MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by samuelklam | 2025-04-09 16:40:31+00:00
PermitFlow (YC W22) | Staff, Fullstack & Frontend Software Engineers | New York, NY | ONSITE | Full-time | https://permitflow.com

PermitFlow’s mission is to streamline and simplify construction permitting in the $1.6 trillion United States construction market. Our software reduces time to permit, supporting permitting end-to-end including permit research, application preparation, submission, and monitoring.

We’ve raised a $31m Series A led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Initialized Capital, Y Combinator, Felicis Ventures, Altos Ventures, and the founders and executives from Zillow, PlanGrid, Thumbtack, Bluebeam, Uber, Procore, and more.

Permitting is a challenging yet interesting problem; thousands of municipalities across the United States have their own processes and requirements - many which are continually updating. Software, AI, and LLMs provide an exciting opportunity for us to reason at scale and distill a nuanced and localized permitting process into a standard and streamlined experience for our customers.

We're looking for customer-obsessed, ambitious, and hard-working teammates who are excited about solving a real-world problem with technology at its helm.

NYC Onsite Roles | apply at: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/permitflow?departmentId=d33195eb-89...

1. Staff Software Engineer - $200K-275K + equity

2. Fullstack Software Engineer - $125-240K + equity

3. Senior Frontend Engineer - $125K-240K + equity

https://permitflow.com/hiring
by addaon | 2025-04-09 16:40:39+00:00
Selling shoes that you purchase wholesale for $75 has costs that go beyond selling shoes that you purchase wholesale for $50. There's the cost of money to buy the inventory, the cost of holding the inventory (and insuring it), the cost of shrinkage, the risk of being unable to sell some of that inventory. Most of those costs scale with the wholesale cost of the product being sold, although not necessarily fully linearly. As a result, a top line $50 margin on a $75 product gains you less than a $50 margin on a $50 product -- in a world with cheap capital. If you're restricted to holding $N of inventory due to cost of capital, this becomes even worse -- not only are your bottom line margins going down as much as 15%, but you're able to do it on only two thirds as much inventory, which (depending on turnover rates, etc) can drive you even lower.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-04-09 16:41:00+00:00
Oh, I’m in a pretty sizable town right now, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

I live in a 2001 Dodge grand Caravan and only have portable solar panels, and you’re right, I don’t know if I should call myself homeless most of the time but I’m homeless in the conventional sense where I don’t have a fixed address where I can get mail.

Thanks for the thoughts about my future, but I just don’t think about it and that’s the best thing to do for everyone I feel.
by delusional | 2025-04-09 16:41:19+00:00
"More or less" is doing a lot of work there. School, at least where I am, still spends the first year getting children to memorize the order of the numbers from 1-20 and if there's an even or odd number of a thing on a picture.

Do you google if 5 is less than 6 or do you just memorize that?

If you believe that creativity is not based on a foundation of memorization and experience (which is just memorization) you need to reflect on the connection between those.
by adriand | 2025-04-09 16:41:31+00:00
> The primary architect of trumps tariff strategy in his first and second term is Peter Navarro.

He's also a complete and utter liar. I happened to come across him speaking on Fox News when he stated that "Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels". [1] As a Canadian and as someone who isn't living in some bizarre alternate reality, I can assure you that Canada has not been taken over by cartels. The claim is insane. The fact that his interviewer did not challenge him on this insanity is unsurprising yet also insane.

I bring this up first because it made me angry, but secondly because I think it's relevant to this discussion: of course things are going to turn out badly when the architects of policy are either liars, are living in an alternate reality, or both.

1: https://www.mediaite.com/tv/trump-adviser-insists-canada-has...
by adrian_b | 2025-04-09 16:41:37+00:00
On Gentoo, it is also simple to install a completely new system in a chroot environment, even if it is intended for a computer with a different, but compatible architecture.

This is frequently very convenient if you want to install Gentoo by compiling everything from sources on a cheap and small computer, e.g. one with some Intel Atom CPU.

Instead of compiling anything on the resource-constrained computer, you install a fresh Gentoo system for it, in a chroot environment on a fast desktop computer, which supports a superset of the ISA of the small computer, so you can still execute the programs intended for the target computer.

Then you just copy the installation result over the SSD/HDD of the destination computer. If you have many identical computers, you can copy the installed Gentoo over all of them without any problems, removing the need for multiple installations.

If desired, you can keep the chroot environment with the installation result and perform any later updates on it. Then you synchronize the updated Gentoo from the chroot with the one or more target computers.
by cowpig | 2025-04-09 16:41:41+00:00
> US is still sanctioning Russia, meaning there's zero trade between US and Russia. It's illegal for US people and companies to buy from Russia.

Quoting the Trump administration:

U.S. goods exports to Russia in 2024 were $526.1 million, down 12.3 percent ($73.5 million) from 2023. U.S. goods imports from Russia totaled $3.0 billion in 2024, down 34.2 percent ($1.6 billion) from 2023. [0]

If the same formula were applied to Russia as every other country in the world, the Russian tariff would be above 40% since it's half of (3500-500)/3000 = 85.7%

[0]: https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/russia...
by nonethewiser | 2025-04-09 16:41:43+00:00
Somewhat agree.

I agree in principal - the process of problem solving is the important part.

However I think LLMs make you do more of this because of what you can offload to the LLM. You can offload the simpler things. But for the complex questions that cut across multiple domains and have a lot of ambiguity? You're still going to have to sit down and think about it. Maybe once you've broken it into sufficiently smaller problems you can use the LLM.

If we're worried about abstract problem solving skills that doesnt really go away with better tools. It goes away when we arent the ones using the tools.
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-09 16:41:47+00:00
As someone who is mildly skeptical of the current wave of LLM hype and thinks it's hitting a wall, I'm noting a lot of parallels between Cyc and ML/DNN systems' founding stories. We even have tales of reward hacking and other weird meta-shenaniganery. One wonders if some renegade at Cycorp ever trained a CycL to English LLM to fake another GOFAI demo with "real" AI.

As for free lunches, the one free lunch the neural network people got was training data. i.e. being able to scrape the entire WWW and build on that[0]. But that's also a free lunch Cycorp wanted, too! Look at all the various attempts at half-open subsets of Cyc. They were half-hearted attempts to solicit training data from randos, sure, but Cycorp still begged for the free lunch anyway.

But I think the big indictment of AI - both old-fashioned and neural network driven - is that they're chasing this nigh-impossible dream of effectively replicating and replacing a person. I still see the same pattern, in both eras, of toy models working well, narrow problem solvers being effective, but then people trying to scale them up to ludicrous sizes by pumping them full of knowledge in an attempt to achieve generality. Even modern LLMs are only slightly more generalist in the sense that they don't immediately fall over and die when a question is phrased in a way that wasn't expected.

The "bitter lesson" of AI is that the only two things that work are search and learning. LLMs and Cyc both attempted to short-circuit this with massive data dumps - the proverbial "knowledge pump" that needed to be primed. Compression is a good learning substitute, so sure, you can "cheat the test" with big data. But, I mean... how many discoveries were made solely by someone mainlining Wikipedia articles like black tar heroin? At some point, you need a problem space to search, and your learning needs to be done online[1] based on the results of that search. Nobody has cracked that code yet.

Maybe the reason why general AI never took off is that there is no such thing as general knowledge. The biggest source of knowledge the AI community has provided to us is knowledge about how to make more AI.

[0] Whether or not this was legal is a different question.

[1] Specifically, while LLMs think analogously to humans (because that's an easily compressible representation) they do not learn analogously to them.
by yapyap | 2025-04-09 16:41:48+00:00
> Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes

I’m not sure if you’re just speaking on what you experience or because of this post but the OP is a clothing guy so it makes sense he will look at it from a clothing (including shoes) perspective.

I agree though, if Americans truly do see Asia as just the cheap clothing factory continent they’re sorely mistaken. All you have to do is to just look at TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) and realize that if you were impacting just that company alone you would get a slap in the face as a country, all (~70%) the major chips come from there.

I am aware the US is developing a Semiconductor factory in their own country but it is not done yet and it will not go as tiny in nms as TSMC already is.
by matt-p | 2025-04-09 16:42:15+00:00
In theory, you're right, however it ignores some key points;

-Some of their costs are in fact linear based on the cost of the item.

Inventory cost doubles, perhaps now they have to take out higher interest debt to finance that. Things like insurance would also at least double.

Transaction fees (like card fees at about ~2%) and other parts (like returns risk) also increase linearly.

-Reduced sales due to increased prices.

If an item is less affordable people buy less of them. Theft will also go up. If trainers were $100 a week ago and are now $200 - you will sell less, they will be stolen more.

All in you actually do need more than the fixed $50 of margin if the wholesale cost of the item changes from $50 to $100 - it may actually be that $100 is the correct number, or even too little - sales volume would concern me the most, particularly on this 'luxury' item.
by duxup | 2025-04-09 16:42:17+00:00
Hired someone recently. I sat in on several remote interviews and a couple ... I was suspicious.

I didn't see any "AI" candidates, but I was suspicious about a few / if they were in fact who they said they were.

The part I worry about is that maybe I was just too suspicious and some poor guy was playing it straight and I gave a thumbs down due to my suspicions.
by kstrauser | 2025-04-09 16:42:18+00:00
Because you never tried this Local Brand Ketchup, which was ketchup in the same way that a Yugo was a car. It met the legal definition but no one was holding it up as the platonic ideal of its kind.

Whatever brand of ketchup you prefer, it’s better than this one was, unless you worked for that grocer and convinced yourself you liked it, in which case bless your heart.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-04-09 16:42:31+00:00
Sounds like your major gripe with mdoc(7) is that lack of better documentation for the format and a shortage of tools to generate it. I agree on this second item, most tools don't support adding cross-references / links.

At this point, markdown is 12 different standards, some of which even diverge on the most basic things like their treatment of newlines and how to wrap text. But even so, markdown provides mark-up for styles, with no semantic meaning. mdoc has macros to mark-up flags, optional flags, arguments, environment variables, files, etc. How to format this depends on the reader, and we can have much richer readers than we do right now. Simply converting man to markdown discards most of this information.

A new format isn't going to help solve this; what we want is better guides and tools for produce high quality mdoc pages.
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-04-09 16:42:52+00:00
If you have lazy devs, sometimes you need to convince (or coerce, or force) them to get them out of their comfort zone and try something new. But typically this is done because management wants more while giving nothing in return which is why no one tolerates these suggestions.

The other reason, which has been used to prevent devs from fixing bad code, is that making money is more important and sometimes that means moving away from costlier tools, or choosing tools because of specific business arrangements.
by acdha | 2025-04-09 16:43:12+00:00
Can you explain what you think is being twisted?

> “I said to them, was there any sign of love?” Trump said, recounting his conversation with released hostages.

> “Did the, Hamas, show any signs of like, help? Or liking you? Did they wink? Did they give you a piece of bread extra? Did they give you a meal on the side? … Like, you know, what happened in Germany?”

That sure seems like he’s saying the Jews’ captors showed mercy in ways which we know did not happen on anything like a wide scale.
by spitfire | 2025-04-09 16:43:21+00:00
According to Wikipedia “ JetBrains, initially called IntelliJ Software,[9][10] was founded in 2000 in Prague by three Russian software developers:”

My understanding is that they had the Czech business location with Russian developers so they had a clean public face.

I’d believe you if you insisted on Kiev based too, I don’t know anything first hand.
by Lendal | 2025-04-09 16:43:49+00:00
If they only sold healthy things it wouldn't change anything. The jobs are low wage. Local businesses employed more workers and paid more than DG or Walmart do, so they went out of business. Workers had no choice but to work at DG or WM for the lower wage. Regional wages cratered. Eventually the community economically just can't afford to exist anymore and also becomes dependent on government assistance. This story has been replayed across the entire country but it happens in big cities too.
by eterps | 2025-04-09 16:44:01+00:00
The system prompt can be found here:

https://github.com/herol3oy/austen/blob/main/src/server/rout...

It would be more interesting if the graph could be generated by sourcing an arbitrary epub file into a RAG and have it figure out character relations without reading the whole book.

I wouldn't be surprised if it all could be done with a script using aichat[1] and rendering the diagram using graphviz.

[1] https://github.com/sigoden/aichat
by ty6853 | 2025-04-09 16:44:05+00:00
Take this to the logic absurdity, you have a car you previously sold for $2 for $1 COGS. Tomorrow COGS is $1M for the car. Could you sell it for $1M+1? No you would lose your ass because your line of credit and investments would not be able to be supported by the returns, in fact if this is your only option you would probably stop making cars altogether and invest in another business and sell your assembly line, eventually enough car companies would go out of business until the supply curve met a high enough % profit to normalize with performance of other businesses.

Now this analogy has a LOT of problems but the point is it directly affects investors, even if the interpolations inbetween are imperfect.
by jy14898 | 2025-04-09 16:44:19+00:00
> You think the sliders ought to be a wider range?

Perhaps, or just no sliders (or something else). To illustrate, setting all the sliders to the min gets the correct order of magnitude, setting all the sliders to the middle gets the correct answer, and max is only off by 1 order.

Maybe the slider just picking the order of magnitude would make it more fun (1e-9 to 1e9 for example, 20 ish steps), not sure. Perhaps the rough range of magnitudes could be a hint provided if the user has no idea?
by gyudin | 2025-04-09 16:44:37+00:00
We should also acknowledge that most modern developers aren’t as skilled or knowledgeable as they believe. The majority don’t even meet the standard of being called true engineers.

Many lack experience with distributed, high-load systems, fail to write code that meets cybersecurity requirements, and have no background in system design. On top of that, most have never worked in environments where backend and frontend are properly separated.

I’ve seen so many posts like, "How is it even possible that landing a good junior job requires 1–3 years of experience? When after 3 years of coding blogs running on Wordpress you can already be a mid on a way to senior!"
by benmmurphy | 2025-04-09 16:44:38+00:00
from the point of maximising value in the economy its a game where in a single iteration co-operate is strictly better than any alternative. if the other player co-operates then that is the best outcome. if the other player defects then you are still better off co-operating than defecting.

but the problem is the real game being played is different because the political process ends up diverging from maximising value in the economy. the free trade argument is this is because the political process is captured by concentrated interests who benefit from tariffs to reduce competition. the deadweight loss caused by tariffs to the rest of society is not properly accounted for in the political process because the cost is diffused over many people. other people who accept the text book comparative advantage argument but reject free trade will claim to have a different optimisation function that is not purely maximising value in the economy. for example maybe they think its important to have a strong manufacturing base in order to make it easier to re-arm to fight a conflict.

but if we accept this situation then its difficult to say what the optimal strategy is because you don't really know the payoff matrices for the players. even what they tell you could be a lie and might be difficult to derive what their values are based on their actions.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-04-09 16:44:47+00:00
Some more feedback

> Fermi Game is a brain teaser that challenges your ability to make real-world (if outlandish) estimates using reasonable assumptions and mathematical reasoning.

What assumptions am I making? All the assumptions have all been made for me? What mathematical training am I doing? What's the point of the separate formulas if they are all present and to be used? How is this order of magnitude thinking if all of the orders of magnitude have been already been determined? It kinda feels like "Hey do you like chess? Come play checkers with chess pieces."

> You're right about all of these, they're mostly there because I just wanted to get out the door and get feedback.

I've got no problem if someone has put a bunch of effort in and made a game and wants feedback. But this feels like asking people to come up with your game for you. It feels you kinda you don't see it as a game either yet.

That said, it's always hard to ship things so congrats on shipping something. It's an interesting idea, but spend a bit of time figuring out the game. Good luck with it!
by dingnuts | 2025-04-09 16:44:53+00:00
> That's more or less accepted today.

Bullshit! You cannot do second order reasoning with a set of facts or concepts that you have to look up first.

Google Search made intuition and deep understanding and encyclopedic knowledge MORE important, not less.

People will think you are a wizard if you read documentation and bother to remember it, because they're still busy asking Google or ChatGPT while you're happily coding without pausing
by caust1c | 2025-04-09 16:45:08+00:00
This Agent2Agent Protocol (a "compliment" to Anthropic's Model Context Protocol?) seems to me to just be an attempt at a land grab in the line-protocol AI communication ecosystem.

If I'm reading it correctly, A2A is similar to MCP in that they both use JSONRPC but extends the capabilities for agents to be able to communicate with one another, potentially using separate backend models. MCP simply exposes applications data and workflows to a model itself and is not attempting to make agents communicate with one another.

The fact that A2A wasn't proposed as an extension to MCP seems disingenuous at best. To me, it looks like Google (among the other AI giants) is trying to create their own repository of agents, controlling the protocol, thereby enabling them to become the de-facto source for finding trusted agents.

Further, it comes off to me as a defense against the existential threat that AI poses to google's search and ads monopoly.

The problem is, as a consumer of AI, I don't want multiple agents communicating with one another. What I want is one model that communicates with non-agentic services. Making AI work well and understanding what it's doing is hard enough. You now want to pull in multiple models and companies into the picture? Talk about a risk management nightmare.

Shadow IT SaaS is already a massive problem for companies. Now imagine Shadow Agents doing work for your business using A2A to connect dozens of different unsupervised work for the company. No thanks!

For the inevitable defense of A2A "But it's open source and Apache licensed!". That's just bait. If you control the protocol, you control the ecosystem. See: Android, VSCode, Chromium, Java, Kubernetes, etc.

For me? I like my single-model audibility pulling in context using MCP. A2A just seems like an insane attempt at a land grab in the AI agent wars.
by lossolo | 2025-04-09 16:45:20+00:00
This. Anyone who doesn’t believe it — please go spend some time in Shenzhen, Shanghai, or similar cities, like I did. I just got back from China. I’ve been (also lived and worked) to the U.S. many times, and I can confidently say that China’s tier-1 cities are on another level when it comes to development and QoL (and not only T1 cities, I was in smaller regions in the north too). It’s also incredibly clean, super safe, and the infrastructure is breathtaking.
by maxwellg | 2025-04-09 16:45:33+00:00
I wasn't around for WSDL so please correct me if I am wrong - but the main weakness of WSDL was that no applications were able to take advantage of dynamic service and method discovery? A service could broadcast a WSDL but something needed to make use of it, and if you're writing an application you might as well just write against a known API instead of an unknown one. LLMs promise to be the unstructured glue that can take advantage of newly-discovered methods and APIs at runtime.
Show HN: I built a Severance-inspired game, let you experience life at Lumon
by allanren | 2025-04-09 16:45:41+00:00
After watching the tv show Severance, I was fascinated by the MDR department's number organization works in the show and thought about making a game out of it. So I designed a game that captures that same retro-futuristic aesthetic and eerie corporate vibe.

Now you can experience what it's like to be an MDR employee sorting through mysterious data, complete with that satisfying terminal interface and unsettling atmosphere from the show.

It's still in early development with more features planned, but I'd love to hear what you think.

Cheers!

P.S. No waffle parties... yet.