MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lamarcke | 2025-04-08 20:19:38+00:00
After my endeavours with various store APIs and trying to get all of them to fit with our constraints, i understand why GOG Galaxy is always broken

Most of their external APIs suck tbh. Steam and PSN were the best experience i had, and the PSN one is not even officially documented. Epic doesn't even let you use their user library endpoints if you are not a partner unfortunately...
by andirk | 2025-04-08 20:20:03+00:00
> “If the U.S. doesn’t get its debt under control, if deficits keep ballooning, America risks losing that position to digital assets like Bitcoin.”

Keyword "like". To me, means something other than USD and not necessarily Bitcoin.

> By 2030, mandatory government spending and debt service will consume all federal revenue, creating a permanent deficit.

Well, shit.
by jacobgkau | 2025-04-08 20:20:31+00:00
I still primarily use search engines like Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Google (in that order). I've started sometimes bothering to read the search engines' AI overviews instead of skipping them, although I almost always still click through to their sources for any particular statement.

I just tried ChatGPT and saw that you can ask it to search the web and also can see its sources now. I still remembered how it was last time I used it, where it specifically refused to link out to external sources (looks like they changed it around last November). That's a pretty good improvement for using it as search.
by simonw | 2025-04-08 20:20:42+00:00
None of the LLMs (not even Grok) are "continuously trained" on news. A lot of them can run searches for questions that aren't handled by their training data. Here's Grok's page explaining that: https://help.x.com/en/using-x/about-grok

> In responding to user queries, Grok has a unique feature that allows it to decide whether or not to search X public posts and conduct a real-time web search on the Internet. Grok’s access to real-time public X posts allows Grok to respond to user queries with up-to-date information and insights on a wide range of topics.
by bitwize | 2025-04-08 20:20:43+00:00
If I don't know something, I'm not gonna trust ChatGPT to get me the right answer. It may do so 90% of the time, and make shit up the other 10%. Google sucks compared to what it was (and DDG still sucks worse, which is why I still use Goog as a fallback), but I still know how to sift through the results to find something truly informative (if it's out there; some searches, like whether some product is a scam, have been SEO'd to oblivion by the scammers).

Oh, and a major reason why Google sucks now? AI enshittification. They basically jettisoned their finely tuned algorithm in favor of "just run it through the LLM sausage grinder".
by hansvm | 2025-04-08 20:20:55+00:00
A mathy construction like in the article is probably important for the full conjecture, but isn't this concrete case just an instance of the bin-covering problem? Your discrete items are the log of each prime factor (included according to its multiplicity), set the lower threshold to log(100k), and if you get any solution with 300k or more factors, you can redistribute the extra factors arbitrarily.
by handfuloflight | 2025-04-08 20:21:00+00:00
There seems to be a misunderstanding about industry terminology here.

"Product documentation" is a broad umbrella term encompassing various types of documentation across the entire product lifecycle [1]. This includes both internal-facing documentation (like feature requirements) and external-facing documentation.

Feature requirements are indeed a subset of product documentation. Industry resources clearly categorize "product features documentation" as part of the broader product documentation ecosystem [2]. Technical documentation frameworks consistently include requirements documents as core components of product documentation [3].

Product Requirements Documents (PRDs) are recognized as integral parts of the documentation ecosystem [4], serving as blueprints for implementation. The article uses "product documentation" correctly in this comprehensive sense, and the MECE framework example demonstrates precisely how feature requirements fit within established documentation practices.

The original author's usage aligns with standard industry terminology and understanding.

[1] https://indoc.pro/documentation-types/product-features-docum...

[2] https://indoc.pro/documentation-types/product-features-docum...

[3] https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/technical-documentation-in-so...

[4] https://www.productplan.com/glossary/product-requirements-do...
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-04-08 20:21:48+00:00
Often I remember having read an article or seen a website in ~2014 or something, and now I want to find a link to it so I can cite it. I use a search engine for this, typing in the gist of what I can remember, set a date range (more clicks than it should take), and that's how I get to it.

This can be very difficult, if there's a lot of semantic overlap with a more commonly-searched mainstream topic, or if the date-range-filtering is unreliable.

Sometimes I'll look for a recipe for banana bread or something, and searching "banana bread recipe" will get me to something acceptable. Then I just have to scroll down through 10 paragraphs of SEO exposition about how much everyone loves homemade banana bread.

Searching for suppliers for products that I want to buy is, ironically, extremely difficult.

I don't trust LLMs for any kind of factual information retrieval yet.
by paulpauper | 2025-04-08 20:22:05+00:00
This article gets things wrong and overcomplicates other things.

he confuses the characteristic equation for the generating function. This : T(z) = z + zT + zT^2 + zT^3 is the characteristic equation.

There is no simple generating function ,as it's not possible to easily invert a cubic closed in form.

Successive derivatives of the generating function are taken to find the coefficients of the infinite series that encodes the sought values. It's hard enough explaining this with a quadratic; a cubic so much more involved.

This so far beyond the scope of a blog post. You need to spend at least a few weeks working on this or take some college courses.
by 0x0203 | 2025-04-08 20:23:11+00:00
Not listed is the red-bellied woodpecker. I've got one of them that drums on my gutters just outside my home office window every day. Multiple times a day. Fast, evenly spaced drumming with no variation or fall-off. Lasts 1-3 seconds. Maybe not quite as fast as the flicker, but close.

I thought he was putting holes in my house for a while until I figured out what he was doing. I have a lot of flickers around too, but don't hear them drumming very often.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-04-08 20:23:50+00:00
Like seneca, I also don’t know anyone who uses it. That’s interesting. I haven’t used it for around 2 years.

I wonder who uses it when I see their reports, because I don’t know them. I probably have a weird group of friends. I’m sure if I asked, some of my coworkers use it.

My kids would love if we used it. Perhaps it’s big among younger people.
Ask HN: How will we integrate MCP servers in the future for all of our devtools?
by linktothenew | 2025-04-08 20:23:57+00:00
Just curious what everybody thinks about how we will use MCP servers in the future. The thing I am stuck on is the future of the integration pattern.

Right now we go into our MCP client of choice like Claude, Cursor, and Windsurf and we manually add the servers ourselves after we done a bit of research to make sure it isn't too sketchy.

I think this is fine but what if we are working with multiple devtools at once, are we are going have 20-30 MCP servers integrated or added to Cursor. Not the end of the world and I guess it mimics sort of the like the VS Code Extension pattern, but I am wondering if a platform is just going to own all the integrations and we just connected one integration that manages the others?

Additionally is the new status quo going to be every devtool or developer service going to have a MCP service for their docs, SDKs, and REST APIs, and there will be a new vendor(although this probably exists already) as a service that just generates MCP servers for companies from their existing stack? And will it be as simple as them having a doc page that says copy this server link or run this npm command with prompts?

Anyways curious what folks think, I definitely have some ideas around MCP but I am still learning!
by ergonaught | 2025-04-08 20:24:21+00:00
When Google's results are garbage I will sometimes ChatGPT or others. This is increasing, but that has more to do with Google producing ever worsening results than any desire to use LLMs to "search".

Google wants to show me products to buy, which I'm almost never searching for, or they're "being super helpful" by removing/modifying my search terms, or they demonstrate that the decision makers simply don't care (or understand) what search is intended to accomplish for the user (ex: ever-present notices that there "aren't many results" for my search).

Recently tried to find a singer and song title based on lyrics. Google wouldn't present either of those, despite giving it the exact lyrics. ChatGPT gave me nonsense until I complained that it was giving me worse results than Google, at which point it gave me the correct singer but the wrong song, and then the correct song after pointing out that it was wrong about that.

Still can't get Google to do it unless my search is for the singer's name and song title, which is a bit late to the party.
by andirk | 2025-04-08 20:24:50+00:00
> the world's most famous con artist is fully on board.

Correlation does not imply causation. That con artist is also big on semiconductors. His being on board BTC means it has the ability to enrich the ultra rich more which also does not imply that BTC is necessarily bad. But it does mean the sharks are coming for it, and they don't have the average person's best interest in mind and often the exact opposite.

> tying crypto to fiat

Biggest reason I have lost a lot of interest in bitcoin but I'm still very long on it.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-04-08 20:25:13+00:00
In the US, candidates to become physicians go through a 5-7 year residency which has low pay, dangerously long hours, and has a supervisor watching over them who can flunk them for failing to meet their standards. That's _after_ a normal bachelors degree and then medical school. Does that sound like something anyone would like to go through to become a software developer just to avoid technical interviews?
by pc86 | 2025-04-08 20:25:49+00:00
Isn't it better to 1.5x in 6 months on 40 million than 3x in 2 years on 160?

By definition focusing on things that don't grow your business because you have way too much money in the bank is going to be worse for your business than being forced to focus because you've only got a year of runway.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-08 20:26:08+00:00
Because AIs can be faster and more exhaustive than you'll ever be. It's really good at those needle in the haystack type searches that would take ages doing manually.

You don't want AIs reproducing information necessarily. But they are really great at interpreting your query, digging out the best links and references using a search engine and then coming up with an answer complete with links that back that up.

I'd suggest just giving perplexity a spin for a few days. Just go nuts with it; don't hold back. It's one of the better AI driven search tools I've seen.
by skydhash | 2025-04-08 20:26:16+00:00
I don't know the exact word for this case, but sometimes you want the surrounding information to what you're looking for. Often I skim documentations, books, articles,... not in search for a specific answer but to get the overview of what it discusses. I don't need a summary of a table of contents. But it's a very good tool for quickly locating some specific information. Something like

Language Implementation Patterns (the book) |> Analyzing Languages (the part) |> Tracking and Identifying Program Symbols (the chapter) |> Resolving Symbols (the section)

or

Unit Testing: Principles, Practices,and Patterns (the book) |> Making your tests work for you (the part) |> Mocks and test fragility (the chapter) |> The relationship between mocks and test fragility (the section) |> Intra-system vs. inter-system communications

or

Python 3.13.3 Documentation (docs.python.org) |> The Python Standard Library |> Text Processing Services |> string
by chubot | 2025-04-08 20:26:50+00:00
That’s hilarious, but at least Llama was trained on libgen, an archive of most books and publications by humanity, no? Except for the ones which were not digitized I guess

So there is probably a big pile of Reddit comments, twitter messages, and libgen and arxiv PDFs I imagine

So there is some shit, but also painstakingly encoded knowledge (ie writing), and yeah it is miraculous that LLMs are right as often as they are
by ameliaquining | 2025-04-08 20:27:35+00:00
There's a TeX package that, among many other features, detects rivers: https://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/CTAN/macros/latex/co...

The intent here is that the document author is informed that their text contains rivers, and responds by tweaking the wording until they land on something that doesn't have them.

Of course, for a browser engine this is a complete nonstarter; a useful feature for dealing with rivers would require not just detecting them but automatically removing them, without changing the text content. I'm not aware of any existing software that does this, but I've found one proposed list of exploratory directions that could make a decent starting point for anyone who wanted to build this: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/736578
by chgs | 2025-04-08 20:27:47+00:00
The sad thing is there are actual issues and there is a kernel of truth to the feeling that men are discriminated against in some cases (as of course are women - and let’s not go anywhere near transgender people) and life isn’t blind to gender - especially when it comes to custody decisions, but also in areas like justice and crime (are jail populations 50:50?), educational outcomes (boys do worse than girls), mental health (check suicide figures)

Sadly posters like this do so much damage to equality discourse that it’s unlikely to ever equalise until this vitriol is lost in the past like the prejudice to left handed people was.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-08 20:27:49+00:00
Might just be regional. An insanely high proportion of my rural neighbors are people who did 20 years in the military and started receiving benefits around age 40 and were able to use those benefits to supplement a homestead. How many private sector people drew a pension at 40 and then double dipped? I'm not damning them for it, it's not like many in the military didn't work hard for that money, but it's incredibly difficult for a working class 40 year old these days to fuck off into a rural area and buy a homestead with rural salaries without something functioning as a substitute to that backing it up.

In any case in my rural homestead region there are mainly three classes

1) .gov pensioners 2) successful professionals 3) inherited property

The key to government pensions here I think is that they get benefits early enough in life that they are young enough to build and live a homestead life. At age 65+ you might be able to maintain an established property but buying something affordable (read: rough or vacant land) out and getting it up and running would be pretty rough for most at that age.
by pc86 | 2025-04-08 20:28:15+00:00
Not only the "expectation" but lots of VCs have preference built in that guarantees them huge returns on basically any liquidity event. It's probably not as likely in a Series C like this but 2-3x preference is not unheard of. There are few investment vehicles where for every $1 you put in you're guaranteed to get the first $3 made back first.
by thewisenerd | 2025-04-08 20:28:26+00:00
so they didn't want to pay for AWS CloudWatch [1]; decided to roll their in-house network flow log collection; and had to re-implement attribution?

i wonder how many hundreds of thousands of dollars network flow logs cost them; obviously at some point it is going to be cheaper to re-implement monitoring in-house.

[1]: https://youtu.be/8C9xNVYbCVk?feature=shared&t=1685
by kenrose | 2025-04-08 20:29:02+00:00
You're not wrong to think Tailscale is primarily a software company, and yes, salaries are a big part of any software company's costs. But it's definitely more complex than just payroll.

A few other things:

1. Go-to-market costs

Even with Tailscale's amazing product-led growth, you eventually hit a ceiling. Scaling into enterprise means real sales and marketing spend—think field sales, events, paid acquisition, content, partnerships, etc. These aren't trivial line items.

2. Enterprise sales motion

Selling to large orgs is a different beast. Longer cycles, custom security reviews, procurement bureaucracy... it all requires dedicated teams. Those teams cost money and take time to ramp.

3. Product and infra

Though Tailscale uses a control-plane-only model (which helps with infra cost), there's still significant R&D investment. As the product footprint grows (ACLs, policy routing, audit logging, device management), you need more engineers, PMs, designers, QA, support. Growth adds complexity.

4. Strategic bets

Companies at this stage often use capital to fund moonshots (like rethinking what secure networking looks like when identity is the core primitive instead of IP addresses). I don't know how they're thinking about it, but it may mean building new standards on top of the duct-taped 1980s-era networking stack the modern Internet still runs on. It's not just product evolution, it's protocol-level reinvention. That kind of standardization and stewardship takes a lot of time and a lot of dollars.

$160M is a big number. But scaling a category-defining infrastructure company isn't cheap and it's about more than just paying engineers.
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-08 20:29:46+00:00
Almost always use search-augmented LLMs now, to infinitely better results. Whether I'm wondering about a movie or looking for information on a programming language feature, or even specifics about niche things, an LLM gets me there much quicker.

Earlier today I was trying to remember the name of the lizard someone tweeted about seeing in a variety store. Google search yielded nothing. Gemini immediately gave me precise details of what I was talking about, it linked to web resources about it.
by genewitch | 2025-04-08 20:31:17+00:00
i give less weight to your opinion than my own. I'm not sure how you misunderstood what i said about clip/blip, as well. I was replying to a comment about "populating the front end with the filename" - the first tokens are weighted higher in the resulting image than the later tokens. And therefore, if you prompt correctly, the filenames will be a very accurate description of the image. Especially danbooru style, you can just split on space and use them as tags, for all practical purposes.

I guess the "convenience" just happened to get ported over from "Auto1111", or it's a coincidence, or
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-04-08 20:31:49+00:00
> most problems receive little attention (e.g., to find solvable special cases) after being labeled NP-hard.

Since I know quite some people who exactly work on this kind of problem of finding special classes that can be solved in polynomial time, my impression is of course different.

But I think it can be said that if some NP-hard problem is very important in practice and there is no easy way to to get around this problem (i.e. it will also be practically relevant in, say, 15 years), the problem will for sure get a lot more attention.

This is also the reason why some NP-hard problems are much more researched than others.
by generalizations | 2025-04-08 20:32:21+00:00
Buddy I'm using factcheck.org [1]. But keep going with the intellectual condescension - long as you convince yourself that people who disagree are wrong and need help and idiots, you'll never have to leave your comfy little bubble. But you will become increasingly detached from reality.

[1] https://www.factcheck.org/2021/11/how-many-died-as-a-result-...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-08 20:32:34+00:00
> often seen the statistic where the US Government at point was almost entirely funded by tariffs

Most old societies were. It’s easy to tax at a limited number of ports. And we didn’t understand comparative advantgae because we didn’t need to; most societies were—most of the time—Malthusian/zero real growth. (You’d also go to war more often. Industrial warfare and nukes sort of birthed the modern trade war.)
by flysand7 | 2025-04-08 20:32:38+00:00
I absolutely love the font. Reminds me of an old encyclopedia I read as a kid. It had 10 chapters, each one discussing a specific theme, like history or physics, and the only thing I remember about it now is its design. Specifically the colors of the chapters. They were memorable. This font is quite similar in its aesthetics, in that I think that might be the only thing I'd remember if I was reading e.g. a book written with it.

Also representing prosody was an interesting idea. Never thought how much more information you could transmit through text by including pitch and loudness information. Not so useful for timing, I believe, because you mostly still speak at 1 syllable per time unit, but sometimes you do slow down.
by chasil | 2025-04-08 20:32:57+00:00
Well, the VAX was there before any of these, but I wouldn't call that a "personal machine."

I suppose the argument could be made that the 68000 was first, as both it and MIPS ended up in gaming consoles (Sega Genesis vs. Sony PS2 and Nintendo 64).

However, MIPS eventually scaled to 64-bit, was well-known and heavily exploited in supercomputing applications, and was used to produce the film Jurassic Park. The 68000 had a far dimmer future.

Yes, the x86 line did supplant them all, but only with AMD's help. Had Itanium been Intel's final answer, MIPS might be much stronger today.
by ameliaquining | 2025-04-08 20:33:19+00:00
text-wrap: pretty tells the browser to wrap the text so as to make it look pretty. But the CSS standard doesn't specify what exactly that means; it's up to each individual browser to decide what algorithm yields the prettiest results.

Chromium is the only browser engine whose stable channel currently supports text-wrap: pretty. In this post, WebKit is announcing not only that they've implemented it (though not yet in a stable channel), but that they've done so using an algorithm that's better than Chromium's. Their algorithm adjusts for various things that Chromium's currently does not.
by ctrust | 2025-04-08 20:33:20+00:00
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by api | 2025-04-08 20:34:27+00:00
You can't raise VC money and save it for a rainy day. If VCs wanted their money in a bank they'd just put it in a bank.

If you raise $100M you have to put $100M to work or you'll hear constant shit from your board over it.

If they raised $160M they're going to spend $160M on something. My guess would be a lot of enterprise features and product integrations.
by ryu2k2 | 2025-04-08 20:35:41+00:00
I built mal for videogames too over 10 years ago. A friend also did individually. And I know at least 5 other sites that are "mal, but videogames" or have similar features.

Imo the concept is a waste of time until there are APIs for each console/store to fetch user data and automate libraries. Most users don't bother and the few that do already have accounts spread on like 10 different sites for this kind of thing. Personally these days I just keep csv files of my collection and play history and turn them to HTML via a ssg.Turns out that I don't need anything more than this.

But good luck!