MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shkurski_ | 2025-04-29 15:18:02+00:00
https://shkur.ski/notai A tool that automatically shows you relevant information as you work so you don't have to search for things manually. With privacy guarantees.

Being sick of where things are headed, I didn't want to join the "trend". Instead, there is NotAI. I built it for myself first and foremost, as I am:

1. Too lazy to Alt+Tab into Notion in order to write a note or find it. Instead, I want to select text and write a note in-place. Next time when I see something relevant on screen, I want it to appear. 2. Usually distracted with the need to structure information manually. If you see it on screen, it should be enough. With NotAI you see a name in messenger -- it adds contact automatically. You see meeting caps -- it memorises them. Etc. 3. Tired of bloatware, all those 500MB text editors draining the battery. I wanted it to be fast, small and smooth. NotAI is fully native, consumes a few tens of MBs and runs even on modest 5-7 y.o. laptops. It's fully local, meaning no network requests / server-side processing -> reaction time is usually within 40ms. 4. Sick of marketing bs. Privacy-first products with telemetry and requests to ChatGPT. Attempts to achieve "privacy" by redefining the meaning of it. I no longer believe what I read. If it's private, I want guarantees! So NotAI is fully local. It's a single executable program. You go Windows Defender (or any other firewall) and block it from network. Period.

Here is an old tech demo from last year: https://shkur.ski/notai/demo.mp4
by dontreact | 2025-04-29 15:18:30+00:00
I think the methods here are highly questionable, and appear to be based on self report from a small amount of employees in Denmark 1 year ago.

The overall rate of participation in the labor work force is falling. I expect this trend to continue as AI makes the economy more and more dynamic and sets a higher and higher bar for participation.

Overall GDP is rising while labor participation rate is falling. This clearly points to more productivity with fewer people participating. At this point one of the main factors is clearly technological advancement, and within that I believe if you were to make a survey of CEOS and ask what technological change has allowed them to get more done with fewer people, the resounding consensus would definitely be AI
by paulcole | 2025-04-29 15:18:41+00:00
1. Biden was clearly gone mentally well before they let on. He should have been taken out in the primary season.

2. Democrats believe that "anybody who's not the other guy" is a winning strategy despite it failing over and over. They think that a candidate that people are excited to vote for is not a necessity and have been proven wrong over and over and over again. They got beat with this strategy in 2000, 2004, 2016 (and now 2024). It barely worked in 2020.

If the plan in 2028 is somebody who's a hold-your-nose and say "Well I'll vote for anyone who isn't republican" they will get absolutely smoked again.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-04-29 15:18:43+00:00
Many, many years ago, when I still used Windows recreationally, I used to edit the value of a specific Windows registry key, replacing "explorer.exe" with "cmd.exe". This would prevent Windows from runningg explorer.exe and launching the "desktop" with wallpaper, icons, etc. This produced what seemed more like a UNIX window manager, a solid backgground, where each window is a Microsoft cmd.exe shell, a classic Windows black box with a blue bar across the top and thin grey borders. I could then launch applications, such as the ones in the C:\windows\system32 folder from a command prompt, e.g., taskmgr.exe. For me, this made Windows feel much faster and more robust that when using explorer.exe. Certainly it was lighter weight.

More recently, long after I stopped using Windows but still many years ago, I was reading an article about Arthur Whitney. It had a photo which seemd to be at home, maybe in a furnished garage, and in the background was a desktop computer running Windows. The only window open was a cmd.exe. I am not suggesting anything. It is just something I always remember.

Perusing some recent Microsoft documentation I noticed this:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/shel...
by reverendsteveii | 2025-04-29 15:18:44+00:00
The point of the tariffs is rolling them back when the entity being punished does what Trump wants them to do. This was revealed in the initial stutterstep rollout of tariffs against Canada and Mexico. They both gave him political victories on the border, and in exchange the tariffs were delayed.

Quit assuming he wants what he says he wants and start assuming he wants the obvious, easily-predictable consequences of his actions.
by tbrownaw | 2025-04-29 15:18:57+00:00
Standard tree traversal loop (yes, missing some obvious conditionals I didn't feel like typing out):

var todo = new List<T>(); todo.append(root); while (var item = todo.pop_front()) { todo.append(item.left); // or .prepend for depth-first todo.append(item.right); // or .prepend() // do stuff... }
by ravenstine | 2025-04-29 15:18:57+00:00
That's missing the point, and is kind of like saying why bother paying someone to build you a house when there are DIY home building kits. (or why even buy a home when you can live in a van rent-free)

The point is that I would have paid for another human being's time. Why? Because I am not a young man anymore, and have little desire to do everything myself at this point. But now, I don't have to pay for someone's time, and that surplus time doesn't necessarily transfer to something equivalent like magic.
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-04-29 15:19:14+00:00
I wish plastic were as easily manageable as asbestos. Asbestos has always been far better contained than plastics — it's basically only ever been used “behind the scenes” in buildings. Now that we've phased out its use, you basically only need to manage asbestos when demolishing or doing extensive work on a building, when those cordoned-off spots become exposed.

Meanwhile plastics have already permeated our environment. Even if we stopped all use today, it would be practically impossible to remove every trace of them from the environment.
by smeeth | 2025-04-29 15:19:24+00:00
I'm not going to argue that accounting is all kinds of messed up (totally is), but your comment isn't factually accurate.

> This is true, but it used to measure (or at least try to account for) decay in private companies.

No, the "G" in GDP stands for "Gross," which means before depreciation. Depreciation has long been estimated in NIPAs, but that's a separate slate of measures.

> (especially since our beloved MBAs invented 'future accounting', where expected ROI is added to the value of machinery in the books, truly a genius move by true sociopaths)

This isn't true either. You're describing valuation models, e.g. DCF, but these aren't used for accounting. GAAP doesn't have a concept of adding ROI to asset value.

It is very true that games are played with depreciation. For example, you're allowed to depreciate some assets like real estate even if they INCREASE in value over time. All of that depreciation is tax-deductible.
by ziddoap | 2025-04-29 15:19:27+00:00
This is pointed out in the article:

"“The widespread distribution of cadmium contamination comes from both natural and anthropogenic sources,”"

"“Geochemically, certain parent rock materials [substrate below the ground], such as black shales, contain high levels of cadmium, leading to elevated concentrations in the soil due to weathering.”"

"However, the study does not assign blame to either natural or human causes."
by Attrecomet | 2025-04-29 15:19:40+00:00
The technical information on the cv/resume is, in my opinion, at most half of the process. And that's assuming that the person is honest, and already has the cv-only knowledge of exactly how much to overstate and brag about their ability and to get through screens.

Presenting soft skills is entirely random, anyway, so the only marker you can have on a cv is "the person is able to write whatever we deem well-written [$LANGUAGE] for our profession and knows exactly which meaningless phrases to include that we want to see".

So I guess I was a bit strong on the low information content, but you better have a very, very strong resume if you don't know the unspoken rules of phrasing, formatting and bragging that are required to get through to an actual interview. For those of us stuck in the masses, this means we get better results by adding information that we basically only get by already being part of the in-group, not by any technical or even interpersonal expertise.

Edit: If I constrain my argument to CVs only, I think my statement holds: They test an ability to send in acceptably written text, and apart from that, literally only in-group markers.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-29 15:21:03+00:00
> the increase in autism

Is largely illusory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bentinck,_5th_Duke_of_Por...

"The duke was highly introverted and well known for his eccentricity; he did not want to meet people and never invited anyone to his home. He employed hundreds through his various construction projects, and though well paid, the employees were not allowed to speak to him or acknowledge him. The one worker who raised his hat to the duke was promptly dismissed. The tenants on his estates were aware of his wishes and knew they were required to ignore him if they passed by. His rooms had double letterboxes, one for in-coming and another for out-going mail. Only his valet was permitted to see him in person in his quarters—he would not even let the doctor in, while his tenants and workmen received all their instructions in writing."

"The underground chambers—all of which were painted pink—included a great hall 160 ft (49 m) long and 63 ft (19 m) wide, which was originally intended as a chapel, but which was instead used as a picture gallery and occasionally as a ballroom. The ballroom reportedly had a hydraulic lift that could carry 20 guests from the surface and a ceiling that was painted as a giant sunset. The duke never organised any dances in the ballroom."

We'd diagnose this guy in a heartbeat now, but then, he was "eccentric". If he'd been poor and not an aristocrat, he'd have been a "moron" or "retarded" or something along those lines.

It's deeply odd to see Kennedy saying it's a new phenomenon. His own aunt was lobotomized for "becoming increasingly irritable and difficult".
by hbn | 2025-04-29 15:21:05+00:00
For as long as I've used the official app on iOS (since they killed third party apps... which also got me using reddit SIGNIFICANTLY less) it's had the issue where it'll send a push notification for a message reply or whatever, you can click it, view the message in the thread, reply to it, whatever. The push notification will be gone from your iPhone, but it never actually clears the notification from within the app. So you'll still see the notification in your in-app inbox so you have to go in there manually and click it again.
by willvarfar | 2025-04-29 15:21:11+00:00
I think it is worth making a distinction between "micro" (what the blogpost is about) and "macro", or "tactical" and "strategic", optimisations.

Strategic optimisations is often basically free if you have domain expertise. It's that easy to know that the business wants x outcome and algorithm y is the right choice etc if its all internal thought processes. Whereas if you don't know enough then you're likely to make very expensive to undo decisions.
by ethbr1 | 2025-04-29 15:21:27+00:00
Using Bessent and Navarro as examples, they both have ideological underpinings to their approaches.

Unfortunately (for the world) they're also contradictory.

And the administration doesn't seem capable of enunciating a coherent decision as to which guides its policy -- instead it's last-man-in-the-room-ism.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-04-29 15:22:07+00:00
This model prioritizes generation [0] over storage, by dramatic reliance on transmission systems. That's not inherently a stupid thing to do, but given the reality of global and even national politics, most places are prioritizing storage [1] over generation and limiting transmission goals to national needs.

[0] because India would need to generate not just it's daytime requirements, but also Spain's overnight requirements, and so forth.

[1] because each nation/grid system would need to store significant excess generation to make it through the night/storm systems etc.
by renhanxue | 2025-04-29 15:22:17+00:00
Marco Langbroek, who did the reentry forecast that the linked article is based on, convincingly argues[0] that the bus did separate and reenter separately (in 1981) and what remains in orbit is just the lander. There are several independent pieces of evidence that are consistent with this; the orbital decay pattern, the radar cross section and optical telescope observations all point to only the lander itself remaining.

See also his blog[1] for an up-to-date reentry forecast.

[0]: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4384/1

[1]: https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2025/04/kosmos-842-descent-...
by hbogert | 2025-04-29 15:22:40+00:00
used cursor to finally start a project which otherwise i would not have started (very good!)

I spent probably 80% of the time manually refactoring the dreadful spaghetti code and dead code it generated. This was with Claude sonnet as well.

It feels as if you make tremendous progress initially, only to be hampered afterwards. Is this inherent to vibe coding, or am I just doing it wrong?
by paulcole | 2025-04-29 15:22:43+00:00
> I'll trust in your capacity to resolve any concerns with what I wrote.

Yes, that is what I would do as well if I didn't want to answer a clear question.

> But yes, it is spam.

So then you retract this, "The only requirements are that it be mass (some define that as > 1 target) and unsolicited." because the only requirement is that the recipient see it as spam?
Show HN: A VS Code extension to debug async Rust logs from tracing
by arthurgousset | 2025-04-29 15:22:53+00:00
Debugging async Rust is often a pain [1][2]. The `tracing` library [3] provides great abstractions to deal with logs generated during concurrent code execution, but eyeballing nested spans in the terminal is cumbersome.

We thought "what if we could navigate async logs and nested spans in VS Code?". We looked into it and made a simple VS Code extension.

It's a prototype, but if you're interested in trying it out, we'd love some feedback!

Github: github.com/hyperdrive-eng/traceback

---

References:

[1]: "Is there any way to actually debug async Rust? [...] debugging any sort of async code (which is ALL code in a backend project), is an absolutely terrible experience" ~Source: reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1dsynnr/is_there_any_way_to_actually_debug_async_rust

[2]: "Why is async code in Rust considered especially hard compared to Go or just threads?" ~Source: reddit.com/r/rust/comments/16kzqpi/why_is_async_code_in_rust_considered_especially

[3]: docs.rs/tracing/latest/tracing
Tell HN: LinkedIn Banned Me Out of Nowhere While Raising
by 3Samourai | 2025-04-29 15:22:58+00:00
A week ago, while filling out my YC application, I opened LinkedIn and saw my account was banned. No warning. Just a forced ID and phone verification loop that’s impossible to complete. Support gave me the usual copy-paste response : “just complete verification”, no explanation, no reason.

I have unread DMs from potential investors, people whose emails I don’t have. Friends messaged me asking why my profile disappeared. The effect? Like tossing a rock into the ocean.

The account was real. Created in March. About 50 connections, mostly YC founders, VCs, and school friends. work email, real name, real school.

And yet-gone.

Anyone had this happen before?
by kurthr | 2025-04-29 15:23:32+00:00
The industry started with carbontet (CTC), they replaced it in the 70s with the perchlor stuff you're describing (PCE) in the 80s, then with Trichlorethylene (TCE) in the early 90s, which in turn was replaced with (TCA) Trichlorethane and now all the chlorinated stuff is gone (along with the PCB industry). There's still isopropyl and GBL butyrolactone (which is regulated as a precursor to GHB) for degreasing.

Back in the 60s carbontet was used everywhere (dry cleaning and industrial) and there are superfund sites in Happy Tx and Alabama.

Everyone has seen the walk through dry cleaning right? https://youtu.be/WbkfkcSiYcI

We're literally 60 years since the first regulation. And your local dry cleaner was leaking chlorinated solvents into the 80s. Now the cleanup for old gas stations is mostly complete, but the new MTBE stuff is nasty!
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-29 15:23:36+00:00
> Presumably for the same reason you hear people say things like "How can inflation only be 2%? I am spending 10% more. We need to redefine inflation!"

The question if the goods basket that is used to define inflation actually reflects reality is valid though!

For example, the explosion of rents in urban areas is offset by shockingly low rents in "flyover states" and rural areas, leading to a complete neglect of the problems of urban people because it simply doesn't show up in the statistics. For many poor people, they don't have the money to buy new clothes anyway, much less expensive goods such as new cars or luxury goods - and yet these products are all in goods baskets, offsetting the cost explosion in basic staples (and not just eggs).

IMHO, "inflation" as a simple percentage metric is not a KPI that can be used - at the very least, socioeconomic strata and urban/rural differences need to be taken into account because over the last decades, thanks to rural flight the realities have separated way too hard.

The problem that the Democrats faced in the last election campaign is that they only focused on KPIs useful for rich people: stock market indices, employment counts, GDP. But that mis-focus completely alienated the wide masses who felt they're being fed lies as their reality (exploding expenses but stagnant wages) was markedly different from what the Democrats pushed.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-04-29 15:24:13+00:00
I care about indepedence, but I also care about scale.

It makes absolutely zero sense for me, a homeowner in New Mexico, to have my own storage facilities capable of getting me through a winter heating season (using air-source heat pumps). It makes much more sense for the storage to be centralized, scaled and managed, while my own PV array contributes to it during the summer time.
by _fat_santa | 2025-04-29 15:24:18+00:00
Meta has terrible "separation of concerns" within their apps. I just downloaded Messenger the other day and realized that they now also show you your feed within messenger. Why?? If i wanted to see my feed I would have downloaded the Facebook app. Same with WhatsApp and Instagram trying to cram down AI.

My theory is you have these app "fiefdoms" that are run by different product managers and all of them are trying to steal users from the other product to show that their product is driving growth. So you end up with 10 apps that implement 90% of the same features.
by jghn | 2025-04-29 15:24:35+00:00
Yeah. I've been doing Spanish on Duolingo for about 2.5 years, and just started Section 5. I find that I can read Spanish reasonably well, in that I can usually at least work out what the underlying meaning is for any arbitrary piece of Spanish text I see. But my ability drops off quickly for listening to spoken Spanish, and even more quickly for speaking it myself. Which makes sense given how the site works.
by ajross | 2025-04-29 15:24:37+00:00
> Because when you're spending your own money, you are forced to decide whether something is worth it.

Define "worth it" macroeconomically. There is no "value" idea at scale with a meaning separate from "money". Every transaction happens, definitionally, because the two parties think it's "worth it".

Edit: to focus a bit and extend the metaphor above: if the government buys an iPhone for the notional corrupt IRS agent who doesn't need it, you'd say it's not "worth it". But Apple Computer books that revenue either way. The world you're imagining where "less productive" government spending doesn't happen is a smaller economy. And that's bad, because it means that Apple hires fewer geeks and those of us who can't get those FAANG jobs see less upward wage pressure.

Money is money, at scale. The Economy can't tell what you're using it for, it just cares that you trade it for stuff.
by mannykannot | 2025-04-29 15:24:49+00:00
I imagine AC makes things considerably more difficult. Reactance is a consequence of inductance and capacitance, which cause current and voltage changes to be out of phase with each other. While the current on a DC transmission line will vary, it will not be reversing every ~10 milliseconds, and I suppose the voltage will be very steady except during startup and shutdown.

On an AC transmission line, I suppose any corona discharge going on shuts off and restarts every time the voltage reverses. They make a characteristic buzz in humid conditions.
by deadbabe | 2025-04-29 15:25:01+00:00
Companies have been wanting to lay people off. Using AI as an excuse is a convenient way to turn a negative into a positive.

Truth is, companies that don’t need layoffs are pushing employees to use AI to supercharge their output.

You don’t grow a business by just cutting costs, you need to increase revenue. And increasing revenue means more work, which means it’s better for existing employees to put out more with AI.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-04-29 15:25:11+00:00
I think this will be fixed by having LLM trained not on the whole internet but on well curated content. To me this feels like the internet in maybe 1993. You see the potential and it’s useful. But a lot of work and experimentation has to be done to work out use cases.

I think it’s weird to reject AI based on its current form.
by metalman | 2025-04-29 15:25:11+00:00
many organisms are eating plastics, but that is not good for us at all in the short term. A study ? bedford institute? from a while back reported that plastics that they were collecting from the ocean, were full of holes from bieng eaten by something, and if you think about plastic as a widly distrubuted, easily broken down substance with very high intrinsic energy content, that it's no surprise at all that things are eating it. But back to us, thats bad, because all.of those things eating plastic, are then eaten, and passed up the food chain to us, at the top. So what we need to know, is how far advanced the process of filling the food chain with, undesirable for us substances, is, and what the future looks like if we just shrug, or how long will the system take to clear itself out. ie: is the biosphere "saturated" or not. If not, what is the max concentration that we can expect, and when
by bilsbie | 2025-04-29 15:25:13+00:00
Curious what you tell people you do when they ask? Does everyone know what a sabbatical is?

I’ve been on a long sabbatical myself but I don’t feel like people would understand that so I usually just still say software engineer.

Btw feel free to email if you want to chat sometime. I haven’t especially productive so it would be great to get some inspiration.
by zdc1 | 2025-04-29 15:25:29+00:00
Learning a language is such a large, long term undertaking that I appreciate how Duolingo tries to use a few tricks to keep people on-track. It's also one of those areas where interests and incentives (maximising the time on app; regular usage) are rather aligned.

However after getting halfway into their Chinese course I feel quite disillusioned with their approach and actual content. You'd think an app with their market presence would have some amazing teaching strategies... but they don't. You can get through half of the course and still not know how to count past four. There's also lots of cultural context and finer points that are simply missing.

Anyway, I'd be curious to see how a more community-driven approach could play out, any whether it would lead to better content.