MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pantalaimon | 2025-04-23 14:53:42+00:00
lol 100k at at startup?

I know that what the company has higher cost that the gross salary, but e.g. the EXIST founder's stipend will pay you 2500€/month if you have a university degree (30k/year), the rates at privately funded companies aren't much higher.

https://exist.de/programm/exist-gruendungsstipendium/
by Cieric | 2025-04-23 14:53:53+00:00
I actually set up something close to this myself, but purely selfhosted. I never really wrote any posts though because I wanted to figure out a system for interactivity like some other blogs have done. The one that always sticks out in my mind is the "Let's remove Quaternions from every 3D Engine" post [1], I never really cared for the video aspect of it, but all the little examples to try and give a better 3d perspective of what's going on is the thing I've always wanted a good system for.

[1] https://marctenbosch.com/quaternions/
by michaelulin | 2025-04-23 14:54:22+00:00
Hi HN, author here.

I wrote this post after experimenting a lot with AI coding tools. While code generation is helpful, I found a potentially more interesting pattern emerging: actually replacing complex or brittle functions (think intricate parsers, rule engines) with direct, validated LLM calls.

This seems viable now mainly due to the massive drop in inference costs over the last couple of years. Tools like Instructor AI (which I use in the example) also help bridge the gap by enforcing structured output and handling validation/retries, making the LLM calls more reliable.

The post explores this "LLM as function" idea and includes a practical Python example replacing a brittle date parser with an LLM call using Instructor.

Curious to hear if others are exploring similar patterns, what challenges you've faced, or what tools/techniques you're using to add reliability to LLM outputs within your applications. Thoughts and feedback welcome!
by socalgal2 | 2025-04-23 14:54:35+00:00
I want the equivalent of a shops in the real world. One shop doesn't carry everything. Even Spotify doesn't carry everything. For one, Apple doesn't allow adult content apps. Steam does. I'm sure there's a market for adult games on iPhone as Steam's success there would seem to suggest. I don't think Apple should be required to sell adult games but I also don't think they should get to dictate that people can't use their phones for adult games. So, more stores would great.
by pmontra | 2025-04-23 14:55:05+00:00
If I were Putin I'd attack some very minor NATO state to check if NATO will really send soldiers to defend it. Example: is really somebody willing to die for Estonia? (Sorry HNers from Estonia, but you are just in the worst possible place of all of NATO.) If not, NATO will crumble into pieces. If yes, let's see who's sending soldiers and who won't, and how they will react to the first week of casualties. Keep going or fold?

Maybe before getting there, if I end up controlling the next parliament of Ukraine I'd take over Moldova, and before that let's teach a lesson to Armenia. That's to keep the army busy and not let soldiers back home where they could cause troubles or, god forbids, create a pacifist movement like after the Afghan war (the Russian one.)
by freyfogle | 2025-04-23 14:56:02+00:00
If you think that is a fair trade I would love the chance to talk with you and save you A LOT of money.

Our experience (10+ years of offering a geocoding service) is that many people (of course depending on exact needs and use case) are significantly over-spending and could be using open data to reduce costs by 80+%.

Happy to chat if interested
by almosthere | 2025-04-23 14:56:05+00:00
I'm conflicted about what to do about US housing. Apparently we have more empty houses than homeless people. I'm not sure why - what do you think God wants us to do about it?

Do we even care? I keep hearing from people that the only way to change the sentiment of people and bring us back together is some kind of major catastrophe or war. Can we get through the 4G issue without that?
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-23 14:56:17+00:00
If it's hard for you than it's hard for your customers and they have a reason to pay for your product.

After I left a job where I developed a neural search engine for patents (years before BERT) I talked with many of the vendors in the enterprise search and what I found was that few of them did systematic work to improve the relevance of their results [1] and few of them tried to sell their product based on the quality of the results.

What they all promoted was ease of integration with hundreds of data sources, security, privacy, scale, rapid sync, etc. Looking at the way these got sold, I'd say that all of that is the core work and the actual search engine is an afterthought.

[1] See https://trec.nist.gov/
by yesfitz | 2025-04-23 14:56:31+00:00
Hi @Pierewsa,

Consider submitting some non-promotional links in addition to what you currently have.

From the HN Guidelines[1]: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."

1:https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-23 14:56:53+00:00
`terraform refresh` (which is now `terraform apply -refresh-only`) is an exception to the rule. Terraform doesn't know what's going on in the outside world. If you write configuration to create a Security Group named "foobar", and do a `terraform plan`, it will say it's about to create "foobar". When you go to apply, it will error out, saying "foobar already exists".

If Terraform wasn't completely idiotic, it could have just checked if it existed in the planning stage. If Terraform was even mildly helpful, it would have suggested to the user at either plan or apply time that the security group already exists, and do you want to manage that with your code? But it doesn't do those things, because it's a completely dumb-ass design.

> I'm not aware of any configuration management tool that "guesstimates" when making changes. Thank God.

Many of them do. Ansible does, Puppet does, Terraform does. They have to, for the same reason as my filesystem example: it's often impossible to know that a resource is unique, because there aren't actually unique identifiers. My definition of "Guesstimation" is specifically "using the identifiers you have available to select an entry from a list of potential options with the closest match". Ansible does this all the time. Puppet and Terraform do this for every provider that doesn't have a totally unique identifier (there basically are no totally unique identifiers, as I pointed out in my filesystem example)
by Uzmanali | 2025-04-23 14:56:58+00:00
I'd pay for a "Digital Life Concierge" app.

Something that audits all my subscriptions, passwords, cloud accounts, and digital footprints. And flags forgotten paid services, broken data sharing, or security risks. Lets me clean up or close accounts with one click.

An app like this could be the Marie Kondo of the internet age. If it existed, I’d pay for it today.
by Turboblack | 2025-04-23 14:57:40+00:00
in fact, it doesn't work, any decent ophthalmologist (there aren't any) will say that these things are only needed to collect money from customers. the carrot myth isn't strong either. you can eat kilograms of carrots and poop yellow poop - your eyesight won't improve. only genetics decides. unfortunately. or fortunately. yes - your eyes get tired, but they get tired from the fact that you're looking at one point from one distance, and you need to work on your eye muscles, sometimes look into the distance, sometimes closer-farther, get distracted from the screen more often. there's another reason why your eyes get tired - you blink less when you sit at the computer, this is a proven fact. i know all these tricks because i've been working at computers since the time when they "put" a screen the size of pantyhose on monitors ))) and even put a cactus on the side so that it would supposedly absorb radioactive waves. all these tricks are complete nonsense. in fact, the eye gets tired because it looks at a static image from the same angle without blinking (almost always). if you play a game, usually 3D games, you look further-closer, because your eye thinks that the object is far away))). to preserve your vision, get distracted more often, and look out the window, even if you have a bad view outside the window, your eyes will rest from the change of work. the eye muscles must contract-expand so that the diaphragm works well. have you seen the eyes of computer scientists up close? they usually have a wide diaphragm, as if they took something in, in fact it is because the eyes are so tired that they forget to contract the diaphragm, that's all the math.
by ingav | 2025-04-23 14:58:28+00:00
What I meant by "fully-owned" is really about owning the content and the workflow: everything lives locally in plain text, versioned in Git, and built with open tools. I can move it to any host without being locked into a platform or losing anything.

You're right that hosting on GitHub and Cloudflare isn't infrastructure ownership. I should’ve been more precise with the wording.
by palmotea | 2025-04-23 14:59:22+00:00
> Yep, move it into an independent non-profit foundation and have the government fund its development through taxes as a public good software that benefits everyone. The idea makes sense, which is why it'll never happen.

Or turn it into a tightly regulated natural monopoly, a la a public utility.

But I totally agree with you: some things should just be state-owned. We should put our energies into identifying those things and addressing any legitimate concerns (e.g. spying via requiring open source and reproducible builds) instead of trying to free market all the things.
by mrborgen | 2025-04-23 14:59:36+00:00
Would love to see tscircuit tutorials on Scrimba! It’s easy to record — just talk over the code. I demo it in this scrim from around 1:40. https://scrimba.com/s0kmcarts1

The preview is rendered live, not video. So with heavy projects (e.g. lots of JS animations), the recording can get large due to the detailed DOM stream.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-23 14:59:54+00:00
RSS isn't as ubiquitous as it used to be, but it's still very common. It's pretty much the only way that I keep up with websites I care about, and there are very few of those that don't offer an RSS feed.

They don't always advertise the feed, though, and since browsers stopped being RSS-aware, I've taken to looking at the page source for a new site to find if there's an RSS feed mentioned in the metadata. Very often there is.

> (1) Paywalls and content monetization

You absolutely can provide RSS feeds that require a login, so paywalls and such are a supported use case.

To answer your direct question, I do provide RSS feeds for my sites, but all of my sites now require a login.
by dragontamer | 2025-04-23 15:00:11+00:00
> 60,000 seconds was the amount of time it was tested for,

Surely if they already have a test setup, then having a test last for 600,000 seconds isn't very hard?

Things that look linear for a short period end up being exponential over longer periods. I don't think we can assume linear extrapolation here. There could be physics at play where exponential degeneration of the voltage occurs.

Its a good start of a test. But it seems weird in that a paper like this would have taken much more than ~1 week to write, so making a test last ~1 week for their calculations seems within the feasibility of this group. But its oddly missing data.
by gue5t | 2025-04-23 15:00:48+00:00
The Gruen transfer seems to make use of confusion or disorientation upon entering a new physical space. On the other hand, the phenomena described here with data search implementations (e.g. a feed) intentionally returning things that were not asked for does not rely on user confusion. The user already made a perfectly legible request by performing the query (e.g. opening the feed). Ignoring or misconstruing this request is gaslighting. The site tries to pretend that the user asked for something different than they actually did and to sneak this subterfuge past them. It's rampantly unethical. The purported justification I've heard is that fuzzy search can find results in cases when exact matching does not, but taking the control of fuzzy vs. strict search out of the user's hands is unethical because it is motivated by the opportunity to introduce mistakes and pervert intention.

Sites like Etsy implement this dark pattern in ways intentionally intended to make CSS-based blocking of injected sponsored products difficult to block. The arms race between user agents and corporate manipulation continues, and corporate web designers will use every tool available to subject users nonconsensually to their preferred experience. This is why I consider it a net loss for users to add functionality to the "web platform". The corporation is your enemy and they're well-funded.
by larusso | 2025-04-23 15:01:05+00:00
Didn‘t use it for quite some time now. I actually switched to nix packages for a while and was happy. Even worked in tandem with brew but I had a glibc issue on my shared Linux setup I could not resolve. I‘m still on nixos on Linux and tested nix on macOS again with flakes. I‘m not there yet to fully commit though.
by smcameron | 2025-04-23 15:03:45+00:00
Which is weird, because the stated purpose of MinC is: "MinC was written to help children at vocational education learn Linux without the hassle of virtualization." And it does this by running OpenBSD on Windows? That's really strange. Why not just run linux if the goal is to teach/learn linux? Perhaps the actual goal is not well stated, or I misinterpret what is really meant by those words.
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-23 15:04:12+00:00
> it doesn't excuse the "undefined behavior (uninitialized local variables)" that I still see all the time despite all the warning and error flags that you can feed to the compiler.

Yeah but we're talking about a 2004 game that was pretty rushed after 2002's Vice City (and I wouldn't be surprised if the bug in the ingestion code didn't exist there as well, just wasn't triggered due to the lack of planes except that darn RC Chopper and RC plane from that bombing run mission). Back then, the tooling to spot UB and code smell didn't even exist or, if at all, it was very rudimentary, or the warnings that did come up were just ignored because everything seemed to work.
by nohajc | 2025-04-23 15:04:51+00:00
Hi, the author here. Thanks for sharing! My solution is based on https://github.com/containers/libkrun (the microVM hypervisor for Linux and Mac) and NFS. I wanted to take advantage of virtualization instead of any macFUSE experimental drivers and just make it easy to use. I'm also keeping an eye on https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fskit which could be an interesting alternative in the future (once stabilized).
by troyvit | 2025-04-23 15:05:10+00:00
Seems like VRML would've worked, huh. It looks like they do have an export to .stl, and in fact it looks like their web viewer actually uses .stl with three.js to represent the model. So there's that.

Almost the rest of the comment is just random observations that have little to do with your observation.

I think they did it this way because they are going for a bit of a Markdown approach. HEF looks somewhat more human readable than VRML once you learn the syntax and they have a basic tutorial on their home page.

I fed one of their example pieces into their online viewer and it loaded instantly. I was hoping for a parts list from it but I don't see one. Aha, that's because it's embedded in the .hec itself.

Not knowing VRML I'm thinking I could build something with .hec, and I can't build my way out of a paper bag.
by MarkusWandel | 2025-04-23 15:05:11+00:00
An equally sad, but much less mentioned story is the Avro Jetliner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_C102_Jetliner

The sole surviving XB70, another super cool plane that was obsolete by the time it was ready, is a valued museum piece. These planes should have been.
by myrmidon | 2025-04-23 15:05:36+00:00
That is not so clear. Appstore revenue is ~ $100 billion/y, but Apple makes less than 30% from that.

So the question is: Would more convincing compliance have cost Apple more than single digit percentage decreases in Appstore sales? Comparing the F-Droid vs Playstore situation, this seems unlikely to me.
by falcor84 | 2025-04-23 15:05:39+00:00
This is extremely impressive, significantly beating the state of the art models from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic on both OSWorld and Android World, based on a relatively small open source model [0] that can be run locally. At this pace of progress, I now wouldn't bet against AIs hitting that human threshold of UI interaction before the end of the year.

[0] https://huggingface.co/ByteDance-Seed/UI-TARS-1.5-7B
by cf100clunk | 2025-04-23 15:05:41+00:00
My dad was an avionics and air-to-air weaponry guy in the RCAF in the 1950s-60s (you might understand my HN nick) and was training up on the Arrow's suite, which was being designed from scratch by RCA Canada in Montreal as Project ASTRA. It was a direct competitor to U.S. systems made primarily by Hughes, and the missiles were a direct competitor to those from what is now Raytheon. One of Avro's desperate options prior to cancellation was the idea of scrapping ASTRA for a 100% U.S. avionics and missile suite.
by JamieBohanna | 2025-04-23 15:05:46+00:00
I don’t even know what broke me — maybe the third “we’ll be in touch” with zero reply, maybe the recruiter who ghosted me after a final interview, or the one who just wanted me to drop names of managers I worked with.

But... I snapped.

I officially entered Petty Jobseeker Mode™.

I now keep a personal record of every recruiter who contacts me:

- Their name - Company - The role they pitched - Whether they followed up - And whether they ghosted, lied, or just wasted my time

It started out of spite.

Now it’s kind of like… my own little web app CRM for recruiter BS.

And guess what? It works. The same dude who ghosted me 8 months ago came back with a “hot new role.” I hit the log: “Nope. Ghosted me after 2nd round. Never again.”

I’m not even mad anymore. I’m just tracking patterns. Some recruiters are solid. Most are chaos wrapped in business casual.

After talking about this on Reddit a bit, it turns out that there's a huge need for this tool to go public.

So I've started building it, I've got a landing page created and I'm about 30-40% way through converting the web app to be suitable for a userbase.

I've had 130k views on my reddit posts, 1000+ upvotes and over 140 comments of people begging for it.

It's going to be 100% free because screw charging candidates that are looking for a job.

With a bit of luck, I'll have it completed by the middle of May.

Feel free to give some feedback or sign up to the waitlist, y'all.
by lynndotpy | 2025-04-23 15:05:56+00:00
I wonder how much of it can be blamed on the Vision Pro being nothing more than a big wobbly iPod Touch, instead of a real computer.

For me, a Vision Pro would have been fantastically useful if it was a little bit more like MacOS (or Android), and shipped with a native, real terminal that I could run things on. $3500 is suddenly a lot easier to swallow if I could think about it like 20 monitors to run terminals on.
by K0balt | 2025-04-23 15:06:12+00:00
If there is enough of this era software running around, it might make sense to make an esp32 laptop with a 7” screen, running a DOS emulator. Bonus if we could do it on a riscV variant. Set it up with a few hundred educational titles, Qbasic, WordPerfect or Ms Works, and an assortment of other programs including old DOS games (and a parental controls) with a launcher menu.

Give it a basic postscript printer driver and a microSD slot for future expansion, a gopher client and a mud client, maybe access to a couple other legacy protocols but no standard web access so it won’t work as a media consumption device or social media outside of things like (AI?) moderated MUDs or chatrooms. You’d want a python or JavaScript interpreter and a simple file manager. Also perhaps an interface to Wikipedia and a telnet type interface to a chatbot API for local or commercial models.

It runs a little against my grain, but perhaps to enable the network Stuff It would need a PPPOE connection to a gateway so that users could be registered and controlled to remove bad actors : tied to chip ID for a “secured area” that parents could opt in to ? iDK, online safety is a tough problem for children. Maybe there is a better solution than total AI surveillance and access controls, but how would you keep bad actors out? Or maybe just not offer any online functionality at all, except maybe a Bluetooth proximity based link to other machines to enable LAN parties?

Something like that would make a pretty great kids computer that could give them access to a complete k-6 education and much deeper computer skills than the current host of consumption oriented devices.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-23 15:06:14+00:00
I think this is pretty on point

The social fabric has been re-configured by the least socially adept people in society

I should know. I'm not terribly socially adept, I grew up on IRC channels and forums because I struggled to connect with people in person

But now everyone is on the internet, using social networks designed by people who aren't very social like me, or worse, people who only understand social interaction through a lens of "what can this person do for me"

We're in a really strange time.

I used to go online to get away from everyone and try to find other people like me

Now I have to go offline to in-person events hosting things that appeal to people like me, because everyone is online and there's no avoiding the crowd anymore
by ferguess_k | 2025-04-23 15:06:30+00:00
TBH I'd very much like to have an "HAL" that contains a world of knowledge (even if it never updates, or only gets updated once few years) at home.

I wonder whether the current technology is feasible for a replication of HAL.

- Very good chess player -> Check (And probably can be a top notch Go player too, although I don't play chess or go)

- Very good knowledge of history, science, technology, everything -> I'm not sure if it's possible. And I'd assume we need to send scans of all books, because for example it should know many fine details and educated guesses about a certain historical fact.

- Understand human language pretty well -> I actually think ChatGPT is good enough if I choose my wording clearly. But voice recognition might prose some challenges. It also depends on how good the microphone is.

- Have pretty good voice generation. I'd like to choose the voice too! -> I guess it's OK-ish nowadays? I listened to a few AI generated clips and they are pretty good, not sure how practical it is, though.

Anything else I missed? I know HAL also has its multi-decade objectives in mind, so this is different from the LLMs which don't seem to have a very long term of memory.
by socalgal2 | 2025-04-23 15:06:36+00:00
> If you want to sideload, just get an Android device. There is no monopoly here.

The Digital Markets Act is not about a user's right to sideload. It's about 100s of thousands of businesses' right to reach billions of users without Apple in the middle. That's why it's called the Digital Markets Act, not the Phone User Rights Act
by drew870mitchell | 2025-04-23 15:06:55+00:00
We (us, the people reading here, the demographic building the software and technology and automation) would do well as a community to spend more time on introspection about what ends it serves that tech, which was sometimes promoted as a great equalizer, gets built so often in practice only to make the walls of an aspiring monopolist's fortress more steep with no benefit to anybody else.