MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by smeej | 2025-04-29 11:37:41+00:00
I don't know what percentage of cars sold on the U.S. ever get transported across the Atlantic to the autobahn, but I'm willing to bet there are several zeroes between the decimal and the answer. I can't see how the existence of the autobahn an ocean away would actually be the answer for this question. Like, OK, fine, sell cars without limits on speed near the autobahn, but why the rest of the world?

I'm not even saying such cars shouldn't be available. I'm just asking why they're the default when so few people will ever actually care to drive over 100 mph.
by TrackerFF | 2025-04-29 11:37:51+00:00
Cool, it is rare to see that kind of transparency. I live in a country with both tariffs / import taxes on a bunch of items, and a general VAT. VAT (25%) is the only thing you ever see as a consumer, and other taxes (like for exmaple 10.7% on clothes imported to my country) are hidden away by the stores.

I've been checking out some of the aliexpress / temu / etc. subreddits, and US consumers are losing their marbles over the new import duties. Most stores have now rolled out those on check-out.
by greatgib | 2025-04-29 11:38:36+00:00
A tangential note, but after fighting for weeks with office365 and outlook to have basic features working for a small business, I would advise anyone sane of mind to avoid like hell using office365 or exchange for emails/calendar.

On the outside, things look great, looks like to be a good value for the price, but for real, everything is buggy, lot of basic features requires you to manage them with PowerShell commands, there are bugs for years and the support is clueless. For example don't mind using "shared mailbox" or "delegation" without fighting a labyrinth of unexpected behaviors.

For outlook app in itself, you have around 3.5 different versions of it fighting in duel. With the "new" version not necessarily the one to use to have all the paid features, that would be the "classic" version.

With the new or web version, you can't move more than around 100 mails at a time, or more crazy, you can't delete more than 10 contacts in one go...

What amaze me is that all the email/contact/agenda suite looks like semi abandoned when they should make so much money with all the subscription and when everyone is there showing off with billion dollar tech in AI when your basic features are still incomplete and buggies.
by ellisv | 2025-04-29 11:38:40+00:00
My family’s favorite experience has been that Costco usually doesn’t have the cheapest option but it has a good value option.

Our main example is something like pasta. Our local grocery stores all carry their own brand of dirt cheap pasta but it’s not as good as the more expensive pasta at Costco. Comparable pasta at the local grocer would be more expensive.

For items that are carried at both stores, Costco is usually no cheaper than the regular retail price and rarely much more expensive.
by ljosifov | 2025-04-29 11:38:50+00:00
Amusingly enough, people writing stuff like the above, to my mind come over as doing what they are accusing LLMs of doing. :-)

And in discussions "is it or isn't it, AI smarter than HI already", reminds me to "remember how 'smart' an average HI is, then remember half are to the left of that center". :-O
by patapong | 2025-04-29 11:39:42+00:00
I agree! People will become more productive, meaning fewer people can do more work. That said, I hope this does not result in the production of evermore things at the cost of nature!

I think we are at a crossroads as to what this will result in, however. In one case, the benefits will accrue at the top, with corporations earning greater profits while employing less people, leaving a large part of the population without jobs.

In the second case, we manage to capture these benefits, and confer them not just on the corporations but also the public good. People could work less, leaving more time for community enhancing activities. There are also many areas where society is currently underserved which could benefit from freed up workforce, such as schooling, elderly care, house building and maintenance etc etc.

I hope we can work toward the latter rather than the former.
by productme | 2025-04-29 11:40:10+00:00
ProductMe App: A Duolingo-like app for learning product management theory. It's for people who don’t want to spend thousands on PM bootcamps or courses, but still want quality learning material

It’s free to use with a reasonable daily limit (5 lessons). To access unlimited learning and additional utility features, it's ~$4.99/month

https://productme.org
by redeux | 2025-04-29 11:40:45+00:00
Once again Russia attacks the west using asymmetric warfare and unfortunately the west has been unable to respond with appropriate measures to dissuade Russia from these types of attacks. Obviously this is the type of attack a state would use prior to engaging in kinetic force, and while I don’t believe that’s the intent this time, it should be treated as such.

There are no pleasant options for Europe if they want to stop Russian aggression and attacks on their sovereignty. I believe it’s time for Europe (and I would say the US but we all know that’s not going to happen) to take meaningful action to permanently stop Russias capability or willingness to continue waging war against them. To not do so is to capitulate to Russia and slowly but surely lose their sovereignty and way of life.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-04-29 11:40:46+00:00
I hate the cheeto in chief, but I also really hate low quality Chinese shit. I'd love to see Timu and the myraid amounts of trash that Amazon sells finally die.

That said, China makes a lot of good quality things too and a whole lot of things that we have no hope of being competitive in producing.

Also, it's not like anything we bring back to the USA under the circumstances is going to be higher quality.

I was already buying a lot of clothes from brands that pride themselves on trying hard to do Made in America, like Schott Nyc. It'll be interesting to see how this impacts them or brands like Thursday.

I really want the impact of this to be to force Americans to buy fewer, higher quality things instead of bloat loads of cheap shit. I don't think that this will be the impact of the policy, unfortunately...

Also, given that Cheeto promised no more IRS, I shouldn't have to pay federal income taxes this year. Don't tread on me zion don.
by mapt | 2025-04-29 11:40:50+00:00
California contracting in particular is built not of penurious individual corruption, but of systemic corruption. The lowest bid must win, and nobody has the political capital to establish a bidding system that works, so dramatic systematic underbidding + cost overruns is the rule, and is expected by all parties except the naive public.

Couple that with the kind of "Build nothing if any single problem can be detacted", 'Cheems mindset' failures of liberalism, and high-pressure demands from a federal government whose legislators are eager to sabotage projects outside of purple states.

https://normielisation.substack.com/p/cheems-mindset

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcZxaFfxloo
by bmacho | 2025-04-29 11:40:54+00:00
> It's probable that small classes would help because the teacher could then be more of a private tutor. But with 20-30 size classes, only really motivated students who already study/watch media outside of school will excel. So it's kind of redundant in my opinion.

Yup. Motivated students learn the language in the classroom (+ self-study) just fine. Unmotivated students don't, but they are not motivated anyway.
by clarionbell | 2025-04-29 11:41:09+00:00
The world is deglobalizing. EU has been cutting off from Russia since the war started, and forcing medical industries to reshore since covid. At the same time it has begun drive to remilitarize itself. This means more heavy industry and all of it local.

There is brewing conflict across continents. India and Pakistan, Red sea region, South China sea. The list goes on and on. It's time to accept it. The world has moved on.
by thr0waw4yz | 2025-04-29 11:41:15+00:00
Currently it's photography for me.

I'm documenting graffiti a lot, but also taking pictures of other urban/nature/landscape scenes.

Took ten thousands of photos in the past years with a full-frame camera to the point that wielding the camera is second nature.

Also learnt editing raw files with a professional tool and trying to improve on it.

I hate taking photos with my smartphone now.
by Buxato | 2025-04-29 11:41:24+00:00
Thanks non-people-smart 10%, the "right" it's only trying to not close the remaining nuclear plants. I didn't hear anybody call to burn more coal (that will be stupid, specially in Spain). New modern nuclear plants are needed to have a more balanced energy pool, and not depend so much in natural gas. Anyway there is no confirmation yet on what happened, we will see.
by conartist6 | 2025-04-29 11:41:37+00:00
Let me know if you want to try to collaborate.

I'm working on the same idea, but I'm trying to take it several steps further by letting any syntactic programming language be rendered, edited, and run as no-code.

This is a response to my observation that the limit to the growth of these things is that they always have "meh" editors because the editor and the programming language are tightly coupled -- right now if there are ten visual programming languages there are ten different visual programming language editors.

This is probably the biggest reason these tools don't catch on professionally: you can't learn the editor tool and take that skill with you to a new language/project as you can with a text editor and syntactic languages. Fortunately this is the problem I have solved.
by junon | 2025-04-29 11:41:45+00:00
Reminds me of working on Chalk (JavaScript terminal coloring library).

My first foray into "beg bounties" was with Chalk. We received a report that inputs that contained malicious terminal escape sequences would be emitted to the terminal if passed through chalk.

But... yeah, of course they would. It's just a glorified string formatter, we don't care what you pass to us. They would have been emitted anyway if you just used console.log. There was literally nothing actionable for us to do. It wasn't our responsibility.

It wasn't just left there. The "researcher" persisted, threatening to file a CVE (which wreaks havoc on an OSS dependency such as Chalk that has millions of downloads a day) and kept swinging their proverbial member around with how they work for soandso esteemed research company (it wasn't) and ultimately demanded we compensate for their time, citing it as a responsibility and obligation.

I would have ignored it, but the threat of CVE (and the fact we'd have literally zero recourse against it) kept me on the hook.

Ever since then it's really watered down my view of the CVE/CVSS systems and has turned me a bit bitter toward "security researchers" in general, which isn't where I'd like to be.

With the rise of automatic ReDos detection the problem has only compounded over the last 4-5 years - things that might even technically fall under the "vulnerability" umbrella, but only if the code is so intentionally and egregiously misused, and in a manner that is dangerous with any library let alone ours, still earning a plea for monetary compensation.

It's silly, saddening and only discourages people to work on OSS stuff at a scale larger than hobbies, to be honest.

(Thank you for coming to my TED talk)

EDIT: I should mention that I have received legitimate reports by well-meaning researchers (no quotes) that are detailed and professional in nature I'm always proud to service them and see them through. They're increasingly rare, though. The downside is that doing OSS for free means I still cannot compensate for their time, even though I would love to.
Show HN: I made a tool to help dev find the best streamers to promote their game
by juliebelz | 2025-04-29 11:41:45+00:00
I've worked with many indie game studios (even been a C-level in one). I've seen many of them spending days searching for streamers adapted to their game niche.

There are thousands of great and creative streamers but most developers ended up only sending Steam Keys to the big names.

It often was a waste of time because they're swamped, charge high fees, and their broad audience is not even the studio's ideal players.

On the other hand, you have thousands of passionate micro-streamers that: - have hyper-engaged niche communities (higher conversion!). - mostly promote for free because they are eager for content to stream - often play very specific niches (cozy puzzle games for instance), so their audience is super-aligned with some game genres.

But these hidden gems are hidden for a reason: it’s highly time-consuming to find them. You have to browse Twitch for hours and hours. Twitch mostly shows the bigger streamers so you'll be lucky to find 5 streamers that enjoy playing your precise game niche and that have the audience size you are looking for.

As someone who's been in the video game trenches (and now a indiepreneur launching products), I felt there had to be a better way. That's why I built Seedbomb.

It helps game developers spot and connect with relevant Twitch streamers in minutes because they can instantly download a list of streamers who play games similar to theirs. Then they can filter by audience size, language, and more to match their marketing strategy. They get the email of each streamers so they can reach them in 1 clic.

Hopefully they'll start making their game viral. Sometimes, all it takes is 1 email to the right streamer!
by mattlondon | 2025-04-29 11:42:32+00:00
It looks like the writing is on the wall too for other menial and low-value creative jobs too - so basic music and videos - I fully expect that 90+% of video adverts will be entirely AI generated within the next year or two. see Google Veo - they have the tech already and they have YouTube already and they have the ad network already ...

Instead of uploading your video ad you already created, you'll just enter a description or two and the AI will auto-generate the video ads in thousands of iterations to target every demographic.

Google is going to run away with this with their ecosystem - OpenAI etc al can't compete with this sort of thing.
Ask HN: How does ChatGPT Shopping work?
by lukol | 2025-04-29 11:42:49+00:00
I'm interested in understanding the practical aspects rather than the technical details. Specifically:

- What merchants and platforms are supported? - Where does ChatGPT source its product information? - How are recommendations generated? - How does the checkout any payment process work?

Information on this topic seems limited, so any insights would be greatly appreciated!
by ta1243 | 2025-04-29 11:43:16+00:00
Tens of millions?

£1.2 BILLION before a single spade in the ground for the lower thames crossing

https://www.ft.com/content/917d4b7f-318e-46fe-ba44-664551ebc...

The planning document alone was 350,000 pages long, and cost about £1000 per page (£350m).

What western countries lack is someone empowered enough to just say "fuck it, make it happen", and be held accountable once it's built.
by 6510 | 2025-04-29 11:44:02+00:00
I think you got cause and effect mixed up. One would normally move on in life and tune down college life rather than shut it down entirely.

I've made a fb account very early on and a new one periodically. Each time I add few friends who have few friends. I post some content daily for two weeks, content these friends would always respond to. The feed had nothing they posted and my posts never got any engagement.

I didn't simply move on, they actively disqualified themselves.

Users are much better of making a whatsapp group. You don't have to leave the college group (you could ofc) but you can mute and archive it or add a few contacts from it (before leaving)
by thunderfork | 2025-04-29 11:44:08+00:00
"WordPress is fairly secure as long as you don't use any extensions and don't let arbitrary users sign up" is technically true, but it's no surprise that a lot of WordPress use cases collide with these two things.

For example, a WooCommerce site is both more sensitive than a blog and more likely to have sign-ups open and functionally necessary additional plugins running.

For better and for worse, WordPress is the ecosystem, not just the software itself.
by paulcole | 2025-04-29 11:44:26+00:00
How can this be true:

> Spam is any communication the recipient doesn't want. The definition is by the recipient, not the initiator.

If this is also true:

> The only requirements are that it be mass (some define that as > 1 target) and unsolicited.

Say I send an unsolicited email by typing it to a businessperson I want to sell my product to. They get my email and didn’t want to receive it. But it wasn’t mass and it was unsolicited.

Was it spam?
by msm_ | 2025-04-29 11:44:27+00:00
>Legally, saying that you took someone else's code as "source of information" would probably be seen as copyright infringement

Not necessarily. There are ways to work around that, for example white box reverse-engineering[1]. Also there are exemptions for some use cases, like interoperability. I'm sure a lawyer could figure something out, but it looks like they didn't consult any, and didn't follow a rigorous process.

[1] https://ospo.co/blog/modern-reverse-engineering/ - a random link I found by googling, but presents the idea well.
by throwawax295 | 2025-04-29 11:44:30+00:00
I agree. Nothing beats using a well known framework for speed.

I think we also need to consider how much experience one has with a language. Most can pickup a new language relatively quickly, but it's not the same as having real experience with it.

At work, someone just started a new micro service written in Rust because they were familiar with Rust and thought they would be able to do something "fast". They spent at least half the time struggling with even basic dependencies, how to deploy it, monitor it and make it deployable. If this was a startup, they would have burned a significant amount of time that could have been spent on PMF
by Der_Einzige | 2025-04-29 11:45:02+00:00
People who write like this article are responsible for the rise of 4chan, manosphere, etc.

You all made being conservative subversive. Repeating the tired trope of "tech bros = losers/incels/virgins" is exactly why men are going overwhelming conservative.

You want to see cringe? Go to your local antifa rally.
by Ukv | 2025-04-29 11:45:49+00:00
> (of course Wikipedia is probably "manufactured narrative", right?).

Wikipedia aims to represent the current consensus of reputable sources ("Verifiability, not truth"). I think that's often pragmatic - but it does make it a poor ground truth for specifically the case where someone is claiming that an outlet going against the grain was correct.

Seems to be somewhat alleviated here by reputable outlets having since reconsidered the story a couple years later. The Wikipedia article now mentions the authentication of the emails for instance, instead of only the fabrication/manipulation theory. You could always verify by yourself with the provided DKIM signatures, and that was discussed on the talk page at the time, but couldn't be added to the article because it was considered original research and only reported in security blogs/GitHub repos/unreputable sources.

There are still many material claims in the Wikipedia article which, while maybe verifiable, are highly misleading or untrue (at least, to my understanding of events). The claim that "the shop had no contact information for its owner" seems fairly directly contradicted by documents presented in the initial NYP article, for instance[0].

[0]: https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/10/Comput...
by cardanome | 2025-04-29 11:46:22+00:00
It is orders of magnitude easier to write an game engine for yourself than it is to create a monster like unity or unreal that needs to appeal to everyone and support every kind of game.

If we are talking 2d, it can be months to hack together a basic engine. 3d can be a bit harder but far from decades.

Thing is, if you designed your engine well and implemented great tooling, it should make it faster to implement the actual content of the game.

So upfront cost to be faster later. At least in theory. Obviously you might end up with subpar tooling that is worse than what a commercial could offers. But if you do something like an RPG with a lot of contend, every bit of extra efficiency in creating that content can help a lot.

Now, obviously from a purely commercial standpoint, not using an established engine makes nearly never sense. Super risky. Hard to hire outside talent. You are only justified when you have very, very specific needs that are hard to implement in a generic engine.

Also for us with an ADHD brain, hard things tend to be easier and easy things very hard, so yes the extra mental stimulation of writing an engine can help.
by Macha | 2025-04-29 11:46:54+00:00
It seems very simple cause and effect from a economic standpoint. Hype about AI is very high, so investors ask boards what they're doing about AI and using it, because they think AI will disrupt investments that don't.

The boards in turn instruct the CEOs to "adopt AI" and so you get all the normal processes about deciding what/if/when to do stuff get short circuited and so you get AI features that no one asked for or mandates for employees to adopt AI with very shallow KPIs to claim success.

The hype really distorts both sides of the conversation. You get the boosters for which any use of AI is a win, no matter how inconsequential the results, and then you get things like the original article which indicate it hasn't caused job losses yet as a sign that it hasn't changed anything. And while it might disprove the hype (especially the "AI is going to replace all mental labour in $SHORT_TIMEFRAME" hype), it really doesn't indicate that it won't replace anything.

Like when has a technology making the customer support experience worse for users or employees ever stopped it's rollout if there's cost savings to be had?

I think this why AI is so complicated for me. I've used it, and I can see some gains. But it's on the order of when IDE auto complete went from substring matches of single methods to when it could autocomplete chains of method calls based on types. The agent stuff fails on anything but the most bite size work when I've tried it.

Clearly some people seem it as something more transformative than that. There's other times when people have seen something transformative and it's just been so clearly nothing of value (NFTs for example) that it's easy to ignore the hype train. The reason AI is challenging for me is it's clearly not nothing, but also it's so far away from the vision that others have that it's not clear how realistic that is.
by PennRobotics | 2025-04-29 11:47:10+00:00
It doesn't help that the Play Store has no effective way to browse recently developed apps or to filter searches in any meaningful way whatsoever.

Couple that with the Indiana Jones boulder chase known as the Target API Level Requirement plus needing to log in every six months or risk getting your Google Dev account permanently deactivated and then needing to relaunch all of your apps under a new namespace.

A handful of apps I use come from small companies (5 to 40 employees) who should not have a dedicated mobile dev on their payroll. The apps do not pose a security risk (as they don't use internet/network features) and don't need to be updated as they are feature-complete. One such company just pulled all of their free apps and now has a contractor charge users for worse functioning redesigns.