MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alkonaut | 2025-04-09 06:10:36+00:00
Everyone can produce _something_ they have written. Yes there are people who literally clock in at work and code 8-5 for 10 years and never touched a hobby project or contributed to an OSS project. And you might not want to filter that group out completely. But if I was in that group and I was considering switching jobs, I'd definitely make sure I had some of that proprietary code stashed away so I could show a potential future employer. Yes you won't be allowed to do that. And it would be understandable if in some cases (like you work as a defense contractor) it's completely impossible. But for most people it should be possible to show something.
by beloch | 2025-04-09 06:13:50+00:00
There was a good blog post on bicycles and tariff's earlier this week[1].

A key point was that volume really matters in what you can onshore. Whether you go for full automation or not, dies, tooling, machinery etc. all need to be amortized across what you sell. High-volume, low-end products are relatively easy to amortize, being both less demanding to manufacture and having higher volume. Such products are usually made in several factories around the world. Specialized, high-end stuff tends to be much harder to sell in large enough quantities to be economically viable. In many cases, one factory serves the entire world and barely makes a profit.

The Tariffs and counter-tariffs currently being implemented create a barrier around the U.S. market. If a product is low-end and high-volume, then it may make sense to manufacture it in the U.S. if it wasn't made there before, primarily to bypass the barrier and serve the U.S. market as profitably as possible. Exporting from within the U.S. may not necessarily make sense. Not all low-end, high-volume products will be onshored either. For low-end products in which manufacturing costs are a small portion of the consumer price, simply paying the tariffs may make more sense.

Manufacturers of high-end, low-volume products that rely on access to world-wide supply chains and markets are unlikely to move to the U.S.. The U.S. is a big market, but the rest of the world is bigger. High-end, niche manufacturers currently in the U.S. may be forced to consider moving abroad or shutting down. Many high-end, specialized products will become more expensive in the U.S. and there will be no domestic competitor. Some products that are barely profitable now will simply be impossible to make with significant trade barriers around the U.S. market and will cease to be offered anywhere.

Dividing up the world market into walled off economic regions is, ultimately, likely to reduce the range of high-end, specialized stuff that the world can produce. If countries insist on a higher degree of self-sufficiency and throw up trade barriers, there will be things we all simply stop making.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43572820
Show HN: A Swift-First, Reactive Programming Framework with No Bloat
by gokulnair2001 | 2025-04-09 06:13:54+00:00
Hello HN!

I've developed Pledge, a lightweight and thread-safe reactive programming framework for Swift. It aims to simplify state management and event propagation in Swift applications by offering:

Thread-Safe Observables: Ensure safe state management across different threads.

Flexible Binding Mechanism: Easily bind observables to UI components or other data sources.

Minimalistic API: Focus on simplicity without sacrificing functionality.

I created Pledge to address the complexities often encountered with other reactive frameworks. It's designed to be intuitive and easy to integrate into existing projects.

You can find the project here: https://github.com/gokulnair2001/Pledge

I would greatly appreciate any feedback, suggestions, or contributions from the community. Your insights will be invaluable in improving the framework.

Thank you for taking the time to check it out!
Show HN: Speech and Audio To Text – Transcribe voice messages offline
by 8mobile | 2025-04-09 06:15:07+00:00
Hi HN, I’d like to share a side project I recently finished: Speech & Audio To Text, a small iOS utility to transcribe voice messages from apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Voice Memos — fully offline and without sending any data to the cloud.

The motivation was personal. I often receive voice notes when I can't listen to them — during meetings, while commuting on noisy trains, or when I don’t want to disturb others. I used to rely on an app that handled this well, until it moved to a subscription model and started requiring constant internet access.

I wanted something that would:

- Work offline - Not send audio to any server - Be available with a single, one-time purchase - Support WhatsApp and Telegram voice messages directly - Handle multiple languages

So I built it. It’s completely local, lightweight, and doesn't use any AI or external APIs. The speech recognition relies on on-device iOS capabilities, and supports over 60 languages depending on system settings.

I'd love to hear your feedback or suggestions. Thanks for checking it out.
by successful23 | 2025-04-09 06:15:32+00:00
Yeah, I still use search engines.

LLMs are amazing for technical research or getting a quick overview and a clear explanation without clicking through ten links. But for everyday searches — checking restaurant hours, finding recent news, digging into niche forums, or comparing product — search engines are still way better.

I don’t think it’s a matter of one replacing the other — they serve different purposes.
by slowhadoken | 2025-04-09 06:16:11+00:00
Thank you. I get a lot of this litigious attitude on Hacker News but the bad actors are either wrong or trying to instigate irrational arguments. Like someone will post something political, I’ll point out an inconsistency in their argument, so they accuse me of starting a flame war and downvote me into oblivion. There’s more opinion making, control of narrative, and group-think on this site these days. It’s weird.
by cseleborg | 2025-04-09 06:16:16+00:00
There is something to be said for trust here. I like that I can go straight to the imprint ("Impressum") to know with whom I'm dealing with online, where the company is located and who the CEO is. This is not always easy to decipher from the "Terms" pages companies in the US and elsewhere provide.

The downside for founders is that you have to divulge your address, unless you take additional steps to give yourself a mailbox address, but this can also be illegal if you're not careful. You can also rent an office of course, but for indie devs and freelancers, this is usually not financially viable.
by 1659447091 | 2025-04-09 06:17:18+00:00
The above story is a separate category of journalism, think photo-journalism as opposed to news reporting. My statement on journalistic integrity was specifically referring to the topics' discussion on news reporting journalism.

But I agree there is a type of journalism -- I think there is another name for it but I can only think of photo-journalism atm -- where creative writing, or linguistic flair, can and does contribute if done in good faith (integrity).
by Llamamoe | 2025-04-09 06:18:13+00:00
> I think saccharin is probably the safest of all the artificial sweeteners. Stevia and monk fruit extracts (herbal sweeteners) are probably okay too, as long as you're not allergic to them.

No, isomaltulose(a.k.a Palatinose) is the best. Not very sweet, but it's literally just glucose and fructose connected differently, no other off-products or metabolic consequences, just a sweet carbohydrate with slow metabolism that doesn't cause cavities and is beneficial to the gut microbiota due to the slow release of sugar, just like a good resistant starch would.

It's not as sweet, low calorie, or inexpensive, but health-wise forget being harmless, it's outright better than almost all other carbs.
by bitwize | 2025-04-09 06:18:50+00:00
I like this article. It opens with a statement of its thesis and presents a few profiles of video game workers whose lives have been negatively impacted by AI. Each profile follows a basic template: a paragraph or so about who they are and what they do, a summary of how AI entered their workplace, a bunch of interview quotes about their reaction to it, and a paragraph at the end about what the final outcome was for the person or their company. Succinct, to the point, and easy to read. You don't see a lot of online journalism like this; the clickbait era has been marked by an entire novel about the E! True Hollywood Story of the major player(s) before the fucking point is even mentioned -- or worse still, AI-generated slop as the body text. Props to Aftermath and Luke Plunkett for maintaining a high standard of prose.
by cluckindan | 2025-04-09 06:18:54+00:00
No. There would be some guy on the street goading you to enter a restaurant by offering you free chicken, and once you did enter, they would start pressuring you into ordering other things while overpaying for that bucket of low quality chicken that may or may not be a health hazard. There would be a threat of violence and you would not be allowed to leave before paying.
by nikolay_sivko | 2025-04-09 06:18:54+00:00
From a user’s perspective, it doesn’t really matter how the data is collected. What actually matters is whether the tool helps you answer questions about your system and figure out what’s going wrong.

At Coroot, we use eBPF for a couple of reasons:

1. To get the data we actually need, not just whatever happens to be exposed by the app or OS.

2. To make integration fast and automatic for users.

And let’s be real, if all the right data were already available, we wouldn’t be writing all this complicated eBPF code in the first place:)
by alwillis | 2025-04-09 06:19:47+00:00
I just can't bring myself to believe there is a meaningfully sized group of developers that have considered the performance of text-wrapping.

You're kidding, right? There are a ton of non-trivial edge cases that have to be considered: break points, hyphenation, other Latin-based languages, etc.

From a Google engineer's paper describing the challenges: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jJFD8nAUuiUX6ArFZQqQo8yT...

Performance Considerations While the `text-wrap: pretty` property is an opt-in to accept slower line breaking, it shouldn’t be too slow, or web developers can’t use them due to their performance restrictions. The pinpoint result when it is enabled for all web_tests is in this CL. Complexity The score-based algorithm has different characteristics from the bisection algorithm. The bisection algorithm is O(n * log w) where n is the number of lines and w is the sum of spaces at the right end. The score-based algorithm is O(n! + n) where n is the number of break opportunities, so it will be slower if there are many break opportunities, such as when hyphenation is enabled. Also, computing break opportunities are not cheap; it was one of LayoutNG's optimizations to minimize the number of computing break opportunities. The score-based algorithm will lose the benefit. Last 4 Lines Because computing all break opportunities is expensive, and computing the score is O(n!) for the number of break opportunities, the number of break opportunities is critical for the performance. To minimize the performance impact, the implementation caches 4 lines ahead of the layout. Before laying out a line, compute line breaking of 4 lines ahead of the layout. If it finds the end of the block or a forced break, compute the score and optimize line breaks. Otherwise layout the first line from the greedy line breaking results, and repeat this for the next line. The line breaking results are cached, and used if the optimizer decided not to apply, to minimize the performance impact. Currently, it applies to the last 4 lines of each paragraph, where “paragraph” is content in an inline formatting context separated by forced breaks. The Length of the Last Line Because the benefit of the score-based line breaking is most visible when the last line of the paragraph is short, a performance optimization is to kick the optimizer in only when the last line is shorter than a ratio of the available width. Currently, it applies only when the last line is equal to or less than ⅓ of the available width. Checking if the last line has only a single word Checking if the last line has only a single word (i.e. no break opportunities) requires running the break iterator, but only once.
by orwin | 2025-04-09 06:20:12+00:00
Don't do systematic embezzlement, or at least try to look contrite when you get caught, and you'll be fine. Bardella is a much stronger candidate for the RN anyway.

Some people _really_ like criminals here it seems. If I had my work pay for my father's butler and claim that as 'business expenses', I sure hope they would fire me when they eventually find out years later.
by xarope | 2025-04-09 06:20:44+00:00
I've done 97km in 26 hours before, in the Sahara (I think we started around 8am, and finished around 10ish the next morning), which works out to about 2.3mph, so I'd agree 2-2.5mph is reasonable.

hmm, [0] this says the longest stage was 91km in 2009 (I did it in 2015), so I could be wrong, but I'm going by what my garmin told me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_des_Sables
by PhilippGille | 2025-04-09 06:21:50+00:00
> the easiest way would be to run it as a Docker container

Regarding this part, you can always just run a base image and add the app yourself. I'm on mobile so can't test, but should be along these lines:

docker run --rm --name dockerfmt \ -v /path/to/Dockerfile:/tmp/Dockerfile \ golang:1.24-alpine sh -c \ "apk add git && go run github.com/reteps/dockerfmt@latest /tmp/Dockerfile"

> against an existing file

For this part yes, you'd still need one, but it can be any of your own.
by JamesAdir | 2025-04-09 06:22:15+00:00
I've recently tinkered with creating an automated install script for a home server. It was good practice for me and I want to setup a small home server with pihole, sonarr and so on. I've created it with Claude and ChatGPT and both preformed poorly. Huge chunks of code, that might be running, but creates much more mess than it should. Only after going and reading the documentation the old fashioned way and with the help of search, I was able to reduce the size of the script and solve many problems with it.
by scyzoryk_xyz | 2025-04-09 06:26:52+00:00
Any chance you would be able to point me to a good source or article describing/explaining the first half of your comment? I.e. someone getting into the nuts and bolts?

Netflix is a platform - their strategic advantage is in their content sourcing and development pipeline which is fed the unique insights on audience preferences. This is distributed with recommendation algorithms and UX. It could be argued, like someone also already pointed out, that this infra aspect is a commodity at this point.
by aw1621107 | 2025-04-09 06:27:41+00:00
I think that's more a case of unnecessary pedantry. Rust "has garbage collection" in that you can opt in to the lifetime of some objects being handled by some kind of garbage collection. Rust doesn't "have garbage collection" in that Rust does not require a GC'd runtime to implement its semantics in a memory-safe manner. Two different concepts with similar terminology.

Edit: Also looking at that commenter's history I am rather skeptical they would reasonably be considered a "Rust evangelist"
by yorwba | 2025-04-09 06:29:50+00:00
LLMs are good at translating between languages that have significant amounts of written content on the internet. There are few languages in this category that do not already have correspondingly large Wikipedias.

There are plenty of languages with millions of speakers that are only rarely used in writing, often because some other language is enforced in education. If you try to use an LLM to translate into such a language, you'll just get garbage.

It's very easy for a hand-crafted template to beat an LLM if the LLM can't do the job at all.
by protocolture | 2025-04-09 06:31:05+00:00
>“I am yet to have a team or gamerunner push back on me once I actually explain how these AI art generators work and how they don't contribute in a helpful way to a project, but I have a sense of dread that it is only a matter of time until that changes, especially given that I've gone the majority of my career with no mention of them to every second conversation having it mentioned.”

I recently played through a game and after finishing it, read over the reviews.

There was a brief period after launch where the game was heavily criticised for its use of AI assets. They removed some, but apparently not all (or more likely, people considered the game tainted and started claiming everything was AI)

The (I believe) 4 person dev team used AI tools to keep up with the vast quantity of art they needed to produce for what was a very art heavy game.

I can understand people with an existing method not wanting to change. And AI may not actually be a good fit for a lot of this stuff. But I feel like the real winners are going to be the people who do a lot more with a lot less out of sheer necessity to meet outrageous goals.
by flaburgan | 2025-04-09 06:32:08+00:00
Personally, I think free software are really important, and I love the developers that I am hiring to be in this mindset as well. So the first think I am doing is to check their gitlab / github profiles. If they love to write code and to share it, there obviously will be code there to check. Of course this code could be written with help of an AI but, nothing is preventing the developer to use it while working as well. As long as the result if good, everything is fine.
by kortilla | 2025-04-09 06:32:43+00:00
These channels don’t exist because it’s a better way to display information. It’s a more click bait way.

A chart that works that way is the title equivalent of “you won’t guess who wins”.

I get sucked into those “X over 50 years videos” and watch to the end to get the satisfaction. But it doesn’t help me remember the outcome at all.

It’s just engagement bait in video form. A chart on a webpage like this is just chart junk like the poster said unless it’s actually updating in real time.
by magicalhippo | 2025-04-09 06:32:48+00:00
I fed it some 200 lines of non-trivial Delphi code and asked it to implement a stub method in the middle of the code, and it did a decent job.

The implementation was solid Delphi code and used the existing code correctly, but it didn't solve the core problem 100% correct.

However, I'm just using the Q4 variant as I'm constrained by my GPU's 16GB of VRAM, and my question was just a simple one-liner with very few details, and the code wasn't commented. So overall I was pleasantly surprised.

Though definitely too heavy for my system for such tasks. Due to the thinking it used 14k tokens total, leading to just partially offloading layers on the GPU, which in turn meant just 10 tok/s response speed.
by ralferoo | 2025-04-09 06:33:10+00:00
Not everyone lies. To say everyone does is just lying to yourself in an attempt at rationalisation.

Tell the truth. If you perform poorly in an interview, you now know where your weaknesses are. Work on them. Do a hobby project that lets you gain experience in that area. Use that as an example in your interview. Not only can you be truthful, you'll be more confident as you'll actually understand what you're talking about and can turn it into a positive - "I was weak in this area, so I went off an studied it myself" reveals more about your character than just the specific thing you learned.
Show HN: Built a Yahoo Messenger-inspired web chat app just for the nostalgia
by lakshikag | 2025-04-09 06:34:16+00:00
Hey folks, so I’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic lately and decided to build a web chat app that kinda brings back the vibe of Yahoo! Messenger. Right now it has group chat rooms. Anyone can register (no email or anything), and you can either create your own rooms or join ones that are already there.

Room owners can set custom backgrounds and even custom cursors for their chat rooms. Users can format their messages with basic markdowns such as bold/italic/colored text like we used to, and I even brought back the original Yahoo! Messenger emoticons because why not?

Here are some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/Ks29qoH

I’m thinking about adding:

• Audibles • A buddy list so you can add friends • Private chats between buddies

Before I go any further, I figured I’d ask here - what do you all think? Any memories from Yahoo! Messenger days that you wish were brought back? Features I should add or change?

Would really love any feedback or ideas!
by bitwize | 2025-04-09 06:34:40+00:00
> Can Gen-AI, moot the need for code?

No, because if you read your SICP you will come across the aphorism that "programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." Relatedly is an idea I often quote against "low/no code tooling" that by the time you have an idea of what you want done specific enough for a computer to execute it, whatever symbols you use to express that idea -- be it through text, diagrams, special notation, sounds, etc. -- will be isomorphic to constructs in some programming language. Relatedly, Gerald Sussman once wrote that he sought a language in which to discuss ideas with his friends, both human and electronic.

Code is a notation, like mathematical notation and musical notation. It stands outside prose because it expresses an idea for a procedure to be done by machine, specific enough to be unambiguously executable by said machine. No matter how hard you proompt, there's always going to be some vagueness and nuance in your English-language expression of the idea. To nail down the procedure unambiguously, you have to evaluate the idea in terms of code (or a sufficiently code-like notation as makes no difference). Even if you are working with a human-level (or greater) intelligence, it will be much easier for you and it to discuss some algorithm in terms of code than in an English-language description, at least if your mutual goal is a runnable version of the algorithm. Gen-AI will just make our electronic friends worthy of being called people; we will still need a programming language to adequately share our ideas with them.
by rtpg | 2025-04-09 06:37:20+00:00
every rant like this inevitably goes into Gnome/GTK world. I must insist how much "better" (for these kinds of people) the Qt/KDE world is! People who are so passionate about this stuff just don't give any credit to one side of the equation that has stuck to its guns in terms of making apps that still have a billion buttons with text labels on them.

Seriously, if you find yourself annoyed at Gnome, you can set up KDE and (mostly) have no issues.

I say all this... Qt is a tricky beast to use. I prefer it to GTK but it's chunky.
by awanderingmind | 2025-04-09 06:38:04+00:00
Great post that hits the sweet spot between a dry academic summary and a popular exposition.

Personally I hope that the current wave of AI is over hyped and misunderstood (so that e.g. https://ai-2027.com/ will be a comical footnote one day) and that symbolic reasoning will make a comeback in a new form.