MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pmags | 2025-04-22 16:33:19+00:00
This is especially interesting in light of the following:

• Trump Laid Off Nearly All the Federal Workers Who Investigate Firefighter Deaths -- https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-cuts-firefighter-de...

> National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, will also halt a first-of-its-kind study of the causes of thousands of firefighters’ cancer cases.
Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source IDE for multi-agent systems
by segmenta | 2025-04-22 16:33:21+00:00
Hi HN! We’re Arjun, Ramnique, and Akhilesh, and we are building Rowboat (https://www.rowboatlabs.com/), an AI-assisted IDE for building and managing multi-agent systems. You start with a single agent, then scale up to teams of agents that work together, use MCP tools, and improve over time - all through a chat-based copilot.

Our repo is https://github.com/rowboatlabs/rowboat, docs are at https://docs.rowboatlabs.com/, and there’s a demo video here: https://youtu.be/YRTCw9UHRbU

It’s becoming clear that real-world agentic systems work best when multiple agents collaborate, rather than having one agent attempt to do everything. This isn’t too surprising - it’s a bit like how good code consists of multiple functions that each do one thing, rather than cramming everything into one function.

For example, a travel assistant works best when different agents handle specialized tasks: one agent finds the best flights, another optimizes hotel selections, and a third organizes the itinerary. This modular approach makes the system easier to manage, debug, and improve over time.

OpenAI’s Agents SDK provides a neat Python library to support this, but building reliable agentic systems requires constant iterations and tweaking - e.g. updating agent instructions (which can quickly get as complex as actual code), connecting tools, and testing the system and incorporating feedback. Rowboat is an AI IDE to do all this. Rowboat is to AI agents what Cursor is to code.

We’ve taken a code-like approach to agent instructions (prompts). There are special keywords to directly reference other agents, tools or prompts - which are highlighted in the UI. The copilot is the best way to create and edit these instructions - each change comes with a code-style diff.

You can give agents access to tools by integrating any MCP server or connecting your own functions through a webhook. You can instruct the agents on when to use specific tools via ‘@mentions’ in the agent instruction. To enable quick testing, we added a way to mock tool responses using LLM calls.

Rowboat playground lets you test and debug the assistants as you build them. You can see agent transfers, tool invocations and tool responses in real-time. The copilot has the context of the chat, and can improve the agent instructions based on feedback. For example, you could say ‘The agent shouldn’t have done x here. Fix this’ and the copilot can go and make this fix.

You can integrate agentic systems built in Rowboat into your application via the HTTP API or the Python SDK (‘pip install rowboat’). For example, you can build user-facing chatbots, enterprise workflows and employee assistants using Rowboat.

We’ve been working with LLMs since GPT-1 launched in 2018. Most recently, we built Coinbase’s support chatbot after our last AI startup was acquired by them.

Rowboat is Apache 2.0 licensed, giving you full freedom to self-host, modify, or extend it however you like.

We’re excited to share Rowboat with everyone here. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
by amarcheschi | 2025-04-22 16:33:45+00:00
I have to say that i'm so tired of reading these things - as interesting it might be to read about some whackos like them - that just being apalled is not enough to describe how repulsive is a world in which human value is used like a number - especially if it is pulled out of their arse just to hide their racism, classism, sexism (ecc ecc)
by whartung | 2025-04-22 16:34:05+00:00
I would love to know how DECs BASIC-PLUS worked.

The key thing about B+ is that it's a compiled BASIC, it compiled into P-Code, that was then executed. This is in contrast to MS-BASIC which interpreted the parsed token stream over and over.

But, there is no way that the entire thing was compiled each time you said "RUN", that would have been much to expensive. But, it was compiled. At the same time, it kept the entirety of the BASIC program in memory, as text. So, it had to store both the raw text form, and the compiled form. Seems quite expensive given the limits of machines back in the day.

So, I've always been interested in the design and engineering history of B+.

Similarly, I'd love to know where Gates and Allen got the idea to use a tokenized form to store the program, as its an elegant solution in a tight memory budget to store the program source and runtime.

They're clever guys, and maybe they made it up out of whole cloth, but it would be interesting to know what may have inspired them to do it that way. It wasn't BASIC-PLUS, as that's not how it worked.
by vinceguidry | 2025-04-22 16:34:07+00:00
Worst part of static compiled languages is the ugly syntax. Worst part of dynamic systems is they aren't machine-understandable. It's a direct tradeoff that results from formal language theory. Ruby isn't an answer to this, in fact it lies so far on the dynamic side of the fence that the one IDE targeted at it is more of an impediment than a help. There is no answer to the tradeoff, though there are a few current attempts, like Zest.

I personally don't need or want a computer to help me to understand the code I work on. It would be nice but not worth the need for a compile step. Pike looks like a compiled language, but doesn't even try to give you any of the advantages of machine understandability. It's purely cosmetic, why in the world would anyone want Python to look like C? If you want a dynamic language and don't want to deal with Ruby's... eccentricities, just use Python like everyone else.

https://github.com/jamii/zest
by conductr | 2025-04-22 16:34:09+00:00
I'm trying to use my imagination, but what exactly is the fear? Perhaps the AI will explain where baby's come from in graphic detail before the parent is ready to have that conversation or something similar? Or, for us in US, maybe it tells your kid they should wear a bullet proof vest to pre-K instead of bringing a stuffy for naptime?

Essentially, telling kids the truth before they're ready and without typical parental censorship? Or is there some other fear, like the AI will get compromised by a pedo and he'll talk your kid into who knows what? Or similar for "fill in state actor" using mind control on your kid (which, honestly, I feel like is normalized even for adults; eg. Fox News, etc., again US-centric)
by skydhash | 2025-04-22 16:34:15+00:00
That's a nice quote. And your comment reminds me of why I (and maybe some other people) prefer windows managers over desktop environments. You go with the basic and everytime you notice some missing capabilities or inefficiency, you code it away. The end result is something that fit you like a glove and you understand thoroughly. It's 100% your own.

But with DE, you need maybe 80%, and the 20% you build with workarounds is constantly under threat. Why, because you're effectively enclosed in a small space by the design decisions of the DE.
by presto8 | 2025-04-22 16:34:52+00:00
> Just to get the numbers right: [0] there is a $25 minimum, that becomes $50 June 1st, on all packages below or at $800.

Things are changing very quickly, so it's hard to keep up. But I believe this was revised on April 9th to $100 dollars a package from HK or PRC on May 2, and $200 a package starting June 1.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/modi...

> (b) increase the per postal item containing goods duty in section 2(c)(ii) of Executive Order 14256, as modified by the Executive Order dated April 8, 2025, that is in effect on or after 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on May 2, 2025, and before 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on June 1, 2025, from 75 dollars to 100 dollars; and

> (c) increase the per postal item containing goods duty in section 2(c)(ii) of Executive Order 14256, as modified by the Executive Order dated April 8, 2025, that is in effect on or after 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on June 1, 2025, from 150 dollars to 200 dollars.
by vinceguidry | 2025-04-22 16:35:30+00:00
Ruby's static type checker is built into the language, since 3.0.

https://github.com/ruby/rbs

You can use others if you like. I have used Crystal before, pretty quickly realized that it was never going to catch up with Ruby and the compile step isn't really all that much of an advantage. The few scripts that I want speed for, I just use mruby. Embed Ruby in C, runs super fast. Don't get all the cool Ruby libs or runtime reflection. But a way better tradeoff.

https://mruby.org/
by wat10000 | 2025-04-22 16:35:42+00:00
This distinction might sound very important for people within one of those religions, but it sounds pretty trivial from the outside. Changing secular law to reflect religious law versus directly applying religious law, who cares? The result is the same.

And for excessive focus, maybe you haven't noticed, but that fringe position is wielding a tremendous power in the country where I live at the moment.
by JoelMcCracken | 2025-04-22 16:35:44+00:00
I use my boox max lumi as a secondary display daily for working in emacs. The eink is great for text/terminal use, the only issue I have is when i sometimes need to do any kind of mouse work (which, is basically never, when I use it for what I said above).

What I really want is a low power linux laptop that is not entirely without CPU/memory power, so I can program some simple things on it. I don't mind if it has _less_ power, I can use ssh for anything that is overly cpu-hungry.

Ive seen several devices that seem like they might suit my need, but I look at them for long enough and just won't pull the trigger. Either it seems overly much like a walled garden (like, I can program on the device, but it doesn't seem like a suitable spot to write blog posts in emacs for my blog or whatever), or its just too underpowered and I'm sure that 99% of the tools I use already won't work on it.

I wish I had the EE knowledge/confidence to start hacking on this kind of thing. I think its very doable; I was just looking at e.g. https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/...

which is just cheap enough that I could see myself risking buying it without being sure that it will work with my other choices.

Nowadays, I feel like I should be able to run most of what I want on an android device that is built for power, and it should have a fairly long lasting battery because of its design; attach a trackpad, keyboard, and eink display, and my perfect device is here. I don't care if its not the thinnest device in the universe, a swappable battery (or, just load the thing with extra batteries) plus perhaps a portable solar charger would be amazing.
by pera | 2025-04-22 16:35:54+00:00
Is Graham still involved in HN?

While it's true that he has spoken against Trump many times, Garry Tan is very close to Thiel, Musk, and the MAGA movement in general. Didn't he recently show support for DOGE as well?

Of course, YC is more than its current CEO and hopefully this doesn't affect the moderation of this website :)
by ineedasername | 2025-04-22 16:35:57+00:00
I think dang, or the agglomeration of people who fill that role, are pretty good in respect to this, responsible stewards of the active commenting space. and I’m not proposing conspiracy theories about them not being upfront or honest in what they have said: it’s much simpler than active suppression to simply tweak the automated criteria by which articles are allowed to rise or fall.
by amarcheschi | 2025-04-22 16:36:50+00:00
Btw, i also have the pet peeve that such horrible calculations do not take into account that an earlier action that saves less lives actually has a theorethical effect of saving other lives for the sheer fact that the people you saved now might provide value in the future. In their perverse logic, this is something that should be taken into account. Given that i'm only an ai major taking a small course on ethics, i both find myself repelled by what i said and amused that such deep thinkers couldn't think of the "potential" value generated after saving someone now rather than in the future.

Given they're all for this sort of horrible calculations, if someone doesn't include this in their thinking - and as far as I read, this potential is not taken into consideration - they might have just condemned billions to die for a wrong calculation. Gah
by nehal96 | 2025-04-22 16:37:06+00:00
Thank you! I find a lot of articles skip the exact techniques used, and usually say something generic like "Scientists ran many tests to confirm..", so I intentionally specified the tests and tried to explain it in simple terms here. The tradeoff is that is can come off a bit jargon-y but I hope that it sparks some curiosity about the process.

You make a great point about the parallels (and differences) of hypothesis generation and testing for wet-lab and CS. There seems to be an ongoing debate about the lack of link between these two fields, leading to some misconceptions -- would be a great topic for an essay!
by simonw | 2025-04-22 16:38:20+00:00
Unrelated to the new materialization option, this caught my eye:

"this query sorts all 150 million values in the helpful_votes column (which isn’t part of the table’s sort key) and returns the top 3, in just 70 milliseconds cold (with the OS filesystem cache cleared beforehand) and a processing throughput of 2.15 billion rows/s"

I clearly need to update my mental model of what might be a slow query against modern hardware and software. Looks like that's so fast because in a columnar database it only has to load that 150 million value column. I guess sorting 150 million integers in 70ms shouldn't be surprising.

(Also "Peak memory usage: 3.59 MiB" for that? Nice.)

This is a really great article - very clearly explained, good diagrams, I learned a bunch from it.
by FlyingSnake | 2025-04-22 16:38:20+00:00
> You are borderline arguing that information is bad

Your words not mine.

I questioned why sites like X or BlueSky or Reddit can be sole in charge of who is "verified" and Real™. We can listen to what the Journalists, UN officials etc have to say on their own media websites, right?

Too much news is bad for us anyway [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5549054
by nialv7 | 2025-04-22 16:38:27+00:00
> we uncover that RL-trained models excel at low k (e.g., pass@1) but are consistently outperformed by base models at high k (e.g., pass@256).

This is a weak argument. I think I get what we are trying to say, but let's take this to the extreme, say pass@10^10^100. Just like a group of monkeys could write Shakespeare if given enough time, a complete random model could probably outperform an RL-trained model at pass@10^10^100. Would we then say the random model can reason too?

Of course the correct reasoning trace will be in the base model's distribution, just like any other well-formed, coherent paragraph. Kind of makes me think, maybe sampling efficiency _is_ intelligence?
by voidspark | 2025-04-22 16:38:59+00:00
> I'm really looking forward to Fortune 500 companies sending all their internal company data to Google

Their internal company data is already on cloud servers. They’re not going to waste money on doing it all in house. The executives will buy the AI service from Google/Azure/AWS, where the company data is already hosted, avoid the costs and risk of doing it in house, and collect their bonus.
by aidenn0 | 2025-04-22 16:39:25+00:00
Two of GNOME's recent updates have made searching menus for a rarely used item incredibly painful:

1. Replace the menubar with a hamburger menu; in some cases the hamburger menu then contains file/edit/&c. so it's just a spurious extra click

2. Require a click to see the contents of a submenu and a click to go back

Fortunately my most-used GNOME application (Evolution) has an option to restore the old behavior for both of those, but I literally cannot think of the motivation for these two changes that clearly make things worse. The only halfway plausible idea I have heard for #2 is that the GNOME UX designers think that submenus are bad, so if you make them hard enough to use, developers will stop putting them in their applications. #1 is probably partly a looks thing, and partly a "too many people have fewer horizontal lines on their screens than I did in 2004[1]" thing.

1: That's when I got a 1600x1200 monitor; people today with 1080p screens have only 56 more lines than the 1280x1024 monitor I had been using since the previous millennium
by joncrocks | 2025-04-22 16:39:44+00:00
I'm not sure, but I think that the reason that radiators are placed near windows (at least historically) was to avoid hot/cold spots in rooms.

By placing the radiator near the place that is likely the coldest place in the room, you ensure that the room is an even in temperature as possible. Rather than to counteract 'cool draughts'. I think.

So perhaps people thought that your initial comment was wrong/misleading.

But if you have triple glazing and this mitigates the heat loss, then the coldest wall of your room may no longer be the one with a window, so you may well be doing the right thing for your room(s).
by lillecarl | 2025-04-22 16:39:49+00:00
What is serious business? I think supabase can scale brilliantly, and it doesn't lock you in, if you have need for some special infra you can build and integrate it, I don't know but you could possibly even use FDW to access a postgres you run yourself.

Also they can't run on AWS postgres with all their postgres plug-ins AFAIK.

The point of "cheaper to host everything yourself" is a lot higher than what most estimate.

My only concern is that is supabase goes out of business or go evil you're gonna have a bad time, however everything is open-source
by tmoertel | 2025-04-22 16:39:53+00:00
This optimization should provide dramatic speed-ups when taking random samples from massive data sets, especially when the wanted columns can contain large values. That's because the basic SQL recipe relies on a LIMIT clause to determine which rows are in the sample (see query below), and this new optimization promises to defer reading the big columns until the LIMIT clause has filtered the data set down to a tiny number of lucky rows.

SELECT * FROM Population WHERE weight > 0 ORDER BY -LN(1.0 - RANDOM()) / weight LIMIT 100 -- Sample size.

Can anyone from ClickHouse verify that the lazy-materialization optimization speeds up queries like this one? (I want to make sure the randomization in the ORDER BY clause doesn't prevent the optimization.)
by spencerflem | 2025-04-22 16:40:29+00:00
Maybe its just the two I was looking at, but the Dell G16 was on a best under $1k list and is $1600 on best buy, and my almost brand new Zephirus G14 that got killed by a spill (rest in peace) went from $1200 when i got it to $1700 on best buy as well.

Acer Nitro V kept its price at what the reviews said and that's what I ended up getting, but still weird that 2 of 3 changed
by giantrobot | 2025-04-22 16:40:35+00:00
> We technical people always underestimate how fast things change when non-technical users can finally get things done without opening the hood.

This is good and bad. Non-technical users throwing up a prototype quickly is good. Non-technical users pushing that prototype into production with its security holes and non-obvious bugs is bad. It's easy for non-technical users to get a false sense of confidence if the thing they make looks good. This has been true since the RAD days of Delphi and VisualBasic.
Show HN: I replaced my devs with AI agents – and it worked
by buzzbyjool | 2025-04-22 16:40:35+00:00
I run a small AI company in Luxembourg. We started out as a consulting studio, building custom tools for clients — mostly boring things like dashboards, reporting modules, and CRUD backends.

At some point I realized we were building the same things over and over again. Not in a copy-paste way, but in a “we could generate 80% of this” kind of way. So last year, I ran a live-fire experiment: I asked Claude 3.5 and DeepSeek to build a small admin panel, with tests and API docs, from a plain-language spec.

The result: not great, but usable. It gave us the idea to stop typing code altogether.

Now, at Easylab AI, we don’t write code manually anymore. We use a stack of LLM-powered agents (Claude, DeepSeek, GPT-4) with structured task roles: • an orchestrator agent breaks down the spec • one agent builds back-end logic • another generates test coverage • another checks for security risks • another synthesizes OpenAPI docs • and humans only intervene for review & deployment

Agents talk via a shared context layer we built, and we introduced our own protocol (we call it MCP — Model Context Protocol) to define context flow and fallback behavior.

It’s not perfect. Agents hallucinate. Chaining multiple models can fail in weird ways. Debugging LLM logic isn’t always fun. But…

We’re faster. We ship more. Our team spends more time on logic and less on syntax. And the devs? They’re still here — but they’ve become prompt architects, QA strategists, and AI trainers.

We built Linkeme.ai entirely this way — an AI SaaS for generating social media content for SMEs. It would’ve taken us 3 months before. It took 3 weeks.

Happy to share more details if anyone’s curious. AMA.
by magixx | 2025-04-22 16:40:49+00:00
I also thought about this but wanted to look into an ESP32 CAM to get vision working. For better or worse I didn't pursue the idea as I thought in the end repurposing a cell phone would be better overall.

I do wonder if the cellphone/app argument is why we didn't see that many hardware LLM API wrappers up until now. The rabbit R1 was basically just that.

I've seen more products in this space recently such as Ropet[1], LOOI[2], and others but for now it's going to be costly for companies to sell such a product at a fixed cost as I think a subscription model would be a hard sell [3] for consumers.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1067657324/ropet-your-n... [2] https://looirobot.com/products/looi-robot?variant=4909200762... [3] https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/tragic-robot-shutdown-sho...
by ianbicking | 2025-04-22 16:41:05+00:00
What's been your experience with the Realtime API? I've been doing LLM with voice, but haven't really given it a try – the price is so high, and it feels like it's much harder to control. Specifically that you just get one system prompt and then the model takes over entirely. (Though looking at the API, I see you can inject text and do some other things to play around with the session.)
by quickthrowman | 2025-04-22 16:42:29+00:00
> ideal one-size fits all thermostat

The round Honeywell electromechanical thermostat with a bimetallic strip, invented in 1953: https://www.honeywellstore.com/store/products/honeywell-roun...

24VAC, dead simple, and reliable. My family’s lake house has 50+ year old Honeywell round thermostats still in service.
by xp84 | 2025-04-22 16:42:34+00:00
> lovely talking toys can die if the company stops being profitable.

This is a good point to me as a parent -- in a world where this becomes a precious toy, it would be a serious risk of emotional pain if the child experienced this scenario like the death of a pet or friend.

> version with decent hardware that runs a local model

I feel like something small and efficient enough to meet that (today) would be dumb as a post. Like Siri-level dumb.

Personally, I'd prefer a toy which was tethered to a home device. Without a cloud (and thus commercial) dependency, the toy wouldn't be 'smart' outside of Wi-fi range, but I'd design it so that it got 'sleepy' when away from Wi-fi, able to be "woken up" and, in that state, to respond to a few phrases with canned, Siri-like answers. Perhaps new content could be made up for it daily and downloaded to local storage while at home, so that it could still "tell me a story" offline etc.