MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tomemme | 2025-04-14 12:27:58+00:00
Hi :) I'm tomemme a Disabled veteran and Info Sci grad, posting to share my newly Public portfolio and sub-domains badideas.tomemme.com and irc.tomemme.com .Take a look if you have time, would love some feedback. Good/bad I was a Fleet marine force corpsman I can take it :) general PW is gen123, super secure wink wink, DB wipes at 5pm everyday on Secure IRC
Show HN: Pintalk – Public, location-based chat rooms on a map
by cracadumi | 2025-04-14 12:28:00+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been thinking about Paul Graham's idea of Twitter as a communication protocol https://www.paulgraham.com/twitter.html and wanted to experiment with a different kind: location-based chat.

I built Pintalk: https://pintalk.onrender.com

It's a simple web app that lets anyone start or join public text conversations tied to specific latitude/longitude coordinates on a map.

How it works:

Visit the site – the map tries to center near you using browser geolocation or falls back to IP lookup.

Click anywhere on the map to open a chat panel for that location.

Type your first message and hit send – this creates a persistent pin and conversation room at that spot.

Click an existing pin to view the conversation and join in.

No login or registration required. You get assigned a temporary username like User_1234. Messages and pins currently stay indefinitely.

The goal was minimal time-to-value – just click and chat. It's an experiment in discovering real-time, hyperlocal public discussions. What happens when conversations are anchored to places?

Tech: Node.js/Express, WebSockets, MongoDB/Mongoose, and Leaflet.js on the frontend. Deployed on Render.

It's basic right now but functional. I'd love to get your feedback, bug reports, or thoughts on the concept.

Try it out: https://pintalk.onrender.com

Thanks!
by jkaplowitz | 2025-04-14 12:28:16+00:00
No complaints based on the amount of pay, maybe.

But for example, someone who is fired or laid off in a way that wouldn’t comply with local employment protections if the employment relationship were correctly classified might assert their misclassification claim so that they can also get compensation for their wrongful termination.

If that happens, then the company not only has to scramble to catch up on the overdue social contributions for the complaining employee and pay any applicable penalties, but also likely have to undergo an audit of their other workers in that country plus the same consequences for them.

There’s a reason why any US tech company that’s big enough to be a juicy financial target tends to do this correctly, and why companies like Deel, Remote.com, and their less tech-branded competitors (such as Velocity Global) are gaining popularity among people who want to do this correctly at smaller scales than those for which it makes sense to set up foreign subsidiaries.

When smaller companies take this particular shortcut, are risking severe financial consequences for the company if the authorities discover it, and in many cases this also comes with personal liability for some of the executives who are neglecting their legal duties.
by simonw | 2025-04-14 12:30:40+00:00
> I guess it's not a 100% effective, but it's something.

That's the problem: in the context of security, not being 100% effective is a failure.

If the ways we prevented XSS or SQL injection attacks against our apps only worked 99% of the time, those apps would all be hacked to pieces.

The job of an adversarial attacker is to find the 1% of attacks that work.

The instruction hierarchy is a great example: it doesn't solve the prompt injection class of attacks against LLM applications because it can still be subverted.
by hoherd | 2025-04-14 12:30:42+00:00
The future feels more and more sci-fi every day. This gave me Molly Millions vibes:

> “You know about that toxin shit, before?” he asked her, by the fountain. She shook her head. “You think it’s true?”

> “Maybe, maybe not. Works either way.”

> “You know any way I can find out?”

> “No,” she said, her right hand coming up to form the jive for silence. “That kind of kink’s too subtle to show up on a scan.” Then her fingers moved again: wait. “And you don’t care that much anyway. I saw you stroking that Sendai; man, it was pornographic.” She laughed.

> “So what’s he got on you? How’s he got the working girl kinked?”

> “Professional pride, baby, that’s all.” And again the sign for silence. “We’re gonna get some breakfast, okay? Eggs, real bacon. Probably kill you, you been eating that rebuilt Chiba krill for so long. Yeah, come on, we’ll tube in to Manhattan and get us a real breakfast.”

But then they go to a secure location where they can talk.
by torginus | 2025-04-14 12:30:58+00:00
I remember reading an article about this technique - it was used in the original Starcraft. The idea here, is that the object needs to be allocated anyway by someone else, so you get the linked list for free.

An object can also be part of multiple lists, each used by a different subsystem with its own concerns.

Deleting an item involves unlinking it from all lists (though that requires a doubly-linked list)

Edit: found the article

https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-...
Ask HN: Magic links are bad UX and make people's lives worse. Change my mind
by figassis | 2025-04-14 12:32:08+00:00
Click login, get sent an email link that you have to first wait to be delivered (sometimes takes a full minute, sometimes you have to resend the link).

Sometimes the link goes to spam, sometimes you have to search for it like a needle in a haystack of other notifications.

Sometimes you are not logged into your email on that device, or it's a small screen that makes it a pain.

Maybe it's my mother, and she now has to go find where she wrote down her email password because she still can't figure out that 1Password thing I setup for her. Also, she does not have 1Password on this computer (maybe it's a public library).

All this pain because a developer did not want to bother with authentication.

Many, many products are like this nowadays, but the worst offenders are developer tools and OSS projects, and looks like the justification is just that, they just wanted to scratch their itch of a specific feature, why bother with auth when there is google.

Am I crazy?
by freetime2 | 2025-04-14 12:32:33+00:00
> Well, it depends: there are many strong technical reasons on each side, so it’s better to keep an open mind and not come down on either side.

My heuristic in this case is just to go with whatever option is simpler, and gives us the most flexibility to course correct in the future if we turn out to be wrong.

Basically make it clear that in the absence of sufficient data to decide on the best course of action, we are being intentionally non-committal. Then outline what new information would be required for us to make a more informed decision one way or another (e.g. an actual customer asks for the hypothetical feature that we are discussing, or performance is insufficient, etc), and what actions and effort we would need to change course. When put like this, I find that everyone in the room usually ends up pretty satisfied with the plan.
by aeonik | 2025-04-14 12:33:00+00:00
You're right to flag the distinction between symbols and substance, but I think you're misapplying it here.

I'm not conflating symbolic systems with the physical substrate: they're obviously different levels of abstraction. What I am saying is that symbolic reasoning, language, creativity, and knowledge all emerge from the same underlying physical processes. They're not magic. They're not floating in some Platonic realm. They’re instantiated in real, measurable patterns, whether in neurons or silicon.

You can't have metaphysics without physics. And we have solid evidence, from neuroscience, from pharmacology, from evolutionary biology, that the brain's symbolic output is fundamentally a physical phenomenon. Injuries, chemicals, electrical stimulation, they all modulate “metaphysical” experience in completely physical ways.

Emergence matters here. Yes, atoms aren’t thoughts, but enough atoms arranged the right way do start behaving like a thinking system. That’s the whole point of complex systems theory, chaos theory, and even early AI work like Hofstadter and Dennett. I recommend "Gödel, Escher, Bach", or Melanie Mitchell's "Complexity: A Guided Tour", if you're curious.

If you're arguing there's something else, some kind of unphysical or non-emergent component to knowledge or creativity, I'd honestly love to hear more, because that's a bold claim. But waving away the physical substrate as irrelevant doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
by strcat | 2025-04-14 12:33:01+00:00
Kernel drivers for all of the main Android hardware platforms are fully open source. It's the userspace libraries/services which tend to have a lot of code that's not open source. At least for Snapdragon, that's shared with OEMs so can be modified and built by them. Snapdragon also shares major parts of the firmware sources with OEMs too. Some parts of the firmware are open source.
by coldtea | 2025-04-14 12:34:46+00:00
>- "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" - what exactly is a "conceptual equivalence"? You mean models?

No, a model is not an "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena". It's a simplified representation of a system.

"identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" could be called an analogy, an isomorphism, a unifying framework, etc.

>Unifying disparate observations into models is basic science. Not sure why it is highlighted here as some important insight.

Perhaps because the most important insights are the most basic ones - it's upon those eveything else sits upon.

>At this point, I gave up

If you can't bother beyond the abstract or 1st paragraph, or are perplexed that the abstract has a 10,000ft simplistic introduction into the basics, then it's better that you did :)
by Const-me | 2025-04-14 12:34:54+00:00
Some technical decisions aren’t that important.

A trivial example, I have very strong preference on using tabs instead of spaces for indentation. However, I don’t force people on my team to also use tabs because I realize that’s subjective, and doesn’t affect the product we’re developing. These white spaces are ignored by the compiler after all.

The tricky part is estimating consequences of these technical decisions. If you’re more or less confident in your estimations, and you believe the technical decision being made has severe consequences (not just to the product, in the long run development process is equally important), only then is the time to commit.
by jt2190 | 2025-04-14 12:35:08+00:00
Your description seems directionally correct, but I don’t understand this part:

> You are making an investment … just like any other investor, albeit with a lot less favorable terms. The best part is..guess what? If your circumstances change and you want to move on to a different job, you are now getting to choose between staying with the company until it has a liquidation event..or you have to effectively invest in it. Pretty shitty deal!

Why would you have to stay with the company after you vest? Is there some kind of clause that strips you of your share ownership or forces you to sell if you leave the company?
by mantas | 2025-04-14 12:35:31+00:00
So, one dude did not censor himself, during a cultural warm up era, ended up being kicked out to exile. Which was a fortunate outcome due to his previous fame. Hmmm, is that an example how people were free to do whatever in USSR? :) Is that more like an example how dangerous it was to not self-censor even to well known people with support (for some time) from the ruling elite?

Hearing parents and grandparents stories... And having talked to older artsy people who did grow up before the fall of USSR... Self-censorship was the default modus operandi. Sure, few didn't do it. Most of those paid the price either in gulags in earlier years or mental asylums later.
by lightingthedark | 2025-04-14 12:35:33+00:00
Technically that should be possible the other way by using a Node<T> so the type of the second list ends up being a Node<Node<T>> but I can see why an intrusive list would be preferred to that, and also the linked list API might prevent that pattern.

Usually if I have multiple lists holding something I have one that's the 'owner' and then the secondary data structures would have a non-owning pointer to it. Is that the case where the performance would be better with an intrusive list? My intuition would be that having multiple Node members would pollute the cache and not actually be a performance win but maybe it is still better off because it's all colocated? Seems like the kind of thing I'd have to benchmark to know since it would depend on the number of lists and the size of the actual data.
by Juliate | 2025-04-14 12:35:54+00:00
> Because every piece of generative AI looks identical, right? I mean, if the prompt had an impact, and two people using some ML-model would create different results based on what they choose to input, it sounds suspiciously like your "the same camera in two different hands", doesn't it?

I feel there's something interesting to discuss here but I'm still not convinced: a camera captures light from the physical reality. AI generators "capture" something from a model trained on existing artworks from other people (most likely not consenting). There's a superficial similarity in the push of the button, but that's it. Each does not operate the same way, on the same domain.

> You appear to be completely blind to the similarities [...] without being able to explain how the AI-tool is fundamentally different from the camera-tool, but obviously one negates all possibility to create art, while the other totally is art, because that's what people say!

There's a vocabulary issue here. Art is a practice, not a thing, not a product. You can create a picture, however you like it.

What makes a picture cool to look at is how it looks. And that is very subjective and contextual. No issue with that. What makes it _interesting_ and catchy is not so much what it _is_ but what it says, what it means, what it triggers, from the intent of the artist (if one gets to have the info about it), to its techniques[1] all the way to the inspiration it creates in the onlookers (which is also a function of a lot of things).

Anything machine-produced can be cool/beautiful/whatever.

Machines also reproduce/reprint original works. And while there are common qualities, it is not the same to look at a copy, at a reproduction of a thing, and to look at the original thing, that was made by the original artist. If you haven't experienced that, please try to (going to a museum for instance, or a gallery, anywhere).

[1] and there, using AI stuff as anything else as a _tool_ to practice/make art? of course. But to say that what this tool makes _is_ art or a work of art? Basic no for me.

> Needless to say that the people making those distinctions can't even tell apart a photo from an AI-generated picture.

1/ It does get better and better, but it still looks like AI-generated (as of April 2025).

2/ Human-wise/feeling-wise/intellectual-wise, anything that I know has been generated by AI will be a. interesting perhaps, for ideas, for randomness, b. but soulless. And that is connection, relief, soul (mine, and those of others) I am looking for in art (as a practice, an artefact or a performance); I'm pretty sure that's what connects us humans.

3/ Market-wise, I predict that any renowned artwork will lose of its value as soon as its origin being AI-made will be known; for the very reason 2/ above.
by 5555624 | 2025-04-14 12:36:09+00:00
In the past year, a number of times when I've arranged for a Lyft ride (Virginia, US), a notice has popped up that the driver has a camera and will be recording the ride for passenger and driver safety. Most of those rides have had cameras; but, not all of them. It's always prompted me to ask the driver about it.Some use them all the time, some said they only used them at night or on weekends.
Show HN: I built a browser extension to help you apply to jobs in seconds
by blaumaus | 2025-04-14 12:37:03+00:00
I've created Tap Apply - https://tapapply.net/, that will help you with your job search.

When I've been looking for jobs, it's extremely tiring applying similar job applications over and over again. Filling in my name, occupation, experience, education over and over and over again is not only tedious but also a massive waste of time that could be better spent preparing for interviews or improving skills.

Then there are also questions like "Why do you want to work in our company?" and so on. Like man you're hiring and I need a new job, that's why?

So I created Tap Apply - a simple browser extension that will reduce your job search headache in 2 ways: 1. You can forget about filling in same job forms over and over again. Just click on the autofill button and the extension will to the rest automatically.

2. Then, for cover letters or custom job application questions you can use Tap Apply's AI feature. With a click of a button it will generate a compelling answer to any question on the job form, taking into account the job description itself and your resume (Tap Apply profile).

This way, you can save hours applying to jobs or even apply to more if you wish :)

Would love to hear your feedback!
by msanlop | 2025-04-14 12:37:48+00:00
I'm reminded of Test Pilota Pirx, a polish movie, filmed in part in the US. There's some car chase scenes in american roads, and one scene where the main character gets a beer at a McDonald's[0] while looking around in a mall. I don't know much about the history of censorship but I was surprised as I imagined that would be out of line then

[0] https://youtu.be/20-dt24F6sM?t=1641
by geocar | 2025-04-14 12:37:49+00:00
> But let's be honest, what you're doing is a narrow specialisation - and that is what you're being paid for

That's your unfounded opinion man. You have no idea what I'm doing.

There's only two reasons to use a computer: One is because it is an entertaining way to spend your time and money, the other is because it's a way to make money.

> Why not let the application paint the pixels directly?

Partly because they do it badly, and partly because it's harder for other applications to read the pixels.

Think about how the clipboard has to work: The application just told the display to write some text there, but the clipboard has to ask again what text is there, wait for a response, and let the other program know. Meanwhile the terminal just knows, so it's faster.

> I'm not talking about learning Photoshop, I'm talking about quitting Photoshop. On a Mac, the "close" button is in the upper left corner of the window

And you learned that somehow. You can learn other things too.

> These extensions are non-portable

So what? They're portable to every terminal I use, every new terminal being made, and if you want, any terminal you use. The Mac isn't portable to anything except another mac.
by Zambyte | 2025-04-14 12:37:59+00:00
Ok, let's compare looping

for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) { printf("%d\n", i); }

vs

(loop for i from 0 below 5 do (format t "~A~%" i))

C has the same number of parentheses and also has curly brackets. C additionally has a bunch of semicolons and a comma not present in the Lisp version. The C version is also omitting the required function encapsulation to actually run this, while the Lisp version can be run as a top level expression.

The comparison really isn't even close. If you really want, you can always put the trailing )) on new lines like people do with the trailing }}}} for their nested if in a for in a method in a class in C-like languages. The Lisp community has just decided that putting single characters on new lines like that is needlessly noisy and emphasizes characters that are easily ignored by humans and instead manipulated using structural editing.
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-04-14 12:38:41+00:00
noodle-sieve from 1960's - an old USSR metal sieve with vitreous enamel coating and paintings on it. Love it like my grandma did, too.

Second oldest thing i own is a steamer for kirgizian dumplings (manty), with the price - 2 kopejk - embossed into on of the handles. Must be from the 70-80's.

And a few other old things, but none of them being older then me, except these two things :) love them and I hope, my kids will love them, too, soma day - if i find a wive whos is not pushed away by these things ahah
by pjc50 | 2025-04-14 12:38:47+00:00
> "If you don’t take a position, you’re tacitly endorsing the decision that eventually gets made"

This is important in a lot of situations, not just engineering.

Variants of cut-and-choose can be useful here. If you flip a coin to make the decision for you, do you object to its outcome? If so, you've picked the other one.

It's also worth having a discussing about responsibility, power, and accountability here. Conventional management structures are supposed to align this, but that rarely corresponds to reality.
by kmoszynski | 2025-04-14 12:38:47+00:00
It is a very relevant point. However, some barriers that stop people from coding are psychological, not practical. There will always be people who will be too afraid of IDEs, version control, and "screwing it up" with coding, even if it's done by prompting the AI. And there will always be people who will prefer to move boxes on the screen. But no code people now have a viable alternative.
by pc86 | 2025-04-14 12:39:09+00:00
Somewhere along the line "privately-owned company" morphed into "do what in any regulated industry would be considered fraud."

Multiple classes of stock for non-investors in a pre-IPO/private company should be illegal because there's no visibility or transparency. The other side of the table has no legal right to audits or reviewing the books so the opportunity for fraud is huge. Maybe have an out if you have verified third-party audits and cooking the books like you mention (which happens all the time) carries the same fraud penalties as if you did it for a public company.
by bux93 | 2025-04-14 12:39:32+00:00
I'd say that phrase means 'consideration' in some cases, and in any case something like 'reasonable expectation', which would enter into the 'meeting of minds' prerequisite of contract law.

Banana republics like almost all countries with Civil Law rather than Common Law? And also, you know, some US states and the UCC?

The doctrine that anything not explicit is meaningless in contract law is also referred to as 'the four corners' referring to where you look to interpret the contract; this is considerably relaxed in many jurisdictions (and some situations in the US) where there is considerable information asymmetry and/or power imbalance between parties. With employment contracts in particular; to be a good coder for instance, why would you need to know how dilution of options works? Only to avoid being mislead by your prospective employer?

Conversely, in Civil Law jurisdictions, you see that corporations (rather than employees/consumers and sometimes small businesses) are mostly held to the four corners of the contract as they are professional parties that have legal departments and should be presumed to do their due diligence.