MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ytpete | 2025-04-28 18:01:24+00:00
The veto might be overturned by a 2/3 majority of the state legislature though.

The bill requires social media platforms to investigate allegations that a user violated state law, to suspend their account while investigating, and permanently ban the account if the investigation finds that the law was violated. Allegations can be made by virtually any member of the public.

Part of the governor's statement at the time of veto:

> "This law imposes sweeping requirements that social media platforms, rather than law enforcement, enforce state law. It mandates a private company to investigate and impose the government’s chosen penalty of permanently deplatforming a user.... In our judicial proceedings, people receive due process when they are suspected of breaking the law. This bill, however, conscripts social media platforms to be judge and jury when users may have broken the law or even a company’s own content rules. This proposed law would incentivize platforms, in order to reduce liability risk, to simply deplatform a user in order to comply with this proposed law."

> "Further, the costly and mandatory data and metadata collection requirements in this bill throw open the door for abuse by guaranteeing the availability of sensitive information such as user age, identities, and content viewed, and these reports could even be made public at the discretion of the Attorney General."

(The full statement is in a PDF linked in the article)
by NickC25 | 2025-04-28 18:01:46+00:00
Growing a non-tech company.

I started a functional beverage brand about 2 years ago and rebranded for larger scale about 7 months ago. I am located in South Florida and have had some decent success so far but still investing all profits back into the biz. Raised about $50k of outside money.

If you're in South FLA and are into fitness and health, consider reaching out to me or responding.

I will also have the capacity to sell in to the NYC market quite soon. If this sounds interesting, again, please respond or DM!
by photochemsyn | 2025-04-28 18:01:55+00:00
Very surprising that well-designed contracts (with well-designed exit clauses among other issues) aren't at the top of the 'ten red flags' list. This isn't just a problem with tech startups - business partners down the ages have been burning each other with flimsy contractual agreements and 'trust me buddy' rationales when questioned about the contracts.

This is one of the best use cases for LLMs by the way - they can often explain contracts to you, or find flaws in contracts. Try pasting one of those long-winded click-through contracts from Apple etc. into any LLM and see if they can help you decipher the terms - then do this with your startup's hiring contract. Also, watch 'The Social Network' and pay attention to things like stock-split clauses and so on.

Some claim the world is split between those who understand compound interest and those who don't but I think it's understanding contract law that matters more.
by danielodievich | 2025-04-28 18:02:29+00:00
I have the omnibus edition that they have in this review. It is a gorgeous book, although still likely not as lovely as Folio Society's https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/books-of-earthsea.html. The paper is very white, with the reading light behind it is almost a bit too white/reflective. But great in ambient light. Charles Vess' illustrations are amazing, although there are just too few of them. I got spoiled at his glorious and PLENTIFUL work on Sandman and Stardust. Nevertheless, excellent packaging for incredible series of stories.
by ddq | 2025-04-28 18:02:34+00:00
And how do you plan to deal with the latency of connecting the neurons of your brain to a remote virtual uplink? The speed of light limits the size of a virtual brain that is able to function in the same manner as a biological one. The truth is our understanding of consciousness and its neurological foundation is nowhere close to the level that would allow us to recreate it artificially. We don't even know how it works normally. It will not happen in your lifetime and you are going to die like the rest of us, and very likely this will not change even in the next thousand years.
by wavemode | 2025-04-28 18:02:37+00:00
As other commenters have rightly pointed out - agents being a good product is orthogonal to agents being profitable. If you can start securing big contracts with enterprises by convincing them that the AI revolution is coming, that's enough for profit.

It will only be years down the road when people start realizing that they're spending millions on AI agents that are significantly less capable than human employees. But by that point OpenAI will already be filthy rich.

To put it a different way - AI is currently a gold rush. While Nvidia sells shovels, OpenAI sells automated prospecting machines. Both are good businesses to be in right now.
by wibbily | 2025-04-28 18:02:42+00:00
Currently at a startup that did the same thing wrt having their app built overseas. Protip: don't. Endless bullshit, excruciating trying to get anything out of them. We ended up with an app just like this guy's, locked aspect ratio and all.

If I find another startup whose product is an app, and they can't find a local developer to write that app, I'm running. Why outsource your core product!?
by roguecoder | 2025-04-28 18:03:11+00:00
I think defining the places where vibe-coded software is safe to use is going to be important.

My list so far is:

* Runs locally on local data and does not connect to the internet in any way (to avoid most security issues) * Generated by users for their own personal use (so it isn't some outside force inflicting bad, broken software on them) * Produces output in standard, human-readable formats that can be spot-checked by users (to avoid the cases where the AI fakes the entire program & just produces random answers)
by Ostatnigrosh | 2025-04-28 18:03:15+00:00
After reading the comments, I’d like to clarify a few things. This article isn’t meant to pitch a fraud scoring product. I recently discovered that several states publish VIN level data and, as a weekend project, decided to dig a bit deeper to see what I could learn. Given more time, I’d refine the analysis by normalizing against registration volumes, flagging outliers, and so on but for now I simply want to share an interesting glimpse at what ive found.
by creature_x | 2025-04-28 18:03:27+00:00
I am building a couple of apps:

https://spicychess.com: A real-time chess playing app where you can taunt your opponent and smack them during the game! If you smack them enough times to completely drain their health, you can steal their turn and make their move. There is also has a progression system where leveling unlocks increasingly fun abilities designed to torment and troll your opponent.

https://wordazzle.com: Inspired by the quote 'the limits of my language are the limits of my world,' it's a daily game delivering 7 carefully chosen, sublime words designed to genuinely elevate your verbal prowess. You can also save the words you love as flashcards to review them later!
by ryao | 2025-04-28 18:03:34+00:00
I was comparing NYS’ standards for vehicles and drivers to Germany’s alleged standards. So far, no one has given a single example of German driver education being better than NY driver education.

If you paid attention the remarks about the 85th percentile, you would know that speeding on NY high ways is actually safer than following the speed limits. That is because the speed limits were lowered in the 1970s in a misguided attempt to save fuel that never worked since nobody listened to the speed limits after they stopped reflecting the 85th percentile. Many of the things you cite have nothing to do with highways where the discussion of speed limits is centered either.

As for insurance, the minimum standards are still the highest in the country. Many (myself included) go higher for insurance policies. You can write to the state legislature if you believe the minimum should be higher.
by vel0city | 2025-04-28 18:03:48+00:00
I mean, what, are we going to start executing people because they were poor and decided to pay rent instead of their car insurance bill to get groceries? Give them some poverty-inducing fine they can't discharge in bankruptcy? That'll really teach them to be poor!

Most people not bothering to pay for car insurance aren't wealthy. They're doing so because being asked to pay several hundred bucks a month just so they can go to a $12/hr job and eat is a stretch too far, and chances are nothing will happen on any random day of them driving without insurance. Meanwhile on the unlucky day they massively harm someone else and will probably flee the scene and end up continuing on without consequences. And even if they do, they'll once again probably just get a fine, maybe get some kind of judgement against them which will be like getting blood from a stone.

The consequences are most of the time they'll be fine. Otherwise they'll get a fine. If they keep doing it and they keep getting caught their car will get impounded and they'll go to jail. Then they'll get out, scrape together enough to buy a car, and the cycle continues. But that requires actually getting caught many times which the whole "getting caught" part is pretty lacking.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-04-28 18:04:03+00:00
> the "side effect" happens when your app starts to span 100s of components and you need slight variations for everything. you're telling me you can assure me that none of your master global classes contain any design definitions that could not possibly be reused? i'm calling bullshit. it's like saying your backend 100% never has any duplicated functions.

At that point the design department of your business has failed its job. Case closed. If everything is slightly varied, then there is no coherent design. Not even my backend-dev developed "designs" are that bad.

> tell me now how me opening a file, seeing "button variation-class-1 variation-class-2", then going down into the component <style> section and looking up exactly what the variation and what properties were used is in anyway "better" than just seeing some super powered inline style directly in the button. it's the same complexity and now you've gotten rid of the prime benefit of CSS hierarchy and split the "style and structure" in just one independent component.

I also care about what soup I deliver to any visiting browser. So I care about not having a thousand repeated inline styles, that make it harder to write user CSS for example. Visitors of my site can very easily adapt the styling, by simply changing the styling of 1 class or even 1 CSS variable that I defined in a theme.css.

But you are also making a general mistake. You are letting perfect be the enemy of good. Even if one only succeeds 90% at what I described, this is still great and simple to maintain in 90% of the cases. I doubt tailwind is a big win over that.
by Denvercoder9 | 2025-04-28 18:04:07+00:00
> What I wanna know is if I could have a plug-in box that detects the frequency is drifting

Yes, it's not that hard. There's smart meters and plugs that have frequency measurement built in.

You can even do it with an audio cable: https://halcy.de/blog/2025/02/09/measuring-power-network-fre...
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-04-28 18:04:27+00:00
I've worked with many startups and many VCs. The best VCs are investing in the team, not the product idea. The idea itself is basically nothing. It can get blown up in an instant and require a pivot. But the investor wants to know that the money they're giving out is going to people actually recognizing that and capable of successfully switching gears.

They're investing in people, not some singular half-baked idea that very likely goes nowhere.

In this case it sounds like both the idea was bad, and the team was bad.
by jimbokun | 2025-04-28 18:05:02+00:00
He doesn't prove the claim. But he does make a strong argument for why it's very unlikely that an LLM would have a theory of a program similar to what a human author of a program would have:

> Theories are developed by doing the work and LLMs do not do the work. They ingest the output of work.

And this is certainly a true statement about how LLMs are constructed. Maybe this latently induces in the LLM something very similar to what humans do when writing programs.

But another possibility is that it's similar to the Brain Teasers that were popular for a long time in programming interviews. The idea was that if the interviewee could use logic to solve riddles, they were probably also likely to be good at writing programs.

In reality, it was mostly a test of whether the interviewee had reviewed all the popular riddles commonly asked in these interviews. If they had, they could also produce a realistic chain of logic to simulate the process of solving the riddle from first principles. But if that same interviewee was given a riddle not similar to one they had previously reviewed, they probably wouldn't do nearly as well in solving it.

It's very likely that LLMs are like those interviewees who crammed a lot of examples, again due to how LLMs are trained. They can reproduce programs similar to ones in their training set. They can even produce explanations for their "reasoning" based on examples they've seen of explanations of why a program was written in one way instead of another. But that is a very different kind of model than the one a person builds up writing a program from scratch over a long period of time.

Having said all this, I'm not sure what experiments you would run to determine if the LLM is using one approach vs another.
by vessenes | 2025-04-28 18:05:45+00:00
Oof. Sorry. Missed in this story because Jacob is in Europe/UK is that this level of absolute incompetence in a launch team is, in my experience, extra common on that side of the pond.

There are of course some fantastic startups launched out of the UK and Europe. Spotify, Deepmind and Raspberry Pi come to mind. But, as a rule on the investment side, I'm always super skeptical. Inevitably cap tables are worse, investors have a very different view of their roles than they do in US or Asia, and there's so much less startup infrastructure than in SV or say Singapore or Shanghai that it's a very different world. Ironically, it's self-feeding -- investors think startups are shitty business, they charge more, high quality founders head for greener pastures -- rinse and repeat.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2025-04-28 18:05:50+00:00
It’s not 30 over, it’s 30 over the limit, or anything over 80 mph. They tried to nail me for reckless driving for going 82 on an empty interstate, when the speed limit was 70. Then, because I have a common name, the dumbass lawyer I hired showed up to the court date of a different person with the same name as me who was also charged with reckless driving, no one showed up to my court date, and I was threatened with jail time.

I was eventually able to clear everything up thanks to a sympathetic judge, but overall Virginia is not a serious state.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-28 18:07:16+00:00
You can put together a simple and fully independent solar island with 5kw/h capacity and 7kw nameplate generation for $4100. This is a plug and play system, with zero wiring and no knowledge needed. For the idea of the kind of profit margin that includes for the company, their "smart isolation switch" is $1k. Jackery has several competitors, and all of their build quality is pretty good, and the warranties are acceptable.

20kw/hr of just storage is about $10k. Every one of these companies also has standard DC input ports for bring your own solar panels, because their panels are overpriced.

The 8-Bit guy has been using such a system to maintain his studio. It is reliable, uses cheap solar panels. This stuff is commodity.
by chimeracoder | 2025-04-28 18:07:33+00:00
> Like all other forums, public and private, HN has an ideological filter. I'm as surprised as the next person that the HN ideological filter turned out not to be permissive enough to discuss the downfall of the free society that fostered its creation.

Is it that surprising? As a longtime member, this seems perfectly consistent with the general bent of the website. Collectively, HN has long been extremely comfortable with authoritarianism and far right ideologies, as long as those opinions are expressed in a framing that conveys intellectualism and "civility". Those same expectations are weaponized to drive out dissenting voices, which creates a positive[0] feedback loop.

Honestly, if anything, I'm surprised that this comment thread is (reasonably) lucid, because that's not how a lot of other comment threads recently on similar issues have gone.

[0] In the literal (non-normative) sense: a positive feedback loop is one which amplifies the effects, whether or not the end effects are "good" or "bad".
by dlojudice | 2025-04-28 18:07:37+00:00
The LoveSims research brilliantly mirrors "Hang the DJ" [1] from Black Mirror (comparison inevitable). Technically impressive, just a bit creepy to reduce love's beautiful unpredictability to computational models. Or that's just my romantic view of the world.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5N_Tq1EtRQ
by zelda420 | 2025-04-28 18:07:39+00:00
Throughout my long career in the tech industry, from established giants like Oracle to a hyper-growth pre-IPO Airbnb, I've observed a consistent pattern: engineers rarely advance more than one level above their initial hiring position, regardless of their performance or tenure.

The only exception were juniors who could rise to a senior. But senior to staff, or whatever you want to call it is almost unheard of unless you jump ship.
by WinstonSmith84 | 2025-04-28 18:07:46+00:00
yes (of course) .. It's fascinating how always people love to jump to conspiration theories .. If it were a cyberattack (and so far it isn't proven at all), it would be nothing less than a state sponsored cyber attack to be able to get down the electrical grid from 2 EU countries - and obviously no "reward" such as crypto would be involved behind the scene
by lupusreal | 2025-04-28 18:08:01+00:00
It's a rare stretch of American interstate highway where the majority are sticking to the speed limit. On different roads the ratio of speeders to "speed limit doers" varies, but interstates have fairly consistent driving conditions and the safe speed for those conditions is consistently higher than the posted limit.

Usually traffic on American interstates is staying at the speed limit if: there is a fair amount of congestion, everybody is stuck behind somebody doing the limit, or there is rain/fog/snow/etc.
by JadoJodo | 2025-04-28 18:08:11+00:00
I'd like to invite any Python devs to go on a tangent with me:

Can you give me the scoop on Python, the language? I see things like this project, and it seems very impressive, but being an outsider to the language, I don't "get" it. More specifically: I'm curious to hear thoughts on a) what made this difficult prior to now (with Python), b) why Python is useful for this, and c) what are your thoughts on Python itself?

To add some more context:

I know a lot of developers who work with Python (Flask); Some love it, some hate it (as with any language). My experience has been mainly via homelab/OSS tools that all seem to embrace the language. And yet while the language itself seems very straight forward and easy to use, my experience with the Python _ecosystem_ (again, as an outsider) has been... difficult.

Python 2 vs 3, virtual environments, libraries for each version, etc. It feels as though anytime I've had to use it outside a pre-built Docker container, these issues result in throwing spaghetti at the wall trying to figure out how to even get it working at all. As a PHP/Go dev, it's one of the languages for which I could see myself having a real interest, but this has so far made me hesitant (and I don't want to be).
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-28 18:09:41+00:00
Good question — I’m not 100% sure. I'm not an expert on Ruby or JS internals, and I haven’t studied their execution models deeply. But in theory, if the language is stack-based (or can be mapped cleanly onto a stack machine), and if the ISA is broad enough to cover their needs, it could be possible. Right now, PyXL’s ISA is tuned around Python’s patterns — but generalizing it for other languages would definitely be an interesting challenge.
by ryao | 2025-04-28 18:09:48+00:00
It should be obvious that driving substantially slower than everyone else would make you a danger to others. Try driving at the speed limit on a high way in southern NY, especially in the left lane. You will have many near accidents and the reality is that you would be the dangerous driver for not keeping pace with everyone else.

Increasing the speed limit to the 85th percentile so that you do not have the few people who actually obey it posing a hazard to others does make things safer.

Getting cars off the road sooner by reducing travel time, decreases the number of cars on the road. This increases the distance between cars and accidents only when the distance betweeen a vehicle and something else reaches 0. Forcing people to drive slower therefore causes collisions by bringing cars closer to one another.

The severity is a separate matter from whether there is a collision. As for severity, people drive much faster in Germany where there is no high way speed limit for much of the autobahn yet their autobahn network has half the fatalities that U.S. highways have. The safety data from 2012 shows this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn#Safety

As for your link, it talks about pedestrian safety. As per the data there, pedestrians are unsafe on highways no matter what the speed limits are. There are also no pedestrians on highways. There is no point to setting highway speed limits based on studies showing the danger to non-existent pedestrians.

Did you post the first link that seemed to agree with your position as part of some fallacious appeal to authority because logic failed to agree with your preconceived notions that you were never equipped to defend? I suspect that is exactly what you just did.
by Timon3 | 2025-04-28 18:10:26+00:00
You're quoting a statement from the Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs. Given the well-documented history of lies from the current administration, why should we take a statement from a person under their control as fact? It'd be a different thing if such a statement came from the french side, but according to the article you posted they haven't given one.

Let's not forget that the VP literally admitted to creating fake stories to influence public opinion. At this point, any statement by the administration & people under their control should be taken as evidence to the contrary, unless it's corroborated by outside sources.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-04-28 18:10:54+00:00
I love this story. Why? Because it is the story of so many startups. I was so perplexed in the mid-90's when the dot com "boom" had started by people who wanted to do a "startup" but had no idea what that meant. Like the author, people with a feeling of Destiny that they would be some leader of something that everyone talked about. I had the same beliefs when I left Sun where clearly I would never be "famous" but by starting a company that became big? Sure anyone could do that. And in fact, a peer at Sun for whom I felt was not particularly qualified at anything, had gone on to a startup which had then gone public and made millions! And if he could do it, well it was guaranteed for me, right? Yeah, no.

At the other end of my career and looking back it becomes possible to see things that you missed on the journey, the role of luck, the difference between talking hard and working hard, and the critical importance of the people involved. A million monkeys with a million typewriters won't eventually create Shakespeare's works, they will waste a lot of resources and create a bunch trash. I also discovered that there are people who, when they speak, you really want to believe what they are saying. Being able to step back and say "what's the foundation here? Why should I believe this?" can be very difficult.