00:00
Or open up more stores then the region can support, remove the local competition, and then close theirs stores as uncompetitive. The small town (population < 2000) my Mom grew up in is currently supporting their IGA as well as the Dollar Store, but my understanding is that they're in better shape then a lot of their small town neighbors.

One or two successful businesses makes a huge difference at that level. If something happened to their one large employer, a food factory, then they'd really be in trouble. The other businesses are restaurant sized at the largest.
by yieldcrv | 2025-04-09 16:10:17+00:00
> I think it downplays the incidence of students using Claude as an alternative to building foundational skills

I think people will get more utility out of education programs that allow them to be productive with AI, at the expense of foundational knowledge

Universities have a different purpose and are tone deaf to why their students use universities for the last century: which is that the corporate sector decided university degrees were necessary despite 90% of the cross disciplinary learning being irrelevant.

Its not the university’s problem and they will outlive this meme of catering to the middle class’ upwards mobility at all. They existed before and will exist after.

The university may never be the place for a human to hone the skill of being augmented with AI but a trade school or bootcamp or other structured learning environment will be, for those not self started enough to sit through youtube videos and trawl discord servers
by 9rx | 2025-04-09 16:10:30+00:00
In that case it was more that the ORM was, under certain conditions, silently corrupting data and whatnot due to fundamental design problems. It needed a major overhaul to address the issues and at that point a rewrite that didn't deviate too far API-wise was seemingly the easiest/fastest way forward. Like the original comment asserts: Don't be afraid to use libraries, but choose them wisely.

But in your example, even if an ORM doesn't provide native breakout functionality, it should be obvious that you can maintain a bespoke path to the database for cases where the ORM doesn't fit. Where that isn't obvious to someone, perhaps 'creating their own ORM' isn't the waste of time you make it out to be, but is actually necessary education?

If you are No-name CRUD Company you're probably not hiring the million dollar per year devs who have learned all the lessons. You kind of have to accept that you are working with budget workers and thus learning on the job is going to need to take place, even if you wish that weren't the reality you face.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-09 16:10:39+00:00
> We certainly improve productivity

I think this is really still up for debate

We produce more output certainly but if it's overall lower quality than previous output is that really "improved productivity"?

There has to be a tipping point somewhere, where faster output of low quality work is actually decreasing productivity due to the efforts now required to keep the tower of garbage from toppling
by cush | 2025-04-09 16:11:17+00:00
I tried every kind of focus app and focus mode on iOS, and nothing stuck. After years of trying, this approach worked well for me:

1. Delete any app with any kind of algorithmic feed (YouTube, TikTok, etc)

2. Uninstall Safari

That's right, I've been rocking a browserless phone for about a year now, and I'm never going back. AMA
by nlarew | 2025-04-09 16:11:18+00:00
> Can't we just have a set of best practices around API endpoints/functions? Like, imo we could just keep using Rest APIs and have a convention that an agent exposes endpoints like /capabilities, /task_status ...

To make this work at scale we all need to agree on the specific routes names, payloads, behaviors, etc. At that point we have defined a protocol (built on top of HTTP, itself a lower level protocol).
by 999900000999 | 2025-04-09 16:11:35+00:00
>cloud-cuckoo-land

Welcome, this is where we're going to be for foreseeable future. Prison made inferior Nikes will end up costing 500$ a pair. Not that anyone is going to have money to buy them.

As you mentioned we'd probably need to still source from other countries. The bigger issue here is the USD may lose its reserve currency status.

The rest of the world might just trade in Euros and Yuan. Inflation will truly take off then.
by uses | 2025-04-09 16:11:36+00:00
If this was about national security, we wouldn't be ruining relationships with allies while strengthening adversaries.

If this was about industrial capacity, we wouldn't be attacking education, chilling investment, attacking energy innovation, attacking science and research, and creating a historically unstable economic environment, all without a whisper of any logical industrial policy.

Stop trying to rationalize the destructive foolishness of this leadership.
by reaperducer | 2025-04-09 16:11:44+00:00
I'm not sure whether you travel much, but I always travel as a digital nomad.

I was a "digital nomad" before that was even a term.

I've done "work from home" in Japan, China, Macau, South Korea, Belgium, and at least ten American cities. Even way back when we did it with payphones, Telex and fax machines.

Get off my lawn.
by Nav_Panel | 2025-04-09 16:12:21+00:00
A2A isn't a layer of abstraction over MCP, it functions in parallel and they complement each other. MCP addresses the Agent-to-Environment question, how can Agents "do things" on computers. A2A addresses the Agent-to-Agent question, how can Agents learn about other Agents and communicate with them. You need both.

You CAN try and build "the one agent that does everything" but in scenarios where there's many simultaneous data streams, a better approach would be to have many stateful agents handling each stream via MCP, coupled with a single "executive" agent that calls on each of the stateful agents via A2A to get the high-level info it needs to make decisions on behalf of its user.
by mppm | 2025-04-09 16:12:21+00:00
> Interesting article, but I think it downplays the incidence of students using Claude as an alternative to building foundational skills.

No shit. This is anecdotal evidence, but I was recently teaching a university CS class as a guest lecturer (at a somewhat below-average university), and almost all the students were basically copy-pasting task descriptions and error messages into ChatGPT in lieu of actually programming. No one seemed to even read the output, let alone be able to explain it. "Foundational skills" were near zero, as a result.

Anyway, I strongly suspect that this report is based on careful whitewashing and would reveal 75% cheating if examined more closely. But maybe there is a bit of sampling bias at play as well -- maybe the laziest students just never bother with anything but ChatGPT and Google Colab, while students using Claude have a little more motivation to learn something.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-09 16:12:28+00:00
>Should the world cancel the USA because it is saying something about annexing Canada\Greenland?

Not the world, but If I were Canada\Denmark, I would think twice about if I rely on the US for defense and arms.

That said Taiwan is a red herring.

Im not sure the US policy has a coherent strategy. If there is one, it is that US economic and military hegemony is waning with global economic growth.

Negative sum strategies are valid in war and power competition. If a global recession hurts the rest of the world less than US, that could be a strategic win.
by fluidcruft | 2025-04-09 16:12:33+00:00
It just seems like John Deere putting out a press-release about about a new sparkplug that is only useful to John Deere and can maybe be used on rented John Deere harvesters when sharecropping on John Deere-owned fields using John Deere GMO crops. I just don't see what's appealing about any of it. Not only is it a walled garden, you can't even own anything and are completely dependent on the whims of John Deere to not bulldoze the entire field.

It just seems like if you build on Tensor then sure, you can go home, but Google will keep your ball.
by adrian_b | 2025-04-09 16:12:42+00:00
One of the comments on that page mentions that we see the G-class stars like the Sun as "yellowish", but in fact they are white, like a LED lamp with a color temperature of 5500 K or 6000 K.

The reason for this is not mentioned there, which is that the atmosphere of the Earth acts like a low-pass filter for the direct light that comes from the Sun or from a star, converting the white light into yellowish light. The missing bluish light is diffused over the sky, giving it its blue color. The night sky is also blue, but at a many times lower luminance, so that it seems black.

On the Moon, the Sun will appear as perfectly white, on a perfectly black sky.
by darth_avocado | 2025-04-09 16:13:00+00:00
“Managing stock on demand” is entirely driven by what the store stocks in the first place. Dollar stores often don’t store fresh produce and if they do, it’s not the best, nor is it the variety you need in a community. No amount of filling up feedback forms is going to convince the corporate overlords to change that because “profit”. Our local community supermarket got bought out by Safeway. Everything from less processed pasta to multigrain baked nacho chips disappeared in favor of generic big brand stuff. The meat counter shrunk and the seafood counter almost disappeared. But you could now get 20-30 types of sausages because they come packed, sodium infused and stay on the shelves for months. The locals kept sending feedback, but nothing changed. I stopped shopping there and eventually moved out of the neighborhood because I could.
Looking for a fintech mentor to help me build a startup
by zegax | 2025-04-09 16:13:04+00:00
I'm looking for someone experienced in the fintech industry who can mentor me.

I'm particularly interested in anyone who has worked or works for Visa / Mastercard, Stripe, Adyen, PayPal, Square, FIS, Authorize, Paddle, Plaid, or any relevant company. I'm also looking for someone who has knowledge of how startups can negotiate with banks to get into their networks.

About me: I'm based in the US, studied computer science in university and I'm about to graduate. I am looking for mentorship in order to understand the industry better and what path to take in my career. This past year I've become fixated on the payment processing industry. I read some books on payments processing so I can understand how the system works.

I'm interested in building a technology startup in this space to take on emerging markets.
by keybored | 2025-04-09 16:13:11+00:00
You’re going on about moral clarity and cowardice, dodging any real arguments that could be had. This is just obfuscation and relativism (but NK is worse than X). There have been concrete counter-arguments to the narrative in the OP. It doesn’t matter if the head of state of NK has killed more people than Genghis Khan.

There’s also no point in fretting about cowardice. Critiquing a poor Asian country from an apartment in Europe/America/South America won’t get you harmed.
by Sonnigeszeug | 2025-04-09 16:13:14+00:00
Interestingly enough, Powerwall is the only product I know and heard of, which can do grid disconnect and reconnect out of the box.

Unfortunate for this particular product (i do not like tesla anymore), i also never heard anything about it after that one Musk presentation infront of a house with tesla roof.

But if your ecosystem is Tesla (before Musk), the synergy would definitly be very nice.

'Just because' lucky enough some people do not mind investing money into beauty.
by sebazzz | 2025-04-09 16:13:15+00:00
> it flummoxes me that most developers and designers don't take them seriously enough to implement properly (styles must only be set though <link>, and JS likewise exists only in external files). Doing any styling or scripting inline should be frowned upon as hard as table-based layouts.

At our place we do abide by those rules, but we also use 3rd party components like Telerik/Kendo which require both unsafe-inline for scripting and styling. Sometimes you have no choice laxing your security policy.