MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by virgilp | 2025-04-07 12:56:29+00:00
There's a subtle but very important difference between making sure nobody is a "single point of failure" or bottleneck (heck, most great engineers will actively work with management to make sure they're not single points of failure!), and recognizing that engineers are not fungible resources and should not be treated as such.

I do agree that it's simpler for management to pretend that they are, and that's why great management is insanely rare. But great management, like great engineers, can make a huge difference in the success of a company / project.
Show HN: I build another WebRTC file transfer app with focus on UI
by vladnedelcu | 2025-04-07 12:56:31+00:00
I discovered WebRTC last summer and tried to build a bunch of stuff with it. I tried building an atomic swap protocol for BTC and MultiversX and everything was coded in Go so that it can run in the browser using WASM.

But there was one project that I left hanging for a while focused on just transferring files, usually nobody recommends transferring files through this protocol but its just a side project.

I checked out some projects that are implemented in a very professional way and I liked it so much. I wanted to do a similar project to send my band mates a lot of videos of our shows (more than 8 GB) and I did this project called Hyperspace and these dudes came with some ideas on how to improve the UI and experience overall.

So what's interesting about this project is that I tried to do it as simple as ever. I used Go + HTMX, I tried to remove everything that was unnecessary, I also added a cool 2FA for connecting to another peer.

The flow is very simple. You create a session which is purely made out of words. Once the other peer wants to connect the app generated a pin which should be shared back with the one that started the session, and boom you are instantly connected and can share ONLY ONE file at the time.

There are a some stuff that I want to improve later obviously, but I just want to put the project out there.
by flir | 2025-04-07 12:56:32+00:00
Gotcha, thanks. I always thought it was "first 3-5 years". Could be an example of word meaning diluting as it goes mainstream - hacker being the ur-example. ("Semantic bleaching" is the jargon term, apparently).

I was wondering when the first use of the term in its modern sense was, so I just glanced at Google Books and found this from 1805, which is just too good: "a startup was a coarse kind of half-boot with thick soles; [...] its use is now superseded by that of the modern spatterdash." [spats?]

By 1949 I've got this: "But startup businesses, and even mature businesses in some localities, may face financial constraints" -- Agriculture Information Bulletin, Issue 664, Page 113. I can't find anything pre-WWII.
by taylodl | 2025-04-07 12:56:55+00:00
I use AI as my editor. I provide the AI with my own prose and indicate the tone I'd like to use, then I take the result and put it back into my own voice. Sometimes I'll take that second edit and resubmit it to the AI and again, take the result and put it back into my own voice. To me, AI is an editor, a tool I use to help improve my writing. Like an actual editor, sometimes the AI comes back with that I successfully captured what I'm trying to say, and no changes need to be made.
by whatnow37373 | 2025-04-07 12:57:09+00:00
I realized the hype for composing $thing$s was overblown around 1993 when I learned I could just have "A Grand Unified $thing$" and almost immediately stopped using a dozen different $thing$s.

Then, a decade or two later, I realized the Grand Unified $thing$ was itself composed, but not by me so I had no control over it. Then I thought to myself, how great would it be if we decompose this Grand Unified $thing$ into many reusable $thing$s? That way we can be optimally productive by not being dependent on the idiosyncrasies of Grand Unified $thing$.

And so it was written and so it was done. We built many a $thing$ and the world was good, excellent even. But then one of the Ancients realized we could increase our productivity dramatically if we would compose our many $thing$s into one Grand Unified $thing$ so we wouldn't have to learn to use all these different $thing$s.

And so it was written and so it was done. Thus goes the story of the Ancients and their initiation of the most holy of cycles.
by seanhunter | 2025-04-07 12:57:21+00:00
I get the point you’re making but I’m gonna push back a little on this (as someone who has written a fair few ETL processes in their time). When are you ever ETLing a parquet file? You are always ETLing some raw format (css, json, raw text, structured text, etc) and writing into parquet files, never reading parquet files themselves. It seems a pretty bad practise to write your etl to just pick up whatever file in whatever format from a slop bucket you don’t control. I would always pull files in specific formats from such a common staging area and everything else would go into a random “unstructured data” dump where you just make a copy of it and record the metadata. I mean it’s a bad bug and I’m happy they’re fixing it, but it feels like you have to go out of your way to encounter it in practice.
by brookst | 2025-04-07 12:57:51+00:00
It is for sure a terrible design for a top secret communications system.

For a consumer platform, it makes some sense, and the prompt is supposed to be “hey you might want to do this”, and the user can decide if it makes sense. I’ve used an iphone since they came out, have seen this prompt like twice, and got it right both times. But I’m not a national security advisor or anything so maybe it’s more clear to me.
by threeseed | 2025-04-07 12:58:09+00:00
It's not even about being locked up in an ICE jail.

In Australia, we just had someone [1] who was detained for 8 hours with their phone/laptop searched all because they stopped over in Hong Kong rather than flying direct to the US.

It's that kind of irrational, unpredictable behaviour that makes travellers stay away and instead choose from one of the hundreds of other desirable travel destinations who want you to visit.

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/traveller/travel-news/an-australian-w...
by pornel | 2025-04-07 12:58:32+00:00
Even if you rewrite C code to the same "shape" as Rust, it won't become equally easy to statically analyze. The C language doesn't give the same guarantees, so it doesn't benefit from the same restrictions. For example, pointers don't guarantee their data is always initialized, `const` doesn't make the data behind it truly immutable, and there's no Send/Sync to describe thread safety. You have nothing to express that a piece of memory has a single owner. C's type system also loses information whenever you need to use void* instead of generics, unions with a DIY tag, and have pointers with a mixed provenance/ownership.

Rust checks that you adhere to the analyzable structure, and keeps you from accidentally breaking it at every step. In C you don't get any compiler help for that. I'm not aware of any tools that guide such structure for C beyond local tweaks. It'd be theoretically possible with enough non-standard C language extensions (add borrowing, exclusive ownership with move semantics), but that would get pretty close to rewriting the code in Rust, except using a bolted-on syntax, a dumb compiler that doesn't understand it, and none of the benefits of the rest of Rust's language, tooling, and ecosystem.
by strogonoff | 2025-04-07 12:58:39+00:00
In this case it’s top scientists and people who do the grunt work for them, presumably.

Regarding not letting employees socialize… I cannot speak to any presumed dysfunction in US government, but to clarify my point—employees spending every hour working at 100% efficiency on the exact thing that needs to be done right now is not indicative of a fat system (more like the opposite). Being able to spend a day pondering or exploring or maybe even indeed socializing is.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-07 12:58:42+00:00
If non-US citizens can be deported to El Salvador without due process for having a tattoo that an ICE officer deems to be "gang-related", you're immediately going to alienate most of the World's population from wanting to visit for any purpose.

The lack of due process and the threat of extradition on a whim is one that feels less likely to happen to me as a caucasian with US citizens as family, but the impact of it would be life-changingly poor. I'd rather just not travel to the US, for tourism, family or business reasons.

I'm not sure anything done in the last 3 months is much of a surprise to people who listened to his campaign talking points. It seems to me that people just thought he was a lying politician who lies, and this was just more lying. What's caught people out is that he's doing it all, and believes SCOTUS will never condemn or find illegal a thing he has done so due process is an abstract concept only, and others consider themselves immune for actions covered by Exec Order.

It's all quite sad and worrying.
by w-m | 2025-04-07 12:58:52+00:00
It matches my anecdotal experience here (from Germany). When talking about travelling to the US, previously the discussions of the drawbacks would circle around climate impact, expense or flight time. Recently, this has shifted to feeling unwelcome or unsafe. I talked to two different people last week who had gone to the US regularly in the past years, who have decided to not go this year (attending a wedding and the other for touristic reasons), due to the current political climate.
by johanvts | 2025-04-07 12:59:10+00:00
A general sense that the US is actively trying to hurt us in the rest of the world. Enabling Putin, stopping USAID programs, imposing tariffs etc. the list is long by now. Just makes you not feel like supporting it by buying US or going there and spending money. Secondly lots of stories about tourists being detained by ICE make it feel even almost scary to go.
by gus_massa | 2025-04-07 12:59:15+00:00
Can budesonide reduce the symptoms?

I don't claim it's a good idea, but probably adding a pill of Paracetamol and another of Ibuprofen to any quackery will reduce the temperature and ache in spite it will not improving other important statistics like mortality.

If whatever they are doing reduce the symptoms, it may confuse people and make it look like they are doing something useful.
by diggan | 2025-04-07 12:59:39+00:00
> The GDPR is seen as one of Europe's most complex pieces of legislation by the technology sector

Really? Now I'm no bureaucrat, merely an engineer, but GDPR was relatively easy to read through, even the official document (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...) is only 88 pages long, this cannot realistically be "one of Europe's most complex pieces of legislation". A lot of privacy-conscious SME basically had to do nothing to be compliant, telling me it seems to hit the mark of being not too complicated.

Most of the cases I've heard people complaining about GDPR being "complicated" or "impossible to implement correctly" have been from people/organizations who are breaking GDPR, and have no way of reaching compliance without removing things they ultimately earn money from, which in my mind is the exact purpose of GDPR. Most orgs don't seem to be introspective enough to understand why they are having such a hard time with GDPR though.

I hope that their proposed "simplification package" doesn't actually remove what makes GDPR useful and good, but since they seem to be making a bunch of bad-faith arguments for this simplification, I'm not super optimistic.
by zacfire | 2025-04-07 12:59:39+00:00
Chinese AI company Zhipu has released AutoGLM Rumination, a completely free AI Agent capable of autonomous web browsing and task completion. Unlike OpenAI's $200/month Deep Research or invite-only alternatives like Manus, it's available immediately without restrictions. The Agent combines reasoning capabilities with browser automation, allowing it to access platforms like social media and content sites that don't offer open APIs. Zhipu plans to open-source the entire technology stack on April 14th. My analysis looks at how it performs in real-world testing, examines the business strategy behind offering such capabilities for free, and discusses what this means for the evolving AI Agent landscape.
by ghusto | 2025-04-07 13:00:01+00:00
A few days ago I said how places like Bluesky only seem to contain posts about how terrible Twitter is, and no actual content of their own. Behold the first post I see:

> The administration is a perfect storm of dumb people who enjoy inflicting pain and are addicted to psychotic cruelty and quadrupling down. It ends in total ruin if you don't impeach him.

Second post:

> you, a rube: “i want my kid to grow up to be a doctor or an engineer or a teacher”

lutnick, a genius: “to make america great again your child will make iphones that they will not be able to afford”

Third (talking about some Trump post or something):

> Again, worth at the last considering the possibility that he’s a malevolent idiot who has no idea what he’s doing.

And so it goes on and on.

I'm all for a "non-toxic" social platform, but I have yet to see one. All the alternatives are mirror images of Twitter and co. — not in that they're not toxic, but that they're toxic but leaning in another direction politically. It's all the same, people calling other people stupid.
by perihelions | 2025-04-07 13:00:19+00:00
There were predecessors to pencils going back hundreds of years before that, with very similar capabilities. They used soft metals that streak when dragged across a surface, particularly silver and lead (Pb) (also the etymology of "pencil lead"); and sharpened these into narrow points. The modern pencil sort of iterated on those ideas. Soft graphite powder, in a wax binder, leaves a streak superior to metals; and encasing it in wood was the solution to the graphite composite's brittleness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverpoint

Here's a zoomable example by da Vinci (don't you agree they look awfully similar to pencil lines?)

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1860-0616-...
by bluGill | 2025-04-07 13:00:48+00:00
Unless tne is an abbreviation and so it should pass. Names are a common place where people make up weird spellings and so spell checkers are annoying. I have terrible spelling, and yet most of the time I run spellcheck it is tripping up on words that are spelled correct but not in the dictionary (in large part because I run spell check after each revision: words spelled wrong . Add to dictionary means that my dictionary is polluted with words that only apply to one document and would be wrong in the next)
by throw0101c | 2025-04-07 13:01:16+00:00
US-CA bookings have dropped 70%:

> Using forward booking data from a major GDS supplier, we've compared the total bookings held at this point last year with those recorded this week for the upcoming summer season. The decline is striking — bookings are down by over 70% in every month through to the end of September. This sharp drop suggests that travellers are holding off on making reservations, likely due to ongoing uncertainty surrounding the broader trade dispute.

* https://www.oag.com/blog/canada-us-airline-capacity-aviation...

* https://thehill.com/business/5218113-us-canada-airline-booki...
Show HN: RSS/Atom Feed Analyzer – test your feed for best practices
by Fileformat | 2025-04-07 13:01:17+00:00
While working on a side project with RSS & Atom feeds, I discovered that a lot of RSS/Atom feeds in the wild are (cough) sub-optimal.

The W3C has a very nice Feed Validation Service[1], but it only looks at the feed itself, not at the linked pages. And a lot of the problems that it finds are issues in the body content which can mask more serious errors.

So I write an RSS/Atom Feed Analyzer[2] that checks for things like headers, consistent links and backlinks.

One of the (potentially) more controvesial things it recommends is using the content type "text/xml". The normal recommendation causes the "Save As" dialog popup in some browsers, which is IMHO a horrible user experience.

Anyhow, give it a try and let me know what you think! RSS.Style has a list of high-profile bloggers' feeds[3] that you can try. And feel better about having problems in your own feed!

Source (TypeScript) is available[4] (MIT license). It is running as a function on Cloudflare Pages. It is just something that I hacked together and grew over time: don't be judgemental!

PS: And use https://www.rss.style/ to make you feeds look nicer in a browser!

[1] https://validator.w3.org/feed/

[2] https://www.rss.style/feed-analyzer.html

[3] https://www.rss.style/#examples

[4] https://github.com/fileformat/rss.style/blob/main/functions/...
by danmaz74 | 2025-04-07 13:01:18+00:00
I'm Italian, my wife is Russian and my sister lives with her family in California. I've always been pretty vocal online about my dislike for Putin, and since the war in Ukraine started, I became very worried about visiting Russia, just in case they needed some random Italian guy to extort concessions from the Italian government. So, I stopped going (we were planning a family trip right in the Summer of 2022).

For this Summer we wanted to visit my sister, so we bought tickets last December. I've always been pretty vocal about my dislike for Trump too. Well, for the first time, I'm worried that, when traveling to the US, some overzealous TSA agent could ask me to get access to my social media accounts, and that I could be refused entry, or even get sent to one of those wonderful privately owned jails; you know, for lèse-majesté. I reckon that the risk is too little to warrant us canceling our trip, but honestly, if I didn't have my tickets already, I would probably not have bought them now.

This is the craziest timeline.
by frognumber | 2025-04-07 13:01:39+00:00
This is on a long list of why camera companies are dying.

There is a long list of issues like this which have prevented ecosystems from forming around cameras, in the way they have around Android or iOS. It's like the proprietary phones predating the iPhone.

The irony is that phones are gradually passing dedicated cameras in increasing numbers of respects as cameras are now in a death spiral. Low volumes means less R&D. Less R&D and no ecosystem means low volumes. It also all translates into high prices.

The time to do this was about a decade ago. Apps, open formats, open USB protocols, open wifi / bluetooth protocols, and semi-open firmware (with a few proprietary blobs for color processing, likely) would have led things down a very different trajectory.

Sony is still selling cameras from 2018:

https://electronics.sony.com/imaging/interchangeable-lens-ca...

The price new fell by just 10% over the 7 years ($2000 -> $1800).

And in a lot of conditions, my Android phone takes better photos, by virtue of more advanced technology.

I have tens of thousands of dollars of camera equipment -- mostly more than a decade old -- and there just haven't been advancements warranting an upgrade. A modern camera will be maybe 30% better than a 2012-era one in terms of image quality, and otherwise, will have slightly more megapixels, somewhat better autofocus, and obviously be much smaller by the loss of a mirror. Video improved too.

The quote of the day is: "I wish it weren’t like this, but ultimately, it’s mostly fine. At least, for now. As long as the camera brands continue to work closely with companies like Adobe, we can likely trudge along just fine with this status quo."

No. We can't. The market has imploded. The roof is literally falling in and everyone says things are "fine."

Does any know how much volume there would be if cameras could be used in manufacturing processes for machine vision, on robots / drones, in self-driving cars, on building for security, as webcams for video conferencing, for remote education, and everywhere else imaging is exploding?

No. No one does, because they were never given the chance.
by ta1243 | 2025-04-07 13:01:42+00:00
The bigger debate I see is if it's worse for the US or worse for the rest of the world. The consensus is it's awful for everyone, apart from a few environmentalists that are looking forward to the reduce carbon emissions from a great depression.

I think the consensus is that if the rest of the world grows a spine it will emerge far stronger and the US a weaker state to before - akin to change the British Empire post ww2 compared with before, probably with the same glee they saw the British Empire falling.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-04-07 13:01:46+00:00
"accelerating block breaking because learning to hold a button for hundreds of consecutive steps "

This is fine, and does not impact the importance of figuring out the steps.

Anybody that has done any tuning on systems that run at different speeds, the adjusting for the speed difference is just engineering, and allows you to get on with more important/inventive work.
by pc86 | 2025-04-07 13:01:48+00:00
People use "startup" to mean "start up business" and not "business that is aiming for rapid, borderline-unsustainable growth and very likely requires hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of dollar to even start thinking about achieving it," which is what the actual definition is.

VCs aim for 1 out of 50 investments to return 100x what they put into it, and the rest of them to die quickly and stop taking their attention. A company kicking off 5% returns every year is counterintuitively worse than flaming out immediately.
by Asraelite | 2025-04-07 13:01:52+00:00
> This is the initialization vector (IV). The developers -- of course -- failed to do this and used a constant

Oh, at that point you're not even using the algorithm anymore. Why is this even possible in the library? I would've assumed that any sensible implementation would handle the initialization vector for you, and manually setting it up would require very verbose explicit configuration.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-07 13:03:10+00:00
>Boy, you have no idea.

Why? What did I miss?

>your comparisons between EU clampdown on disinformation and hate speech (however effective or justified it is) to communism propaganda and to persecutions against its opponents - it is pretty offensive

That's how boiling the frog works. Where do you think you'll end up if you give the government authority to decide what information is right or wrong for you to have access to?

What happens when Ursula v.d Leyen decides that her scandal involving the deleted email is "disinformation" and has a friendly judge call for it to be scrubbed from media and search engines?

You can't and should never blindly trust governments with them having your well being at heart. The main goal of a government is to stay in power, by any mean necessary in order to help those who finance their careers and campaigns.

If you can't see the slope between this speech police path and becoming an USSR-Light minus the gulags and executions, then maybe you're the offensive one.
by cbmask | 2025-04-07 13:03:19+00:00
The politicians cite competitiveness as the motivator for relaxing the GDPR. The real reason for the EU lagging behind the US in "big tech" is of course the lack of venture capital and the red tape in registering corporations.

The GDPR does not prevent US big tech from operating in the EU.

As it stands, this is just another attack on EU citizens' rights. It is also the least of the EU's current problems. De-industrialization due to high energy prices is, but of course von der Leyen will not mention that.