MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zild3d | 2025-04-15 10:30:10+00:00
> the need for translating vague desires from laypeople into a precise specification will remain—there's nothing on the AI horizon that will solve for this

LLMs are very good at exactly that. What they aren't good at (I'll add the yet as an opinion) is larger systems thinking, having the context of multiple teams, multiple systems, infra, business priorities, security, etc.
by fidotron | 2025-04-15 10:31:21+00:00
> As an example, I refuse to buy a doorbell camera that doesn't support RTSP.

This is a good example of conflicting security requirements.

Not wanting the video to go to the cloud is fine, but most cameras with RTSP enabled allow any other device on the network to trivially get the camera stream, and sometimes also control the camera. This is why some camera companies require you jump through hoops to unlock RTSP - I don't like it but I can see why they do it.

This is one reason I've come to believe it's necessary that every device must see a totally different network universe from every other, able only to see the local controller server. (This is how I ended up playing with on AP video relays in my profile, as an effort to see what's involved). Things like multicast discovery is cool, but an absolute privacy and security disaster area.
by bamboozled | 2025-04-15 10:31:42+00:00
I was one of those people who always purchased American when things were being off shored, and I still do as often as I can, especially tools.

Do you know who made the Chinese made goods thing a reality? People from Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana etc. People went into a store, saw the cheaper item, often inferior Chinese item on the shelf and bought it instead of the domestically produced item, even the stuff that said "Designed in America, Made in China". They did this because it was cheaper.

I think you're mistaken if you think some external force "did this to us".

We all do it, some items are just not worth the exuberant price tag, especially if you're only going to use something occasionally.

At least from my observation, the balance was actually not so bad in the last 5 years or so, plenty of good American options available and cheaper Chinese stuff when that was appropriate. I think America will be worse off from this because the cost of so many things will be way higher now, DIY for example will be off the table for a lot of people. The cost of a drill will become ridiculous, for example.

I think ending the pipeline of landfill fodder from Temu is a great thing. That kind of consumerism is like eating a diet of pure sugar. Feels good for a second, but bad for the consumer, environment and economy.

There would've been other ways to go about solving the environmental impacts of Temu than this. In my opinion.
by 0xEF | 2025-04-15 10:31:56+00:00
Paying more =/= quality, unfortunately. Believe me, I wish it were otherwise. Don't be afraid to open up those battery banks now and then if you want to be sure, put a meter on them and scope them if you know how, but you'll find what I typically find; a lot of the same cheap components all wrapped in a pretty package. But because one came from China and one was "made" in the USA, you'll pay a lot more for one than you will the other. You can probably guess which.

I say that as someone who works in manufacturing as a controls and repair tech for industrial IoT and electromechanical integrations (I wear a lot of hats, long story). Trusted brands like Rockwell, Siemens, etc aren't really doing anything that much different than their cheaper competitors and they know it. It's a big part of the reason why their business model includes aggressive pushes to keep their customer "in their world," so to speak, trying to be a one-stop-shop for all their control needs when good number of applications really don't need anything beyond a Koyo Click PLC you can get used for $50 on eBay instead of the $1200 A/B unit. Heck, I've seen automation cells that could have the PLC swapped out with a $20 Arduino and nobody would know the difference except the controls guy. I'd love to say this over-priced cult-like hooey is restricted to the automation industry, but it's definitely not, and bleeds all over a variety of consumer industries, especially those of personal electronics. We are getting ripped off left and right, but if there's a fruit logo or some inventor's name we recognize on the packaging, we're okay taking out a second mortgage to afford it.

In the end, the quality standards in many cases are just a lot of hot air, CYA statements and sales BS. Price is really dictated by the customer's perception of the product, and when you create that trust, legitimate or not, you get to price your product much higher than your competitor, regardless if your product is _actually_ better than theirs. They get away with this because, for the most part, customers don't take the screws out and actually look inside.

Now, that is not to say my experience is always true. There are plenty of companies that make their quality standards and testing pretty transparent so the consumer can review them at their leisure and make a choice. I'm just saying most do not, which creates a lot of shadowy areas where many companies can get away with things simply because they know nobody is looking and taking their word at face value.
by Quinzel | 2025-04-15 10:32:40+00:00
The best manager I ever had was a compassionate man. He was super kind and patient, but he was also firm and fair. He was consistent in enforcing rules and regulations, but he also understood human factors really well. He was not authoritarian. He was more authoritative and he really acted more like a mentor than a manager. He knew how to give feedback in a way that was able to be received and actioned. He was also approachable and liked having random chats with people and getting to know people. I admired him a lot. He was the best manager I’d ever had and when he left the whole workplace took a turn for the worst. His replacement was just a huge doofnugget.
by animal531 | 2025-04-15 10:34:43+00:00
I spent the last two or so months using it as an assistant for code and my conclusion is that it is terrible compared to even the free model of ChatGPT.

The incidence of bugs, it not understanding what you're asking or just generating code that is straight up wrong is much worse. Even with guidance it will often be unable to fix issues, leaving you to do all the manual legwork to get things working. Usually you're better off just having done everything yourself from the start.

During those two months they really improved GPT as well, its generation speed is now much much faster, and the quality of its output has become a lot better.
by dharmab | 2025-04-15 10:35:25+00:00
Nevada had to pass a law fairly recently to ban the still-in-use practice of blaring sirens at 6PM to warn native americans to leave town.

There are still places in the west where the level of law enforcement is similar to Tatooine. Mostly in sparsely populated counties and very small towns, where attention from state governments, mainstream media and the internet is general can be avoided.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-15 10:35:30+00:00
"Torrents can't do the massive market of livestream" CAN do, why are we not using them is not technical reason, it is that most people just pay apple tv / netflix and not have to install anything on their computer, and UI / interface is 10000 times better.

or very similar point - i had conversation with some big youtuber and person was confused why he is not more popular with certain demographic. reason was that said demographic was watching on big TV and content he was filming was big head directly in front of camera. so they do not like having 3 feet big head right in front of them... most young people watch things on mobile..
by Freak_NL | 2025-04-15 10:35:31+00:00
Yeah, you have to try real hard to get a customs processing fee on a package from AliExpress. Customs literally can't keep up with the fire-hose of packages coming in from China, so the current deal is that they, AliExpress, charge and pay VAT and the packages just come through unscathed.

Order something from the US into Europe? Expect to pay customs most of the time. From Great Britain post-Brexit? Ditto. China? Rarely.
by cyanydeez | 2025-04-15 10:35:40+00:00
honestly, it looks like an unnecessary additional protocol to a REST API. Couldn't you just add a "LLM-description" (optional) field to any RESTAPI that provides a JSON description of how to use it? That's what it sounds like because every LLM already will have it's own "idea" of how to use a MCP interface. So why have a totally disparate thing.

Just seems like i+1 syndrome with computing.
by fabian2k | 2025-04-15 10:35:58+00:00
The conditions are quite different in Germany than the US, but the very high reliability of ~12 minutes outage per year on average as mentioned in the post does mean that many if not most people don't think at all about power outages here. I can remember only a single real outage for me in the last ~20 years or so, and that affected only a tiny area and was very quickly fixed after it was reported.

It does mean that the average German is probably not particularly well prepared for power outages, I bought a better flashlight and a bigger power bank after the one bigger outage I experienced.
by ralferoo | 2025-04-15 10:37:36+00:00
I don't think he's saying it needs to be BitTorrent, just applying some principles from it.

For example, say you have a cluster of people on the call in the US and another cluster in the UK. Ping times are 100ms or more across the ocean, there will be some random packets lost, but ping times within the UK are around 15ms max. By working co-operatively and sharing among themselves the clients in one cluster can fill in missing packets from a different cluster far quicker than the requesting them from the originating host.

In general, the ability to request missing packets from a more local source should be able to improve overall video call quality. It still might be "too late", because for minimal latency, you might choose to use packets as soon as they arrive and maybe even treat out-of-order packets as missing, and just display a blockier video instead, but if the clients can tolerate a little more latency (maybe a tunable setting, like 50ms more than the best case) then it should in theory work better than current systems.

I've been mulling over some of these ideas myself in the past, but it's never been high enough on my TODO list to try anything out.
by coldtea | 2025-04-15 10:38:35+00:00
>Also why does their website have to look so damn ugly?

Because it was made by coders. Old school coders. Backend coders.

>I know that's not what really matters for a git server, but I just can't take such a project seriously. "Who knows what else they didn't really care about?" in the back of my head...

Yes, a nice looking website, that epitome of project maturity and quality /s

(as if there's a shortage of barely working vaporware FOSS projects with great looking websites, because their creators are more into the whole hussle culture / fancy launch page / web design than coding)
by constantcrying | 2025-04-15 10:39:04+00:00
Do you really believe that the same safety standards apply to all products?

I bought an Anker Battery bank, which got recalled for some safety issue. There is absolutely zero doubt in my mind that some random Chinese seller would not have bothered with any of that. Likely such a safety issue would have never come to light.

Battery production is in China anyways. Do you believe that all Chinese companies adhere to the same standards and that companies who are trying to get some kind of brand reputation in the west would still choose the complete bottom end of battery production?
by gioazzi | 2025-04-15 10:39:31+00:00
In our battle against AI-written content, we launched UnitText as an alternative to use AI to review text, instead of writing it. I got the idea from this lovely book "Writing for Developers"[1] that recommended some quality prompts to use a LLM as what could be considered a copy editor.

I initially liked to call it "unit tests for text", which inspired a prototype,[2] a blog post,[3] and then this product.

We believe everyone is getting really fed up of reading content only to immediately understand it was written by a robot. At the same time, we don't think language models are completely to blame, they are just a tool, and it's on us to use them properly.

The idea of UnitText is that before one starts writing they define a goal and audience for their content. It could be a blog post, but also an email... at some point we'd like to offer different templates for various types of content.

The human is the one doing the writing, and they can then ask the AI to "review" (or, "test") the content, to see whether the goal was met, the explanation is clear, something can be added or cut...

[1]: https://www.manning.com/books/writing-for-developers

[2]: https://github.com/sealambda/unit-text

[3]: https://www.sealambda.com/blog/this-post-passed-unit-tests/
by silverr | 2025-04-15 10:39:35+00:00
I’ve always been fascinated by Formula 1, and recently I challenged myself to build something I hadn’t seen done well on mobile: a live map of an F1 circuit that updates every second, showing the real-time position of all drivers.

At first, I had no idea where to start. The initial version of the app was just a static SVG of the track and a bunch of placeholder dots. But I quickly realized that turning this into something dynamic and precise was going to require a lot more work—both technically and creatively.

One of the hardest parts was figuring out how to map GPS or telemetry-like data (or simulated equivalents) to the actual layout of the track. Circuits aren’t perfect circles or squares—they’re highly irregular, and getting the math right to interpolate positions smoothly along the path took a lot of iteration.

Once I had the basic movement working, I ran into performance issues. Updating 20+ driver positions every second, animating them smoothly, and not killing the battery or CPU on an iPhone took careful optimization, especially when combined with UI features like zooming, rotating, or switching to other parts of the app.

From there, the app grew: I added race results, driver and team info, standings, and more. But the live circuit map remains the heart of it—a tiny simulation of the race, in your pocket.

I learned a lot building this, from low-level animation tricks to dealing with refresh rates and background tasks on iOS. If you’re curious, you can check it out here
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-04-15 10:45:14+00:00
It's important to distinguish between wealth and income. Like, I would say that a lot of HN readers are in the top decile of income in whatever country they live in, but far, far fewer are in the top decile of wealth.

Personally, I think that we should tax wealth more in general, and probably make the income tax a bit more progressive (I currently pay 52% which sucks, but if I had to pay a few pp more to get rid of homelessness and poverty in my country then I'd be ok with it).
by Zambyte | 2025-04-15 10:45:37+00:00
Cool ideas. Some other tools that may be useful are hour/minute difference calculator, in addition to the date difference calculator. Timezone conversation may also be good.

Some additional feedback I have is that scrolling on the site was choppy on my recent and fairly high powered android tablet. Certainly high powered enough to render a static page like the home page. Also the domain name age look up doesn't work for any domain I tried. It just returns a JSON parsing error.
by yzydserd | 2025-04-15 10:47:37+00:00
A star "lasts" about 10 billion years, so you'd expect about 1 in 10 billion stars to 'die' each year, but only a tiny proportion (the very largest) go supernova.

Numbers are huge. Even tiny ratios mean something like 10-100 stars go supernova every single second somewhere in the universe.

Sounds a lot? Only about 1 star per galaxy goes supernova per century. A lot of galaxies.

Mindblowing.
by giantg2 | 2025-04-15 10:48:08+00:00
"we tend to live pretty high up the economic value chain, which can abstract us a bit from participation in the more grassroots co-operative aspect of society."

I really don't see this as being directly true. Most sorts of interactions where we would depend on others/strangers would happen outside of a job, just like all the examples you give. Maybe there's some truth to the stereotype that us IT guys are nerds and participate in fewer IRL group hobbies, which could make your statement indirectly true. However, there's still communities build around stuff like MMORPGs, FOSS, etc where people are from different backgrounds and regions. But then again, maybe I'm the odd one out as a middle class developer with everyone making more than me.
by beeforpork | 2025-04-15 10:48:10+00:00
OK, burning is happening right now, so mission accomplished, I guess? Are you sure people will learn from it? And who is the responsible person nearby in this reality?

> Children get told 100's of times they will burn their hand if they touch the stove. In the best case scenario they touch it once anyway, ...

That is not the best case. I never burned myself on a stove.

Also, this is not an individual Darwin problem like the stove example -- this has consequences for many bystanders who did know better, and many more bystanders who had no say in this.
by bamboozled | 2025-04-15 10:48:30+00:00
I have a friend who started a snowboard factory recently, in the USA, he was able to do this because of Chinese made CNC machines and presses that were half the price and had great support.

Now everything he needs from them to keep his factory going is going to be ridiculously more expensive, probably screwing over his business as well.

This factory wouldn't have got off the ground if it wasn't for Chinese made machines.
by inglor_cz | 2025-04-15 10:49:04+00:00
"Most American academia" !== "most educated people" (much less so if taken globally).

Many Americans would be seriously surprised by the balance of left and right at continental European universities. It is nowhere near as one-sided. And Asian universities are a completely different world.

Generalizing from the extremely lopsided ratios in academia of the Anglosphere to the global educated class is somewhat unreliable.
Show HN: I built a tool to organize Kindle and Kobo highlights (esp. sideloaded)
by ssutl | 2025-04-15 10:49:35+00:00
I read a lot on Kindle but wanted to move to Kobo to get away from Amazon. The problem: reviewing highlights, especially from sideloaded books, is slow and painful on both. So I built Clippings.store: a way to import, annotate, and review all your Kindle & Kobo highlights in one place. Would love feedback from fellow Ebook nerds.
by geob01 | 2025-04-15 10:50:13+00:00
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE

Location: EU, EEST Bucharest time zone

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies:

C++ 17, Python 3, SOLID, TDD, Linux, REST APIs, Docker, Git, Protocols, Flask, Django

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pnVituSV1qz0hFUMajTj38bi...

Email: (Check Résumé/CV)

About: Software engineer with expertise in C++, Python, and web technologies (14+ years of full time software development experience). Proven track record in designing, developing, and deploying scalable backend systems and embedded applications. Passionate about writing clean, efficient code. Language agnostic, open to multiple tech stacks.
by rfmc | 2025-04-15 10:50:26+00:00
It’s all about the VAT collection. I order frequently from Amazon Japan. They add the 25% VAT directly at the moment of purchase and deliver by DHL to Denmark without any extra handling fees. So it’s not about china, but about the company doing the paperwork required for the VAT collection instead of you doing.

And by you I mean PostNord in the case of Denmark
by ringeryless | 2025-04-15 10:50:44+00:00
Well, yes. CORPORATE BEHEMOTHS do not appreciate small players getting top search results, for one.

The article raises a valid point about indifference and lack of responsibility and authority being weaponized. "What are you gonna do about it?" When Microsoft Defender calls your site.com "bad" for no explicable reason .

We have no levers to affect megacorps, and they feel entitled to eat the entire internet and subvert its founding principles. What ARE we going to do about it?
by geob01 | 2025-04-15 10:51:17+00:00
Location: EU, EEST Bucharest time zone

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies:

C++ 17, Python 3, Linux, OOP, TDD, Jenkins

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pnVituSV1qz0hFUMajTj38bi...

Email: (Check Résumé/CV)

About: Software engineer with expertise in C++, Python (14+ years of full time software development experience). Proven track record in designing, developing, and deploying scalable backend systems and embedded applications. Passionate about writing clean, efficient code. Language agnostic, open to multiple tech stacks.
by delusional | 2025-04-15 10:52:08+00:00
> By working co-operatively and sharing among themselves the clients in one cluster can fill in missing packets from a different cluster far quicker than the requesting them from the originating host.

That's only true if you assume the nodes operate sequentially, which is not given. If the nodes operate independently from one another (which they would, being non-cooperating) they'd all get a response in ~100ms (computation and signaling time is negligible here), which is faster than they could get it cooperatively, even if we assume perfect cooperation (100ms for the first local node + 15ms from there). It's parallelism. Doing less work might seem theoretically nice, but if you have the capacity to do the same work twice simultaneously you avoid the synchronization.

Basically, it falls somewhere in my loose "tree based system" sketch. In this case the "trusted" nodes would be picked based on ping time clustering, but the basic sketch that you pick a subset of nodes to be your local nodes and then let that structure recursively play out is the same.

The problem you run into is latency. There's no good way to pick a global latency figure for the whole network, since it varies by how deep into the tree you are. As the tree grows deeper, you end up having to retune the delay. The only other option is to grow in width at which point you've just created a another linear growth problem, albeit with a lower slope.
by soco | 2025-04-15 10:53:05+00:00
The whole society functions on a set of agreements. Some get codified in laws, many not. And as soon as some of those rules, laws or habits, get constantly broken, it means the society has changed. Now what? Do you accept the new change, or do you try to change it again? Remember, you can't enact a new rule - if it's not agreed upon it will simply not be applied.
by EncomLab | 2025-04-15 10:53:22+00:00
We live in an ex-urban area of SW Ohio and after years of nearly zero outages, in the last two years we have had several 12+ hour outage events following pretty standard spring storms. We are experiencing a boom in new construction around us as farms are converting to new subdivisions, and have been told that electrical infrastructure is less stable while construction activities are occurring. All of the subdivisions have buried utilities - but they also all tie to a pole near the entrance, the poles all follow roads, and inevitably a car takes out a pole and entire neighborhoods go dark.