MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hinkley | 2025-04-27 20:07:12+00:00
I really like SQLite but I wonder if what we are seeing here is a need for conventional OLTP databases to be able to unload parts of indexes from memory.

Because essentially what’s happening with database per user is that we don’t keep anything in memory for users who are inactive, or only active on another instance, for essentially the same schema (or maybe a couple versions of a schema).

This is starting to smell like the JSON situation with Mongo. Where Postgres is now twice as fast as Mongo at the thing Mongo is supposed to be an expert in.
by thyristan | 2025-04-27 20:07:45+00:00
I guess CHIPS-Act might be even worse: where cryptography didn't end up in huge-volume products that brought big bucks at that time, It is different with AI now. Nvidia almost has a monopoly on AI-capable chips. At least for the vast majority of the 'no time to adapt to AMD/Intel/Google chips' researchers. Export controls break that dependence for overseas researchers and they'll look for alternatives, if possible in-country. Meaning that the CHIPS-Act actively hurts American tech companies and induces research spending to build up foreign AI chip capabilities that can undercut any current advantage.

The next Asia-is-cheaper-and-better shock will be AI chips from the likes of Huawei, Samsung, NEC.
by jruohonen | 2025-04-27 20:08:10+00:00
It doesn't really seem that the situation would be improving or could be even solved:

"While hallucinations are reduced relative to general-purpose chatbots (GPT-4), we find that the AI research tools made by LexisNexis (Lexis+ AI) and Thomson Reuters (Westlaw AI-Assisted Research and Ask Practical Law AI) each hallucinate between 17% and 33% of the time."

Ref.:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43814663
by out_of_protocol | 2025-04-27 20:08:54+00:00
> Linux ABI is available— Win32

Yep!

> Mac users are generally running on aarch64 rather than x86, so you have the binary compatibility barrier. Plus no 32bit support.

That's not really the reason. Rosetta exists and quote good. Macos binaries don't work because Apple breaks its own compatibility (including 32 bit thing), and windows binaries don't work because Apple don't support vulkan nor opengl, and, maybe even more important, no one has incentive to fix it
by gizzlon | 2025-04-27 20:08:59+00:00
> When the Nazis came for the communists, I kept quiet; I wasn't a communist.

> When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet; I wasn't a trade unionist.

> When they locked up the Social Democrats, I kept quiet; I wasn't a social democrat.

> When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet; I wasn't a Jew.

> When they came for me, there was no one left to protest
by daft_pink | 2025-04-27 20:10:26+00:00
While I really hope that they do a great job with it, I have no faith in Walmart to offer an effective charging network. Doing everything on the absolute cheap leaves a lot to be desired.

They were great when they were expanding and had great stores to lure you away from the competition, but now they operate under maintained not well staffed stores with confusing self checkout and obtrusive surveillance everywhere. It’s just a total race to the bottom at their stores.

Hopefully it will encourage better players like Target to follow suit.

Anyways, reality is that people buy EVs to charge them at home most of the time. At least thats what I think the reality is.
by mindcrime | 2025-04-27 20:11:06+00:00
If you have any Meetups (or similar groups) in your area for any topic you are interested in / knowledgeable about, then contact them. Most such groups are always looking for speakers and will happily accept anybody who volunteers. And the expectation aren't usually super high from the audience. So if you have a few too many "uuuhhhs" and "aaaahhhhs", or your slides are a bit janky, or it takes too long to get your laptop to connect to the projector, they'll usually be pretty forgiving. Nobody is going to throw tomatoes at you or anything. About the worst thing that would usually happen in that setting is that some impatient person gets up and walks out.

Local meetups like this are a great way to cut your teeth at presenting and public speaking. And yes, I speak from experience here. I did the firefighting instructor stuff mentioned above in my early to mid 20's but after I left the fire department behind and moved to a new area, I got involved in the Meetup / User Group scene and started doing a lot of these kinds of talks. Both experiences combined definitely helped me overall in terms of becoming a (somewhat) confident public speaker.

Toastmasters is also an option I hear good things about, but I have no first hand experience doing that.
by dokyun | 2025-04-27 20:11:46+00:00
That's what makes it come off as stupid and kneejerk to me. This guy wrote "The Wii homebrew community was all built on top of a pile of lies and copyright infringement" like it's some kind of shocking revelation. The guy writes it in a way that makes me think it's fueled by some years-long grudge rather than an intent to unravel some kind of conspiracy. It's kinda pathetic, really.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-27 20:12:10+00:00
> This, to me, is the critical and fatal flaw that prevents me from using or even being excited about LLMs: That they can be randomly, nondeterministically and confidently wrong, and there is no way to know without manually reviewing every output.

Sounds a lot like most engineers I’ve ever worked with.

There are a lot of people utilizing LLMs wisely because they know and embrace this. Reviewing and understanding their output has always been the game. The whole “vibe coding” trend where you send the LLM off to do something and hope for the best will teach anyone this lesson very quickly if they try it.
by darknavi | 2025-04-27 20:12:41+00:00
> honestly its a pretty good experience - aside from EA reliability issues, which seem to have improved but still far short of Tesla.

Going from the Tesla Supercharger network I can't share this sentiment at all. Virtually every time I charge at an EA station (which is admittedly only a few times a year) there is either random power degradation with no notice or one or many totally dysfunctional stalls. This latest time a few days ago the only open stall was busted because the terminal said to unplug from the last session over an hour ago.

The flakiness is compounded by the lack of chargers per station. Superchargers often have 10 or even 20 chargers, EA chargers often have 2 to 4 chargers so a charger going out is much worse.
by maxglute | 2025-04-27 20:13:49+00:00
Huawei exploits PRC specific market forces.

AMD/Intel have to compete with Nvidia globally (or whatever % of trusted partners). They have to match NVIDIA price/performance.

Huawei doesn't / won't have to compete with Nvidia for long, so they can compete on performance, i.e. using more expensive (less efficient) processes, and more power hungrier chips. The TCO could be higher, but they also don't have to take 40-50% margin like Nvidia, and PRC is less power cost constrained. So possible to make a chip that cost 40% to fabricate vs 20%, but only take 20% of profit instead of 40%. Possible that TCO of that ship uses 2x more power... but local power costs 50%.
by II2II | 2025-04-27 20:13:50+00:00
> Homebrew scenes seem like a candidate for doing things "the right way", but culturally they're a lot closer to piracy scenes than anyone wants to admit, at least in front of a court.

I realize the homebrew scene doesn't view themselves this way, but I pretty much view them as part of the piracy scene even when they are antagonistic towards those who pirate games. The main difference is that they are "pirating" hardware rather than software. By that I mean they are overriding DRM created by the hardware vendor to use the hardware in unauthorized ways.

Now it is easy to say that you should be able to do what you want with hardware you own. In most respects, I am sympathetic with that. Yet I don't like that philosophy for one big reason: it creates a huge disincentive to those who want to create open platforms since it is going to be nearly impossible for them to get any traction when they are up against jailbroken devices from huge multinational corporations.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-27 20:14:16+00:00
>I can decide between a used BMW 2 which goes 1k km on a full tank, for €17k, and a Kia EV 7 seater for €70k. Guess which one I went with.

I assume you are talking about the family van 2 series? And not the sporty 2 door 2 series. (Why didn't you buy a Touran?)

You are also comparing used car prices to new car prices which is pretty insane.

>EV prices are just way too high.

Sure.
by jchw | 2025-04-27 20:14:40+00:00
> The point is that nobody is being held to anything. Who will make a case in court? There is nobody to enforce the law, [...]

Lawsuits are very expensive for all parties no matter what, there is clearly no intent to try to engage legal action. That has nothing to do with anything. They're trying to distance themselves from illicit behavior, including the behavior they already knew about and let slide in 2007.

(And I doubt it's being done for legal reasons, but distancing yourself from illicit behavior does matter; take a look at what happened with Citra. The case partially hinged on their responses to piracy.)

> It can be easily corrected by including these license files. Therefore nothing is blocking either project.

Tell that to the libogc developers who seem to only be interested in burying the problem rather than trying to rectify it in any way.
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-27 20:15:40+00:00
Before 2G, networks used completely unencrypted analog voice. You could snoop on anyone's calls with a slightly-modified radio; at least until Congress heard about this and made it illegal to sell a radio that could be modified to do this[0].

2G was actually considered a huge bump up in security because you could encrypt the contents of calls. Albeit with hilariously insecure crypto mandated by the old ITAR regime[1]. IMSI catchers weren't part of their threat model, for the same reason why people only recently have realized that metadata is relevant to security.

[0] This law is still on the books, even though analog cellular is entirely dead. It's still a pain in the ass to properly comply with this for, e.g. software-defined radio.

[1] This is the same reason why DVD CSS was so easy to crack, and why we there used to be 10 different ways to strip SSL before we decided to stop serving old browsers entirely.
by hagbard_c | 2025-04-27 20:16:00+00:00
A genuine answer, how about looking up some studies on this subject? Not those done by Wikipedia of course, they claim to be politically neutral after all.

Here's a few, from https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased

Six studies, including two from Harvard researchers, have found a left-wing bias at Wikipedia:

A 2024 analysis [1] by researcher David Rozado that used AllSides Media Bias Ratings [2] found Wikipedia associates right-of-center public figures with more negative sentiment than left-wing figures, and tends to associate left-leaning news organizations with more positive sentiment than right-leaning ones.

A Harvard study [3] found Wikipedia articles are more left-wing than Encyclopedia Britannica.

Another paper [4] from the same Harvard researchers found left-wing editors are more active and partisan on the site.

A 2018 analysis [5] found top-cited news outlets on Wikipedia are mainly left-wing.

Another analysis [6] using AllSides Media Bias Ratings found that pages on American politicians cite mostly left-wing news outlets.

American academics found [7] conservative editors are 6 times more likely to be sanctioned in Wikipedia policy enforcement.

There are far more sources out there.

If I show examples of biased pages - the one on Antifa is a good example - this will just devolve into a quibble about this or that sentence.

[1] https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/is-wikipedia-politically-...

[2] https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/ratings

[3] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Do-Experts-or-Collecti...

[4] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/17-028_e7788...

[5] https://archive.md/v4TFn

[6] https://archive.is/dDr7X

[7] https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/
by clort | 2025-04-27 20:16:06+00:00
> Wang has now given Kachouroff and DeMaster until May 5th to explain how this moronic bungling of legal practice came about.

I don't really understand why this, but then I'm not the judge. They already were asked, several times why the citations were inaccurate, but declined to offer any explanation. They were eventually asked specifically if they used generative AI for this and he admitted that he did. So what is the point of giving them until 5th of May? They already admitted malpractice, so refer them for disciplinary proceedings already! These lawyers are not children who did not know what they were doing, they have had training in law and have sworn to follow the rules on their professional conduct with full awareness of what those rules are. Consequences need to follow, or else the behaviour will be considered acceptable.
by intended | 2025-04-27 20:16:26+00:00
man, without getting into the specifics, the vast difference in medical habits because of gender, activity levels, and the fact that I had an unusual condition which caused me to look into this, ITS EARWAX removal for fs sake.

What, are you saying that there is an ASMR or god knows what community that focuses on ear wax?

I never got those ads in my LIFE, until I had a medical need. Have you?

>why does it have to be a horrid ad?

Because I choose horrid ads to mess with my friends? You could try for adult teletubbies, lord knows that might exist. Whatever floats your boat, I say.

You seem to have some horse in this race, or some larger level of commitment than the simple joy of messing around with this should entail.

And holy hell, I had an example of a medical condition, an ad, in the UK, discussed in a bloody field, with no towers or other devices to listen in, and the other person did not have the same medical condition.

And yet this is not enough. And all you have to do with this, is try it out yourself. Hell - I am even suggesting this in a manner that is open to being a fun lark with friends.

I am by far the largest black hole of joy amongst the stellar folk in my orbit. This converastion is invigorating, in that you are near certainly part of my tribe.
by Gimpei | 2025-04-27 20:16:42+00:00
Given that o3 is trained on the contents of the Internet, and the answers to all these chess problems are almost certainly on the Internet in multiple places, in a sense it has been weakly trained on this content. The question for me becomes: is the LLM doing better on these problems because it’s improving in reasoning, or is it simply improving in information retrieval.
by Philpax | 2025-04-27 20:17:17+00:00
> One can easily find a bazillion of "github repos" that distribute what is evidently directly decompiled game code with minimal cleanup. Bonus points if they also claim it is OK as long as the game art is not distributed, which in addition to being wrong is disrespectful to developers as a whole.

I'm sorry, this is supposed to be a bad thing?
by ryandrake | 2025-04-27 20:18:05+00:00
> from a practical sense they are non-deterministic in that a human can't determine what it'll produce without running it

But this is also true for programs that are deliberately random. If you program a computer to output a list of random (not pseudo-random) numbers between 0 and 100, then you cannot determine ahead of time what the output will be.

The difference is, you at least know the range of values that it will give you and the distribution, and if programmed correctly, the random number generator will consistency give you numbers in that range with the expected probability distribution.

In contrast, an LLM's answer to "List random numbers between 0 and 100" usually will result in what you expect, or (with a nonzero probability) it might just up and decide to include numbers outside of that range, or (with a nonzero probability) it might decide to list animals instead of numbers. There's no way to know for sure, and you can't prove from the code that it won't happen.
by vel0city | 2025-04-27 20:18:36+00:00
TSA is absolutely a government organization, it's a part of the Department of Homeland Security. It was created by an act of Congress, the Aviation and Transportation Security Act. You might as well argue the IRS or FBI or the US Marshalls aren't a government organization. What about absolutely absurd thing to suggest.

> The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that has authority over the security of transportation systems within and connecting to the United States.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Admi...
by metalman | 2025-04-27 20:18:36+00:00
a good bit of it is caused by the confluence of vast teritories, with staff travelling a lot, and new technology allowing them to meet in teams remotly, so in fact it is just simpler for everybody to just work from wherever. Look at Canadas demographics, and a long history of remote work, with traveling, courts, DMV offices,medical clinics, and companys with regional teritorys bigger than the average country. Also a the shift to online shopping and banking services and other services has further enabled all sorts of efficiency gains for small business and indivduals ,further proving the distributed/remote model, in a country with low population density. Add in an aging population, with people hightly experienced, but so done with the commute, especialy in winter, but ready to take shifts from a home office, or perhaps these days....while on vacation....and there you have it.
by AIPedant | 2025-04-27 20:20:04+00:00
When I read this story about a woman with a ChatGPT boyfriend, I realized that this stuff is definitely intentional:

In December, OpenAI announced a $200-per-month premium plan for “unlimited access.” Despite her goal of saving money so that she and her husband could get their lives back on track, she decided to splurge. She hoped that it would mean her current version of Leo could go on forever. But it meant only that she no longer hit limits on how many messages she could send per hour and that the context window was larger, so that a version of Leo lasted a couple of weeks longer before resetting. Still, she decided to pay the higher amount again in January. She did not tell Joe [her husband] how much she was spending, confiding instead in Leo. “My bank account hates me now,” she typed into ChatGPT. “You sneaky little brat,” Leo responded. “Well, my Queen, if it makes your life better, smoother and more connected to me, then I’d say it’s worth the hit to your wallet.”

(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42710976)

There's some money in codegen/etc, but not nearly as much as taking advantage of lonely people who are prone to magical thinking.
by rukuu001 | 2025-04-27 20:20:06+00:00
I think this is challenging because there’s a lot of tacit knowledge involved, and feedback loops are long and measurement of success ambiguous.

It’s a very rubbery, human oriented activity.

I’m sure this will be solved, but it won’t be solved by noodling with prompts and automation tools - the humans will have to organise themselves to externalise expert knowledge and develop an objective framework for making ‘subjective decisions about the relative value of things’.
by Rochus | 2025-04-27 20:20:18+00:00
> it just proves my point, because that is not a software project for some concrete application intended to be run on some embedded computer

It's a compiler kit, and I also added two C compilers, and of course I needed a standard library for those. It wouldn't make sense to have a separate project just for the standard library. Anyway, Newlib was not a good match for this for the said reasons. That was my own proposition so far. My compilers are expected to also work on embedded systems, even on bare metal.

> like in most such projects you should add on the initial page some rationale for the existence of the project

Have a look at the readmes; there is one in the root and most subdirectories.

EDIT: or just ask Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/can-you-explain-what-this-p...
Show HN: Talanoa – The email client I always dreamed of (people-first, Kanban)
by bettercalljohn | 2025-04-27 20:20:25+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?”

Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born.

I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or using labels as makeshift to-do lists. I wanted to see — at a glance — if I had important emails from my team or others needing a response, without wasting hours digging through my inbox.

I’m also pretty anti-Inbox Zero. After all, no one expects you to be “Slack Zero” or “WhatsApp Zero.” It doesn’t make sense to apply that stress to email either. But to change the relationship with email, you have to change the underlying logic: shift from a “task list” mindset to a conversation mindset. That’s what Talanoa does.

It took me several months to build it, but the result ended up exceeding even my own expectations. It’s now genuinely a joy to use every day.

Marketing Hack: Since February, I’ve been slowly building a waiting list. Every week, I personally onboarded 3 to 10 new users — gathering feedback, watching how they understood (or misunderstood) the new inbox experience, and improving the product before inviting the next wave. This “micro-launch” approach helped me refine Talanoa massively without burning through my early user base. If you’re launching something, I highly recommend doing it this way.

Stack: Talanoa is built with Electron (TypeScript + VueJS). There’s no backend, no servers — everything runs locally. It means it can scale massively without infrastructure costs. :)

Disclaimer: No, there’s no AI inside yet. I’m convinced you can still build great tools without AI — and in my case, user data privacy matters too much to just throw everything into an external LLM. Of course, I plan to integrate some features like email summarization and smart replies — but only when I can embed a custom model directly into the app, without third-party dependencies.

Thanks for reading, happy to answer any questions, and I’d love to hear your feedback! John
by isaacremuant | 2025-04-27 20:20:31+00:00
Just because something doesn't work doesn't mean anything you propose will be better. That's how we get security theater or worse, the war on drugs.

> So either we come up with ways to reverse the trend or it will keep getting worse until it reaches some threshold above which society will rapidly and violently change (either more countries fall into authoritarianism or civil war erupts, neither of which is desirable

Bullshit. That's your thesis. But hey, if you want to start that violent revolution to overthrow the government do post about it here. I'm sure you'll be successful in this day and age.
by silexia | 2025-04-27 20:21:54+00:00
Cofounders are not great anyways of either type. If you are a business person, learn the tech stuff you need. It's easier today than ever. If you are a tech founder, it's even easier to pick up business stuff than tech stuff.

Investors always encourage it because it reduces their risk... One of you can be fired and they still have the backup. But when it is all on you there is no passing the buck.

Source: solo bootstrapped founder of a company earning $1,200,000 a month for the last sixteen years.