MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by attila-lendvai | 2025-04-02 22:24:54+00:00
the key idea is to admit/realize that a program is a graph, and that a flat string of characters is not an ideal way to store such complex structures.

once that leap is made, a whole lot of the complexities of namespaces, modules, source control, and parsing become much simpler/better. this comes at the cost of more complexity in the editor/infrastructure, but that is a singular place while in return it is simplifying every program written.
by thearrow | 2025-04-02 22:25:03+00:00
I love this essay, and it very closely mirrors my own feelings about the topic. Thanks for writing/sharing it.

I’m perpetually bamboozled by my fellow software engineering colleagues who insist on proudly shouting from the rooftops “Look at me, ma! I’m vibe coding!” as if it’s some badge of honor to see who can churn out the greatest quantities of shitcode the fastest and completely surrender any last scraps of their cognitive abilities to the best LLM provider of the current moment.
by ms-menardi | 2025-04-02 22:25:25+00:00
Location: Portland, OR, USA

Remote: Yes, remote or hybrid

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Bash, C, Lua, Linux

Resume/CV: https://pastebin.com/FnUt0cw9

Email: cameronking@protonmail.com

Gotta get a job so I can buy food for my cat.

Everyone likes me. I work hard until I burn out. Use me with intention, but... please use me because I need to get a job so I can buy food for my cat. I can learn any language in a weekend, I can bang on Linux computers until they work, and I'm cripplingly honest and kind and I won't deceive you or try to hide.

Interested primarily in back-end roles.
by perihelions | 2025-04-02 22:25:36+00:00
Any chance there's some way, going forwards, to dual-purpose these webserver PoW's, so they solve some socially beneficial compute problem at the same time? I recall reading ideas like that in the early days of cryptocurrency, before humans ruined it.

- Server: here's a bit of a cancer protein

- Client: okay, here's some compute

- Verifier: the compute checks out

- Server: okay, you are authorized to access cat.gif
by dpifke | 2025-04-02 22:25:50+00:00
Dan and Tom can speak to this, but by my reading of the guidelines, "criticism of the current administration" and "views on topics like gender" are both explicitly prohibited:

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

It has nothing to do with being on the side of "the opposition" or "the man," it's because those sorts of posts inevitably lead to the same, repetitive, off-topic debates and flame wars.

Flagging should be used as a cudgel against posts that break the rules. There are plenty of places on the internet to debate politics and gender; HN is not one of them.
by palata | 2025-04-02 22:25:51+00:00
> What on earth makes you think that the same engineers responsible for fluid and smooth UI/UX are the ones who’d ever influence the cryptography/privacy/security?

Did you even read my comment? I gave an example of how privacy directly impacts UX: GMail couldn't automatically add your events to your calendar if it could not read the content of your emails. I never talked about engineers, just the technical reality. If you don't have it, you can't read it. That seemed absolutely obvious to me: the best UX for a car would be one that doesn't need a source of energy, fits in my pockets and instantly teleports me anywhere I want. Go ask your engineers to make a car that allows that perfect UX, and see how they react.

Telegram has no E2EE except for the secret chats. Last time I checked, the secret chats were not synchronized between devices (i.e. the privacy has an obvious impact on the UX).

So no, I don't think it was an odd comment. It just feels like you don't know how it works technically.
Show HN: OpenAPI access to SaaS/PaaS/IaaS for your LLMs. No more MCP clutter.
by uncomplexity_ | 2025-04-02 22:26:22+00:00
Hey all, we built a search engine for LLMs to easily find and use APIs from different vendors.

Our initial release supports GitHub, Cloudflare, Bunny, Supabase, Box, Koyeb, Render, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Linode, Stripe, & Plaid.

In the homepage we provided one-click demos with digitalocean, cloudflare, stripe, and github.

Why we built this:

- We want LLMs to adapt. Usual approach is to hard-code the tools / actions they can do. We built this so LLMs can search and execute actions on the fly.

- We want to reduce redundancy. Writing MCP layers on top of OpenAPI specs brings in coverage limitations and versioning drifts. We built this so LLMs can have direct access to OpenAPI specs.

- We want to be more efficient. Entire OpenAPI specs from large vendors won't fit in context windows. We built this so they can just find what the exactly need and be able to use it.

Think of it like Google, but instead of finding information, it's for finding actions that your LLMs can execute.

You can read more info at homepage on https://uncomplexities.com/.

The usage instructions for LLMs are at https://api.uncomplexities.com/.

Our homepage demo, it's claude 3.7 instructed with "You MUST use the Uncomplexities API to correctly format our REST API operations. Read the usage instructions at https://api-cdn.uncomplexities.com/ or https://api.uncomplexities.com/ before we interact with any SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS."

Currently our goal is to provide a free public search engine of all saas/paas/iaas that has public-facing apis. thankfully cdns are a thing and we have some internal caches in place for the search operations so we can manage the costs.

We have more plans soon:

- open source core parts of it including pre-processed datasets

- add more usage guide for user and for developers

- improvements in indexing and search

- commoditizing some of the compliments, trying to build a business on top of it so we can sustain the free public stuff

please give us your feedback, thank you
by danpalmer | 2025-04-02 22:26:24+00:00
Then we disagree on the value of Wikipedia. "History" has historically been written by those in positions of power and is biased by that. It feels very much in line with Wikipedia's value proposition of being a "free source of history" that they are trying to improve equity and unbias that source by adding more underrepresented voices. Funding racial equity programs seems a reasonable way of achieving that.

This thread (public link: https://nitter.net/echetus/status/1579776106034757633) mostly suggests that is where that funding is going. It also picks on a few specific cases and positions them as bad, but given that the thread is written from the standpoint that racial equity is bad, I'm not inclined to take the couple of cherry picked examples at face value. There are valid reasons to critique them.
by cnst | 2025-04-02 22:26:48+00:00
This is my biggest complaint about AI.

Instead of creating easy-to-navigate help sections of the website, and explaining the product and everything clearly, the flashy vendors simply put everything behind an opaque model as if that's somehow better.

Then you have to guess what to type to get the most basic info about fees, terms and procedures of a service.

You want to see how the Pros are doing it? Well, they're not using any AI! Tesla, for example, still has a regular PDF and a regular section-based manual (in HTML) where you can read the details about your car.

$TSLA is priced as being the most innovative auto manufacturer, and they're clearly proficient with the AI (Autopilot/FSD), yet when it comes to user's manual, clearly they're following the same process as all the legacy automakers always have had (besides not hiding the PDF behind a parts paywall, and having an open-access HTML version of the manual, too, of course). Why? Because that actually works!
by mmooss | 2025-04-02 22:27:19+00:00
Thanks and good point about the structured data.

I ask about mbox (one file system file per Thunderbird folder - e.g., one file named Inbox containing all its messages) or maildir (one folder per TB folder, containing one file per message) because it affects search using outside tools that don't understand that folder structure.

I'm wondering how efficient they are: When you search, does grep return an Inbox mbox file at a certain line number, or a maildir file?
by BizarroLand | 2025-04-02 22:28:09+00:00
I would argue that if something is illegal but it is acceptable, right, good, or moral, (depending on which reference framework is appropriate) a decent person or corporation should commit that crime as often as is frugally possible, e.g. "Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men"

Vice versa, that mythical decent corporation person should not do things that are legal if they are not acceptable, or right, or good, or moral, no matter what other incentives are attached to that action, e.g "Facebook doing an authoritarianism to erase objections".

Thusly, when "Facebook does an authoritarianism" is the topic of conversation, we can say, "Facebook is bad" without wannabe Cartmans showing up in a psychological crossdress yelling, "uh uh, I do what I want" on behalf of the un-decent corporation.
by pvg | 2025-04-02 22:28:14+00:00
I would say it mimics real life interactions of some communities. I do not think that is universal.

I would say this is straight up wrong. It is universal since it's fundamental to being a social animal. There's a cost to being at odds with a group. We do have all sorts of mechanism and rituals, formal and informal, to minimize or amortize that cost in all sorts of settings but it's still there and it's still essential. You look at the faces of your coworkers in a meeting in which you're making some unpopular proposal to see how it's going over and you feel the slight sting of recognizing the smallest hints of disapproval. It's built right into all human interaction.
by kodablah | 2025-04-02 22:28:42+00:00
> Workflows are systems where LLMs and tools are orchestrated through predefined code paths

This definition keeps coming up, but the definition isn't accurate for workflows. Modern workflow systems are very dynamic in nature and direct their own process and tool usage (e.g. like Temporal, disclaimer: my employer). You can even write workflows that eval code if you want though for most that's a step of flexibility too far to give to an LLM. Many workflows have LLMs tell them what to do next, sometimes via a bounded tool list, or sometimes open ended e.g. process execution or code eval. There is no limit here. A better definition of a workflow is that it durably orchestrates things, not that the sequence or code is predefined.

So by a more accepted/modern definition of "workflow", agents are workflows that just happen to be more dynamic than some more rigid workflows.
by acdha | 2025-04-02 22:28:45+00:00
There’s one scenario: if there’s room for more automation, manufacturers might have fewer high-wage workers at a more automated plant. The problem with that theory is that it doesn’t work if the task can’t be cheaply automated (much textile manufacturing falls into this category) or if it’s already being automated. I would be surprised if Apple has that much untapped room for automation but other companies might be able to match costs that way.
by greenfish6 | 2025-04-02 22:29:15+00:00
Modern Realty (YC S24) | Founding AI Engineer | San Francisco, CA | Full-time

We're building an AI-powered real estate brokerage that allows users to buy homes without a traditional realtor. Our platform automates agent workflows including messaging, deal management, and customer interaction.

Tech stack: TypeScript, AI/LLM integrations with focus on tool use

Responsibilities: - Design and develop AI-driven workflows for messaging and deal automation - Build robust backend services using TypeScript - Craft effective GPT prompts and fine-tune AI responses - Collaborate closely with CEO/CTO on key platform features

Seeking someone who: - Uses AI to ship code fast - Has shipped consumer-facing features - Has good grasp of existing AI models

Compensation: $100K-$150K, 0.5%-2.5% equity

Apply / JD: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/66546
by mooreds | 2025-04-02 22:29:21+00:00
FusionAuth | Senior Java Software Engineer, Senior Security Engineer | Denver, CO, USA ONSITE | Salaries listed on job req, but for the Java engineer it is 140k-180k

Our mission is to make authentication and authorization simple and secure for every developer building web and mobile applications. We want devs to stop worrying about auth and focus on building something awesome.

There are a lot of companies in the auth space, but we feel like we have something special:

* a unique deployment model (self-host on-prem or in your cloud or run in our cloud)

* A well designed API first approach; one customer compared our app to petrichor

* a relatively mature product (the code base is over eight years old and we've found and fixed a lot of the sharp edges around core login use cases; however there are plenty more features to add)

* founder-led; the CEO is an engineer who still writes code

* a full featured free-as-in-beer version that makes the sales cycle easier; prospects often come in having prototyped an integration already

If you are passionate about technology and want to join a company moving the industry forward, FusionAuth might be a great fit for you. As mentioned, our core software is commercial with a "free as in beer" version. We also open source much of our supporting infrastructure.

We are profitable but raised a round in 2023 to accelerate our growth (more on that here: https://fusionauth.io/blog/fusionauth-funding ).

Technologies and standards that we use or implement: Modern Java, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Docker, Kubernetes, OAuth, SAML, OIDC.

Learn more, including about benefits and salaries, and apply here: https://fusionauth.io/careers/

Click/tap the 'View open positions' orange button.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-02 22:29:23+00:00
We've been using electron scanning microscopes, radio telescopes, etc for much much longer than we've been using "AI" in them.

I'm really not sure what you're getting at here, but you definitely seem to be confusing generative AI here. What's being discussed here is not generative AI. It's just a very refined algo searching for patterns in images. This is not "artist conception" type of content like the image of the black hole. So until you accept the difference, you're just spinning your wheels
by pixl97 | 2025-04-02 22:30:25+00:00
>I don’t care.

The particular problem with poorly defined definitions is they cause a lot of spilled ink later on.

For example the term AGI. Or, even deeper, the definition of intelligence, gets debated again and again with all the goal post dragging one expects these days.

Even breaking out simple categories can help like

Type I agent: Script driven, uses LLM for intelligent actions.

Type II agent: LLM driven, uses scripts and tools. May still need human input.

Type III agent: Builds a time machine to kill John Connor.
by palata | 2025-04-02 22:30:36+00:00
To me it's just not an encrypted messaging app. I don't even get all the discussions about it...

It's a bit like if we analysed the E2EE guarantees of email over and over again. Every year, multitudes of people would publish a post explaining how email is "badly encrypted". Well, email is not E2EE, period. If you want E2EE, use a system that has E2EE.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-02 22:30:40+00:00
>I hope there's a way to disable the chat button entirely, so I'm not accidentally triggering a function that I never want to use and my kids certainly won't be using, like the damned "share" button on the PS5.

Nintendo is very concious about parental features, so I'm sure there's some way to disable the chat button. I'm honestly surprised to begin with they took the step to work with live chat.

>How's the Deck with multiple Switch Pro controller support?

I've had no issues connecting a variety of console controllers all at once to the Deck. PS5, PS4, XSX, and Switch Pros worked fine.
by sva_ | 2025-04-02 22:30:46+00:00
> Difficulty is set at 4 leading zeroes, unless you're coming from US in which case there's also a tariff of 5 more leading zeroes.

> You can see it in action on this recently decommissioned system I'm using for testing purposes: https://ams.source.kernel.org/

Something seriously wrong with it. When I run it with my normal German/EU home connection, it does ~17k iterations. When I run it with a US Atlanta VPN, it only takes ~6k iterations.
by benbreen | 2025-04-02 22:30:50+00:00
Gwern and others who have dug into it this far might be interested by this footnote in the Crespo article: "I have tried to lay my hands on the original version of the conversation, as I am sure Simon did, too. I contacted Gabriel Zadunaisky, who, as the article explains, participated in the meeting. He is a professional translator. I asked him for the original version, and he replied on WhatsApp: 'Mr. Crespo: I am very sick. Unfortunately, I am unable to provide you with the information requested.' My hypothesis is that Zadunaisky translated the conversation directly from the recorded version and that this original version has been lost."

My read is that most likely, it was recorded on an old school reel-to-reel tape recorder. It's entirely possible that the tapes are still sitting on a shelf somewhere in Argentina, though the chances of actually tracking them down are pretty low. I worked with some reel-to-reel tapes that Alan Ginsberg made (now held at Stanford) in the mid-60s (including one where he is talking to Bob Dylan!) and they held up pretty well. Had to use audio editing software to remove tape hiss, but they were not as badly preserved as I expected.
by lsllc | 2025-04-02 22:31:12+00:00
According to the BBC reporting, it appears that for each country he's charging 50% of the tariff they place on US goods coming into those countries, or a baseline of 10% for some countries like the UK.

(sorry, this is a BBC live news ticker link):

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c1dr7vy39eet?post=asset%3A3a34...

And a picture of the chart they had showing the per-country tariffs:

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c1dr7vy39eet?post=asset%3A7f78...
by biddlybop | 2025-04-02 22:31:41+00:00
Yes and some people will also make scientifically inaccurate claims like "sex is a spectrum" and "there are more than two sexes" and "it is possible for humans to change sex".

There's a great deal of misunderstanding around this topic. Having open-minded, interesting and reflective discussion about topics like this should however lead to greater understanding. But that is not possible if it gets flagged and censored.
by energy123 | 2025-04-02 22:33:32+00:00
Autarky is just bad economic policy because comparative advantage is too powerful. Nobody benefits from this. The US loses and everyone else loses. The US loses the most however, both economically and in soft power.

This isn't even the China model. Slapping tariffs on raw inputs guarantees that US industry cannot compete internationally. This is more like the North Korean model.

While there are positives to targeted industrial policy, there are no positives to autarky.
by autoexec | 2025-04-02 22:33:54+00:00
> You would expect an explosion of color in the 1960s and then a decrease

What happened was a lot of muted colors, earthy yellows, browns, and oranges in the 70s followed by an insane amount of the brightest colors possible in the late 80s and early 90s where fluorescent blues greens and pinks were everywhere. It seems like everything got a lot more bland after that and we've never recovered to happy medium.
by ferfumarma | 2025-04-02 22:34:18+00:00
I'm deeply skeptical as well.

If firefox doesn't have enough compelling ideas and features in its primary domain of the browser, then how are they going to develop a new mail competency in such a complete way that they can take on gmail?

Whether they succeed or fail, this will sap resources from the browser team. And it seems overwhelmingly likely to fail.
by wat10000 | 2025-04-02 22:35:11+00:00
It’s baffling. I sort of get why some people like strongmen. Hitler and Mussolini fought and bled for their country. Stalin and Mao led armies to victory. They were bad people but I can’t deny that they were strong in some sense.

But Trump? A middling businessman and second-rate TV star nobody would have ever heard of if he hadn’t been born rich? He has zero credentials for this. What gives?
Show HN: A fresh take on Anki and spaced repetition
by adangit | 2025-04-02 22:35:49+00:00
My goal is to support Anki learners with a fresh-take on the tool. One that’s opinionated, easier to use, and not paywalled like Quizlet and other tools.

Markdown + LaTeX support, export as JSON or CSV, start/stop your review anytime.

Still early days, but I’m excited to share it. Would love feedback, thoughts, and ideas—especially if you’re interested in collaborating.
by rqtwteye | 2025-04-02 22:36:04+00:00
I have been in the workforce for almost 30 years now and I believe that everybody is getting more squeezed so they don’t have the time or energy to do a proper job. The expectation is to get it done as quickly as possible and not do more unless told so.

In SW development in the 90s I had much more time for experimentation to figure things out. In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks.

I think google had it right for a while with their 20% time where people could do wanted to do. As far as I know that’s over.

People need some slack if you want to see good work. They aren’t machines that can run constantly on 100% utilization.
by drewcoo | 2025-04-02 22:36:15+00:00
That misrepresents Technicolor. The 3-film process was adopted in the 1930s. It was the most popular, but not first, incarnation of Technicolor.

Kodak also had Kodachrome by the 30s, despite nostalgia for Paul Simon's early solo work.

The more common earlier color adoptions had to do with pigments in paint and especially fabrics. Bold red was so popular for shirts for men over a century that hand-me-down worn-out pinks were considered "boys colors."

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/05/01/pink-blue/

> It's bad design

Says whom? Do you represent the design police? I was never there, don't know the person, and don't know what a person even is, so I'm not guilty, occifer! I'd like a lawyer present, please.
by codetrotter | 2025-04-02 22:36:22+00:00
https://github.com/picosh/pico/tree/main/pkg/apps/pastes

https://github.com/picosh/pico/blob/main/cmd/pastes/ssh/main...

These looks like they are the code for the pastebin.

There’s a bunch of other code related to their other services in that repo and in their other repos as well.
by MrMcCall | 2025-04-02 22:36:26+00:00
So you understand how echo chambers are created and are fine with it?

The problem is that there is no one with power here that can come to the "little guy's" defence. There is no will around here for that kind of support, because the only people hired to wield such power are of like mind. DJT doesn't hire democrats, and this is no different.

Look at this comment section, and tell me this isn't an echo chamber.
by Rebelgecko | 2025-04-02 22:36:32+00:00
Cloudflare will just straight up block me sometimes, with no way to see the page. For whatever reason this used to happen to me a lot with car dealer websites. Maybe checking lots of different dealerships' inventory looking for a specific car made me look like a bot.

And even in cases where Cloudflare forces a captcha, this POW ran much more quickly than I could solve one by hand