MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by goatherders | 2025-04-27 21:35:53+00:00
This post is hilarious and details exactly why so many startups die in infancy. Yes yes, engineers are brilliant and without them nothing ever gets built.

And even still, sometimes things get built and never turn into a real business precisely because of this hubris. And 99.9% of the time, the ones that DO grow over time would have grown much much faster if "the business guy" had been there all along.
Show HN: ThreadWise – Your AI assistant via email
by sci_prog | 2025-04-27 21:36:48+00:00
Hi HN, I built ThreadWise to make accessing AI as easy as sending email.

You can email prompts directly to your ThreadWise address and get instant AI-powered responses, essentially an always available co-worker. Another great feature is the ability to schedule recurring tasks and since the AI has web access, you can get things like:

Daily mortgage rates or airfare price monitoring

Weather and news summaries

Sport scores, jokes, quote of the day

Pull data from public APIs (and more)

So you can essentially use it as a personal newsletter, crafted to your taste.

The free tier will let you test this out for free! I am looking for some feedback/criticism, testing, and additional ideas and I am open for collaboration if you have experience with sales. Also open to hearing which scheduled tasks people would find most useful.

Why I built it: I noticed a trend online, as well as with family/friends, that people would like to have a quick access to AI in instances where they couldn't always install apps or use browser-based tools (such as in remote/low bandwidth environments). This is when it him me, email clients already have all the features needed to interact with an AI (text + attachments) and I quickly got to work.

Some of the advantages are also that since there are no new apps, or browser tabs needed, the tool is ideal for companies who don't have the bandwidth to setup full fledged AI solutions on their own. The companies can choose either between public LLMs (e.g. OpenAI) or host everything on-premise with locally run models, so no data ever leaves the premises.

Eager to hear what you all think!
by currymj | 2025-04-27 21:37:04+00:00
> "hey, i am a COMPUTER and a small set of fixed moves should take me about 300ms or so to fully solve out"

from the article:

"3. Attempt to Use Python When pure reasoning was not enough, o3 tried programming its way out of the situation.

“I should probably check using something like a chess engine to confirm.” (tries to import chess module, but fails: “ModuleNotFoundError”).

It wanted to run a simulation, but of course, it had no real chess engine installed."

this strategy failed, but if OpenAI were to add "pip install python-chess" to the environment, it very well might have worked. in any case, the machine did exactly the thing you claim it should have done.

possibly scrolling down to read the full article makes you a rube though.
by sbarre | 2025-04-27 21:38:00+00:00
> Unfortunately (in my view), group #1 is making all the products and is responsible for the majority of applications of technology that get deployed.

This is an interesting take, and I think I see where you're coming from..

My first thought on "why" is that so many products today are free to the user, meaning the money is made elsewhere, and so the experience presented to the user can be a lot more imperfect or non-exhaustive than it would otherwise have to be if someone was paying to use that experience.

So edge cases can be ignored because really you're looking for a critical mass of eyeballs to sell to advertisers or to harvest usage data from, etc.. If a small portion of your users has a bad time or experiences errors, well, you get what you pay for as they say..

And does that kind of pervasiveness now mean that many engineers think this is just the way to go no matter what?
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-04-27 21:38:14+00:00
I think "society shapes porn" was totally true up until the point where it no longer was.

Porn shapes society the exact moment when the majority of young people get the majority of their beliefs and views on sexuality, romance, relationships, gender roles, sensuality, etc, from porn. This isn't true of all groups of humans everywhere, but it's definitely true of many societies right now already, and I would say obviously so.

None of this is meant as a "moral panic" type point. I'm just saying, there's no point hiding from the reality that young people get their views on sex from online porn, and that has major effects on them and the whole of society.
by perihelions | 2025-04-27 21:39:02+00:00
Umberto Eco "only" had 30,000, and even he hadn't read most of them in his life (hence why it's called the "anti-library" [0]. Or the Japanese word "tsundoku" [1]).

If nothing else, the energy efficiency of this house must be very good.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14087536 ("Umberto Eco's Anti-Library")

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25429940 ("Tsundoku: The art of buying books and never reading them")
by kamranjon | 2025-04-27 21:39:25+00:00
I am a human and I figured this puzzle out in under a minute by just trying the small set of possible moves until I got it correct. I am not a serious chess player. I would have expected it to at least try the possible moves? I think this maybe lends credence to the idea that these models aren’t actually reasoning but are doing a great job of mimicking what we think humans do.
by RyanOD | 2025-04-27 21:40:14+00:00
An oldie but goodie. This was my first exposure to CSS and the foundation for the years I taught web design to low-income high schoolers. We would all go to an end-of-the-year web design competition at the local community college. The kids would have to explain CSS to the judges because they had no idea. :)

Many students walked away winning desktop computers (available due to computer lab upgrades). Probably the proudest accomplishments of my career.

If I remember right, I actually sent a few questions to Dave Shea, Eric Meyer, Andy Budd, etc and they replied with help. Forever grateful.
by Bender | 2025-04-27 21:40:24+00:00
From the accepted answer: If you read deeper in the Forbes article, it tells you that what the survey actually found was that “just 66 percent of young adults aged 18 to 24 years old have "always believed the world is round."

Could it also be that up to 33% thought they were being tricked by word-play, as the earth is in fact an oblate spheroid or am I giving them too much credit? 31% of the US graduated college and some professors like to play word games meaning they are used to being tricked.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-04-27 21:40:34+00:00
I’m surprised they can find the transformers. As I understand it even without any government subsidy transformer production backlog is through 2030. We had a Tesla super charger site near us sit idle for over a year waiting for a transformer. A family member is a lead on transformer manufacturing at hitachi and they can’t build transformer production capacity fast enough to keep up with the rate of change of orders.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/electric-transformer-shorta...
by klibertp | 2025-04-27 21:40:43+00:00
In most of those implementations (certainly in SBCL) it's either you break or step; you can't start stepping from a breakpoint. SBCL got some support for that this year, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43791709. It, however, doesn't allow stepping into any functions called after the break.

Also, the compilers are allowed to make the code unsteppable in some cases, depending on optimization declaration: generally, debug needs to be >=2 and > speed/compilation-speed/space. In some circumstances, you land in decompiled/macroexpanded code, which is also quite unhelpful.

Anyway, it's not that source-level stepping isn't there at all, it's just quirky and somewhat inconvenient. A fresh implementation that does comparatively little optimization and is byte-code based can probably support debuggers better. I hope such support won't go away later when the native code compiler is implemented.
by m463 | 2025-04-27 21:40:50+00:00
This reminds me of a sort of adjacent hack, or maybe adaptation.

I bought one of those ikea lamps, but never put it into service because it was a hardwired lamp, which made it a "project" installation.

Then one day at home depot, I noticed they sell an adapter from hanging lamp to track lighting rail. Wire the adapter, snap into tracklight over dining table.

It might be easier to use ikea ceiling lamps this way.
by hagbard_c | 2025-04-27 21:41:23+00:00
No, you have bad politics.

This is not kindergarten so let's no go down this path. Asking for a politically neutral (see my explanation elsewhere in this thread if you don't understand what that means) source of information is not 'bad politics' but intended to avoid bad politics. I suspect that you 'identify' as either 'liberal' or 'progressive' so I assume you'd be less than thrilled if Wikipedia had a conservative bias. The same goes for conservatives and (traditional) capital-L Liberals who are less than thrilled to see Wikipedia having a 'left-wing' or 'progressive' bias. It just makes WP end up being lumped together with the legacy media, known to be untrustworthy where it counts and that is a shame for a site which in many ways still is a valuable resource as long as you avoid any and all subjects which have been pulled into the polarised political discourse.
by peterfirefly | 2025-04-27 21:42:38+00:00
An x86 disassembler is not that hard, as long as you stick to a single mode and ignore the SIMD alphabet soup.

You have a short loop that scans through the prefixes, checks for a REX prefix (if you handle 64-bit mode), reads the opcode (1-3 bytes), reads the MOD/RM byte if there is one (use a table lookup), reads the SIB byte if there is one (table), reads offset if there is one (table), reads immediate if there is one (table).

It's probably easiest if you use an "expanded/normalized" opcode internally so the 1-3 opcode bytes + the 3 extra bits from some MOD/RM bytes + prefix info (for certain SIMD instructions) map to a single 16-bit opcode (likely around a couple hundred to a thousand opcodes in total).

You have a table that maps those to mnemonics + operand info. You have some tables that map 0-7 (or 0-15) to AL/AH/... and AX/BX/CX/... and CS/DS/ES/... and various system registers.

Not that much code all in all. Several tables. You can squeeze them and bit pack them to your heart's content if you want.

Once you have that, a simple assembler isn't so hard.
by nradov | 2025-04-27 21:42:46+00:00
Anyone who works with human names should take a look at the HL7 V3 and FHIR data models, which were designed for healthcare. They support name validity ranges, and a bunch of other related metadata. It can be challenging to efficiently represent those abstract data models in a traditional traditional database because with a fully normalized schema you end up needing a lot of joins.
by rdtsc | 2025-04-27 21:42:53+00:00
> Trump won by an extremely narrow margin

It was 312 vs 226 votes, including seven swing states, and got the popular vote. I guess to make ourselves feel better we’ll just say an extremely thin margin. But as long as it’s with a nod and wink; kind of like saying that alligators also fly, just extremely, extremely low.
by devnull3 | 2025-04-27 21:43:33+00:00
> hypervigilant

If a tech works 80% of the time, then I know that I need to be vigilant and I will review the output. The entire team structure is aware of this. There will be processes to offset this 20%.

The problem is that when the AI becomes > 95% accurate (if at all) then humans will become complacent and the checks and balances will be ineffective.
by walterbell | 2025-04-27 21:44:20+00:00
Did you find something incorrect in the two paragraphs that you read? Here they are:

During my recent journey to Berlin—a city where every street corner whispers secrets of a divided past—I uncovered the chilling reality of "Zersetzung." This was not just another research assignment; it was an immersive exploration into the dark art of psychological warfare.

This is the personal website of a human being. The first two paragraphs described a human traveling to Berlin. Does ChatGPT travel often?
by _bin_ | 2025-04-27 21:44:57+00:00
A good biz guy can be worth his weight in gold. It's harder than people think to get it right: to figure out the right markets to address first and how to tweak/target your product to do so, when, how, and from whom to raise capital, at what rate to expand the team, sales and marketing stuff, etc. Doubly so if the technical co-founder isn't as good at these. It's not worth 80% of equity against 20%, but it is worth a reasonably fair share.
by siliconc0w | 2025-04-27 21:46:48+00:00
For B2B, it generally makes sense to have one person whose job it is find and talk with customers while the other can focus on building/iterating the product. It helps to be technical for this but they have to actually like talking to people and ideally have a decent network for what you're selling. This isn't exactly sales but it's closer to 'sales' than it is engineering and so generally benefits from that background/skillset.

So in theory it makes more sense to team up with someone with that skillset than partner with another engineer but then one of you has to give up on the thing you're good at to do founding sales which you may-or-may-not be inclined to do.
by analog31 | 2025-04-27 21:47:26+00:00
You didn't ask me, and I don't have a complete answer, but here's a starting point. Consider what's required for a patent: Novelty, usefulness, and reduction to practice. The latter step often changes the first two, for instance by uncovering problems, or even improving the overall quality of the idea.

Of course a lot of things need to right, beyond that point. I use the patent rule as a guide to make sure that the right people get credit where credit is due, when an idea reaches the market successfully.
by ThatPlayer | 2025-04-27 21:47:27+00:00
> the original authors did not write the decompiled source

This isn't anything new or unique to programming. In the same way if I were to transcribe a movie (let's say it's a silent movie) to a script, it would still be that movie. Or if I were to translate a book into Klingon . Or even do a cover song of "Beat It" entirely with throat singing. Copyright would still apply.
by _bin_ | 2025-04-27 21:47:30+00:00
I really like the grids for cities. Say what you want about traffic in Houston or Dallas but, though they move tons of people, driving their is way, way better than e.g. Boston.

I don't object to bespoke layouts out in the country so much as that the "through roads" in the northeast are extremely un-fun to drive on if you have distance to cover. Probably bias from how I grew up, but when I have hundreds of miles to go, I like hopping on a nice, wide FM and opening the throttle.
by alexgrover | 2025-04-27 21:48:01+00:00
Have you tried using them? Installing packages is way, way faster. Here’s an example of how this is meaningful to an organization, and I’ve personally experienced the same exact thing at my last 2 jobs.

https://medium.com/@chaudharyaniket16/from-14-minutes-to-45-...

To list some projects and companies that aren’t on NPM: Prettier, Next.js/Vercel, Cloudflare, Hono, Zod, Expo, Tamagui, Tailwind, the list goes on. I actually had trouble finding any major JS projects that are on NPM. These are serious, widely used packages, and they chose non-standard tooling for a reason.
by 827a | 2025-04-27 21:48:03+00:00
The reality that I've experienced is: Most any function in a software company can be learned to an effective degree by anyone, if you take the discipline seriously, have the right mentors, and dedicate time to do so. Engineers can learn to be good founders and salespeople. Marketers and managers can learn how to commit code.

The reason, I tend to think, why business-focused co-founders might be less valuable than tech-focused co-founders in a tech company is, in my experience, that all founders surface their own biases in how their companies are designed based on the comfortable experiences of their past; and you need those biases to lean toward the tech in tech companies, because tech can automate anything per the previous paragraph.

I've seen this surface subtly: "Yeah, Stripe integration to take money makes sense, but its just not a priority right now. Sales can handle invoicing." (it never becomes a priority because once you give DepartmentX that responsibility they'll fight to defend their turf).

I've also seen it surface less subtly: A VC-backed software startup with mid-eight figures of funding, all the investors thought the company was selling software, but it turns out the salespeople were never trained on that, and were instead told to only sell white-glove services, using the software, from another department. "Bigger contracts" etc. Engineering leadership was oblivious to this happening for at least two quarters, because who knows, users were still signing up, "sales handles the invoicing", they weren't tracking the right things, maybe some layer of intentional deception. Chicken & egg "the software doesn't sell" "you weren't even trying to sell it". Engineers are expensive -> Engineering layoffs. They're now a zombified services company, who took on 70 mil in venture capital to sell software, with zero full-time software engineers. The CEO's professional work history? Selling services of this exact kind for some provider for twenty years. They took rocket fuel to start a bonfire, and it blew up the block.
by tomhow | 2025-04-27 21:48:17+00:00
Please don't claim victimhood (“censorship”) when your comments are flagged. The guidelines apply equally to everyone, and the flags on your comments are from good community members who have a track record of flagging responsibly, to help keep the discussions healthy.

HN’s purpose is to be a place for intellectual curiosity, not ideological battle or railing against things you find disagreeable.
by walterbell | 2025-04-27 21:49:31+00:00
Is the claim that the author is lying on their own web site about their travel, using ChatGPT to write fictional travel anecdotes?

Would you care to provide any evidence to support the assertion that this personal website was written by an LLM?

Data science project: index HN articles which trigger comments about AI/LLM/ChatGPT, with a combination of automated analysis and manual labeling to identify false positives, extract signal-to-noise ratio of HN comment detection of LLMs over time.
by donnachangstein | 2025-04-27 21:49:44+00:00
Sprint deployed WiMAX (remember that?) fairly widely, lot of good that did them.

mmWave is as dead as dead. The cellular Betamax. iPhone 16e (the everyman's iPhone) doesn't support it, and neither did the SE before it.

VZW will be converting those base stations into birdhouses in 5-7 years.
by sokoloff | 2025-04-27 21:49:52+00:00
What does that look like in practice, assuming an engineer doesn’t believe that the LLM genie can be put back into the toothpaste tube?

“Summarize the best arguments for and against the following proposition: <topic here />. Label the pro/for arguments with a <pro> tag and the con/against a with a <con> tag” seems like it’s going to be a valid prompt and any system that can only give one side is bound to lose to a system that can give both sides. And any system that can give those answers can be pretty easily used to make arguments of varying truthfulness.
Show HN: Cerebro: a librarian for the 463-exabyte-a-day internet
by Carlos_Arthur | 2025-04-27 21:50:19+00:00
You missed a miracle while you slept.

Between midnight and breakfast people uploaded five hundred hours of video every single minute.

That is seven hundred and twenty thousand fresh hours in one day, enough footage to keep you watching until 2107 if you pressed play right now.

And that is only YouTube. IDC says humanity will push out about 463 exabytes of new data every day in 2025.

Stack that on hard drives and the column reaches the Moon and comes halfway back.

Insane right? it get's worst.

McKinsey finds that knowledge workers already burn a full work-day each week just hunting for information they have created or paid for.

Now bring AI into the picture. Europol’s analysts warn that up to ninety percent of everything you read online could be machine-generated by 2026.

The models will write, then quote themselves, then train on the quotation. Noise that amplifies itself.

Why should you care? Because the next time you need a fact whether to build, vote, or treat a fever you’ll have to dig it out of a an exponential wave of information that is still rising.

Yesterday one reliable page could tilt the odds for anyone lucky enough to find it, today the same page is buried under a billion noise or masked by fake data and social proof.

If we cannot tell signal from chatter we stop trusting anything. Research stalls, democracy wobbles, and every decision takes longer. Knowledge once tasted like power. Now it tastes like sand.

What I am trying I am building Cerebro. Think of it as a librarian, not a factory.

It ingests the PDFs, videos, and papers you care about.

It verifies statements against originals before they reach your eyeballs.

It maps concepts so you see only what changes the decision in front of you.

No summaries that hallucinate. No extra content to clog the pipe. Just a shield that separates fact from filler. Version 0.1 is live for dog-fooding and every commit happens in public.

Why bother telling you? Because if this resonates then you are exactly the person who can break it, improve it, or tell me it is the wrong fight.

Questions for HN

Which metric tells you that you have crossed from curiosity into overload?

Where do existing curators fail you?

If one slice of your reading workflow could be automated today what would you pick?

I will be in the comments all day.
by bob1029 | 2025-04-27 21:50:32+00:00
> 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).

The benefits of prefetching and page-level abstractions are certainly reduced when every tenant is guaranteed to live in a different file.

I would agree that you should have to deal with an uphill battle when arguing for a DB-per-customer architecture. There needs to be a special reason to not simply add a customer/tenant id column in each table.

I think one good argument for placing a tenant per database file is that it makes total destruction of their information possible without any impact to other tenants. If you don't require immediate destruction of the tenant's information (i.e., can wait for background cleanup activities), then I would begin to push back.
by lotharcable | 2025-04-27 21:50:35+00:00
OpenZFS exists and there is a port of it for Mac OS X.

The problem is that it is still owned by Oracle. And Solaris ZFS is incompatible with OpenZFS. Not that people really use Solaris anymore.

It is really unfortunate. Linux has adopted file systems from other operating systems before. It is just nobody trust Oracle.
by ashalhashim | 2025-04-27 21:51:31+00:00
The ideal business co-founder has to be strong in distribution AND eliciting product feedback. This is why the “MBA types” and ex-McKinsey consultants fare so poorly - they’re used to companies spending loads of money to hear what they think. As an early-stage startup founder, nobody gives a shit about your product and no one wants to hear what you think. Your job is to identify where demand is highest in the market and then turn that demand into dollars. They also need to be excellent communicators who understand or at least appreciate how much goes into building products.

For those reasons, the best business cofounders in my experience, are former salespeople (for b2b startups), demand generation marketers (for b2c), and product managers.