MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-08 13:49:55+00:00
A company pretending to be some fancy place that everyone wants to work that just isn't that great. The whole A's hire A's and B's hire C's but are pretending to be A's kind of thing. Let's just say that not every company is like Google in the early days (free 3 star restaurant food, clean t-shirts, slides in the office, and all the rest). Even Google is not like that anymore.

There's a lot of that going on where companies just don't realize that they aren't just filtering bad candidates out but scaring the best ones away because they approach them wrong. Hiring is as much a sales job as it is a filtering job. After you filter out the bad candidates, how do you make sure you don't lose the good candidates? How do you get them into your hiring funnel to begin with? The assumption that these candidates are going to drop on their knees and beg you to please employ them is just extremely misguided in many cases.

Whenever you hear companies complain that they can't find good people, that's what's going on. Mostly it boils down to the company not being that great and candidates flocking to more interesting opportunities.
by flkiwi | 2025-04-08 13:51:04+00:00
The problem with that is that people aren't asking for AI generated images in the style of Raven from Topeka with an Etsy shop. They're asking for Ghibli. So the people whose livelihoods are most directly impacted are (assuming they're not centuries dead) the famous, talented, and trend-making artists, not the lower tier making bad Precious Moments knockoffs. Society's problem is understanding that not wanting to pay for bad Precious Moments knockoffs is rational, while not wanting to pay, say, a Studio Ghibli for quality, professional creativity is insane.
by jermaustin1 | 2025-04-08 13:51:19+00:00
And I'll warn you a limited liability entity doesn't necessarily protect your personal assets either.

Undercapitalization is a big one that people don't often realize - going without insurance an not enough funds to cover a claim will usually pierce the veil.

Same goes with little things that typically don't matter to the owner of a one person company, like failing to keep board/member annual meeting minutes and sending them to the state body that requires them, and the biggest one for most small businesses - commingling funds and "alter ego" doctrine - the company is not you, the company's money is not yours.

There are a lot of ways that limited liabilities vanish - especially for smaller businesses like OP is describing.
by voidUpdate | 2025-04-08 13:51:26+00:00
My website currently shows up on bing (which has an opt-out tool, I just haven't bothered to use it), duckduckgo (which scrapes its results from other engines) and yahoo search (which apparently scrapes from bing). I can't check Kagi as I'm not paying for it, and I can't currently think of other search engines off the top of my head
by skyyler | 2025-04-08 13:51:38+00:00
>the current government today isn’t already suppressing speech and going after organizations that say stuff it disagree with.

No, actually, it is. Speech involving transgender individuals is being restricted.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/nhl-womens-history-junior-range...

References to trans people have even been scrubbed from NPS pages about Stonewall. It's heinous.
by instagib | 2025-04-08 13:52:18+00:00
The law for speaking negatively about the monarchy is pretty strict. I thought the sentence maximum was up to the king (aka Death penalty) as most matters are.

“The courts seem not to recognise the principle of granting defendants the benefit of the doubt. Judges have said accusers did not have to prove the factuality of the alleged lèse-majesté material but only claim it is defamatory. Pleading guilty, then asking for a royal pardon, is seen as the quickest route to freedom for any accused.”

Thai people won’t say a thing about the king digitally or in person for fear of the law.

How strict the laws are about the royals story: The 1880 queen and her daughter were drowning but no one could save them because looking at or touching the queen was forbidden by commoners. So they drowned while screaming for help.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9_in_Thailan...
by jareds | 2025-04-08 13:52:26+00:00
Do you have resources that provide info on companies using Linux on Z and the benefits of this verses commodity hardware? I used to work for a Mainframe ISV but the majority of our software ran on z/OS. I only saw customers using Linux on Z to begrudgingly run software that wouldn't efficiently run on z/OS, mainly Java applications when customers didn't want to deal with the complexity of specialty engines. I realize because our software focused on z/OS I had limited visibility into the full operations at our customers.
by palmotea | 2025-04-08 13:52:41+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parts:_The_Clonus_Horror

Fun fact: I had a substitute teacher in school who spent the whole period arguing with the class about how it was inevitable whole people would be cloned for organ transplants.

Ever since I found out about Never Let Me Go, I've been wondering where he got the idea.
by panstromek | 2025-04-08 13:52:53+00:00
Yea, in my opinion, hx-swap or turbolinks is a bit of an antipattern. Seems to me you get worst of both worlds:

- something that kinda looks like full reload

- but with all problems of client side routing

- and without preserving the DOM state like SPA would

- and you don't get the immediate response that is the main reason to build the SPA in the first place

In fact, it's often even slower than native navigation, because native navigation can start processing the stream during download and there's overhead with pre and post processing of the response in the boosted link version. Try to profile GitHub links to see what I'm talking about, opening a link in new tab can be 2x faster than clicking in the same tab.
by floppiplopp | 2025-04-08 13:54:15+00:00
I'm always thinking: actuators are close to their peak efficiency for some time now, i.e. electric motors can barely get any better. Same with with mechanical construction, materials and all the newtonian bits. These things are probably close to a theoretical optimum. Now these things weigh a certain amount for a set amount of power needed. It's all a bit like the rocket equation: the more power you need, the heavier the power supply, the bigger and heavier the motors have to be, and so on. So there's a hard limit of what an autonomous robot can do for how long. Now, the Boston Dynamics machines certainly are impressive in their promotional videos. But I've not found any reliable public information on how long their humanoid robots can operate autonomously without recharging. Minutes? Hours? Not that charging is that big of an issue, especially in a factory. But still, I'd be interested how long the machine can actually operate on its own. Maybe someone has information on that?
by ffsm8 | 2025-04-08 13:54:50+00:00
> Yes, and where do you suppose experienced developers come from?

Strictly speaking, you don't even need university courses to get experienced devs.

There will always be individuals that enjoy coding and do so without any formal teaching. People like that will always be more effective at their job once employed, simply because they'll have just that much more experience from trying various stuff.

Not to discredit University degrees of course - the best devs will have gotten formal teaching and code in their free time.
by modeless | 2025-04-08 13:55:11+00:00
Factory arms have next to no sensing. They blindly wave around on preprogrammed trajectories. They are much stronger than humanoids and they are bolted to the floor. They will crush you without noticing at all and continue about their work.

They use high gear ratios on their motors, which means they are extremely stiff and they have much more inertia in motion than you would expect even from their large size and weight. The rotor in the motor is rotating at tremendous speed and its kinetic energy goes with the speed squared. If the arm hits you it will keep going, and if it pins you against something you will not be able to push it even a centimeter.

Humanoids use lower gear ratios and, of course, are not bolted to the floor. I would much rather be bumped by a humanoid than a factory arm.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-08 13:55:15+00:00
Yes, you're describing the slight drop in demand I was referring to that could occur. And there are definitely other of companies who spend their marketing on things other than traditional advertising.

But most ads you see are for consumer products. Coca-Cola, cell phones, soap and shampoo, cars, fast-food brands, toys. These don't have anywhere to shift to. Dove soap isn't going to switch to reaching people by newsletter. They'll just pay the tax and pass on the costs to consumers. The vast bulk of advertising simply wouldn't change at all.

And like I said, even with a slight drop in demand, the main effect would be to lower advertising prices, not reduce advertising space.
by nirui | 2025-04-08 13:55:41+00:00
I'm thinking, maybe controversially, centralized national payment service like this should be government-run based on my experience with Alipay which is a digital payment service in China.

Due to it's commercial origin, Alipay is filled with unwanted ads and traps. Almost every time I made a payment with it, a pop up prompts me to enlist their Ant Financial LOAN service either now, or being prompted for the same question again 30 days later (yep, not Yes or No, but Now or Later). It's just fucking ridiculous, I don't need a LOAN for a $400 projector, and I don't need a LOAN for a $4 hair cut (Xi should probably do something about it, really).

I'm glad that at least people of Brazil don't have to suffer that kind of shit. At least their government-run program is better scrutinized and boring, thus more dependable, that's a good thing in my eyes.
by titzer | 2025-04-08 13:56:07+00:00
It's interesting to think of how bird intelligence is related to their perspective. Perching high in branches and taking to the skies allows them to see a large overview of the many activities of other life forms. They can manage to get relatively safe vantage points and just watch. The better they get at predicting what the low animals on the surface are doing, the more opportunities that they have to sneak in and sneak out safely to get a meal. Being stuck on the surface as a mammal means a more immediate, limited-scope, fight-or-flight reaction dominates daily activities, versus a game-board view of many interactions.

Bird intelligence makes a lot more sense in that context.
Show HN: An open-source Operator that can use computers
by theonlyt3 | 2025-04-08 13:56:08+00:00
Hi HF, I'm Terrell, and we built an open-source app that lets developers create their own Operator with a Next.js/React front-end and a flask back-end. The purpose is to simplify spinning up virtual desktops (Xfce, VNC) and automate desktop-based interactions using computer use models like OpenAI’s

There are already various cool tools out there that allow you to build your own operator-like experience but they usually only automate web browser actions, or aren’t open sourced/cost a lot to get started. Spongecake allows you to automate desktop-based interactions, and is fully open sourced which will help:

- Developers who want to build their own computer use / operator experience - Developers who want to automate workflows in desktop applications with poor / no APIs (super common in industries like supply chain and healthcare) - Developers who want to automate workflows for enterprises with on-prem environments with constraints like VPNs, firewalls, etc (common in healthcare, finance)

Technical details: This is technically a web browser pointed at a backend server that 1) manages starting and running pre-configured docker containers, and 2) manages all communication with the computer use agent. [1] is handled by spinning up docker containers with appropriate ports to open up a VNC viewer (so you can view the desktop), an API server (to execute agent commands on the container), a marionette port (to help with scraping web pages), and socat (to help with port forwarding). [2] is handled by sending screenshots from the VM to the computer use agent, and then sending the appropriate actions (e.g., scroll, click) from the agent to the VM using the API server.

Some interesting technical challenges we ran into:

- Concurrency - We wanted it to be possible to spin up N agents at once to complete tasks in parallel (especially given how slow computer use agents are today). This introduced a ton of complexity with managing ports since the likelihood went up significantly that a port would be taken. - Scrolling issues - The model is really bad at knowing when to scroll, and will scroll a ton on very long pages. To address this, we spun up a Marionette server, and exposed a tool to the agent which will extract a website’s DOM. This way, instead of scrolling all the way to a bottom of a page - the agent can extract the website’s DOM and use that information to find the correct answer

What’s next? We're working on adding support in the UI to run this locally on your own machine, and to spin up other desktop environments like Windows and MacOS. We’ve also started working on integrating Anthropic’s computer use model as well. There’s a ton of other features we can build but wanted to put this out there first and see what others would want

Would really appreciate your thoughts, and feedback. It's been a blast working on this so far and hope others think it’s as neat as I do :)

Here’s the link to clone: https://github.com/aditya-nadkarni/spongecake
by carlosjobim | 2025-04-08 13:56:09+00:00
Good to hear your words loyalty and patriotism, dear citizen! I will contact your local commissar and make sure he increases your social credit score by 5 points.

But we must also be realistic if we want to win against our eternal enemy Eastasia, and admit that Facebook coin would never be a monopoly because Visa, Mastercard and cash exist.
by guax | 2025-04-08 13:56:21+00:00
This is misleading and borderline false.

Most people don't have to do much during tax season nor keep any receipts. You download the declarations of your bank, receive one from your work. Fill them out on a free software and you're done in 15min.

Only gets somewhat complicated If you have lots of deductibles and you have to prove them, that's the same everywhere.
by nonethewiser | 2025-04-08 13:56:21+00:00
Who would the potential bad actor be here? Someone whose committing to your repo right? I guess the risk is that they add something malicious in the commit and you dont see it. Which is maybe obfuscated to some extent by this little known fact. But all the malicious code would be there in the open just like any other commit.

I mean, it seems like it would either take not noticing the malicious code which is always a threat vector. Or seeing it and mistakenly thinking "aha, but you arent actually running it!" and then letting it through based on that (which is of course ridiculous).

Or there is some other way to exploit this that I'm unaware of.

Edit: OK, maybe this is a little better. Re-write some malicious bash look alike somewhere outside the repo, install it from github actions (make it look like you are updating bash or something) and then its doing the bad thing.
by danielscrubs | 2025-04-08 13:57:05+00:00
Here is a randomized, triple blind study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34562208/

”had significant positive effects on brainwaves, salivary cortisol, and self-reported state anxiety compared to the placebo in response to an acute stress challenge. These changes are indicative of relaxation in the brain and suggest a calming response in a moderately stressed but otherwise healthy population”
by drsreeram123 | 2025-04-08 13:57:24+00:00
I was in a similar or worse state in 2017. I was on my OPT (International student). I was hugely successful in my job, then my company was taken private and I was laid off. Without job for a year and no visa either. Mounting debt too. Took a low level job that promised my h1b and slowly worked my was up through multiple legal (visa) issues, layoffs, abusive environments, and financial ruin. Now a senior director at a mid level company and going steady. Took me 6 years. Sometimes all you can do is just hold on to any strand of hay that you can get to stay afloat to survive, then you can crawl, sprint and thrive. At this time you only need one -'Yes'. It could be your next attempt or your 100th. Just keep going and you will be alright. I know it. What you feel is normal, I used to feel like that. Sometimes I wake up in the feeling that way, even if there are no threats. It happens.But you will be alright - just keep trying, and keep moving
by skinner927 | 2025-04-08 13:57:38+00:00
I’m going to go out on a limb and assume OP is similar to all of my friends and missed the fact you can manually curate yt kids? Yt kids is also odd because you need to be signed in as the parent and the kids account isn’t its own independent account.

Perhaps this solves the fatal flaw that your kid has to have your google account signed into their tablet to watch yt kids. I got my child their own tablet, created a child Google account, signed into the Android tablet with it, and then I was unable to restrict what they watched. Best I could do was the young child algorithm, but there’s still so much trash.
by anthk | 2025-04-08 13:58:24+00:00
Well, I will add funny signatures from now.

---

Compiling the Linux kernel to get more stability it's done with the '-O3 -ffast-math -fno-strict-overflow' CFLAGS.

Run your window manager with 'exec nice -19 icewm-session' at ~/.xinitrc to get amazing speeds.
by stuartjohnson12 | 2025-04-08 13:58:32+00:00
Evolution's optimisation pressure on the humanoid shape has already done a lot of that work for us. Certain instruments like the hand and thumb are very thoroughly refined in humans. On top of that, most interfaces in the world are already designed for humans, so by making a humanoid robot you guarantee it can operate in a superset of environments that a human can.
by 827a | 2025-04-08 13:59:09+00:00
This could just be my misunderstanding of how you'd set up a per-user or per-tenant use-case on D1, but as far as I know in order to set up a binding between a Worker and a D1 database, that connection needs to be defined in your wrangler.toml. Its unclear to me how you'd, e.g., be able to automate the creation of a new tenant + a new D1 database, without touching the wrangler.toml file. Otherwise every new tenant would need a code change.

Also, afaik they still have a 10,000 database limit on paid plans. Maybe you can get that lifted if you have a personal relationship with them, but even very low scale apps would quickly hit that.

IMO D1 (hosted SQLite in general) just seems like an interesting distraction. The per-tenant use-case has some pros; security being the biggest one. But I've basically never worked on an app where that boundary was so strict, across 100% of query use-cases, that I'd be willing to make such a critical infrastructure decision to support it. Even something as simple as a business analytics dashboard starts to break down that boundary, and would require replication of the data to another database (which is something many apps do anyway, but you can get a lot of mileage out of just directing BI queries at your normal database).

The second-best thing I can say about it is that it might have an interesting cost profile, but it seems like the situations where that would surface as an advantage is quite small. Mostly just low-scale, low-cost applications. Yeah, the total iterative cost of some low-utilization tenant might literally be $0; but assuming you have some money coming in, every other database can support this for an iterative cost of like $0.10, and you don't have to deal with all the downsides of D1 and SQLite.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-08 14:00:00+00:00
I seem to have touched a bit of nerve. That wasn't my intent. I was just expressing that my personal experience is a bit different from yours. I was not saying that your experience isn't valid or true. I find the difference interesting and was just pondering what the reasons for it are.

I still suspect that it has to do with the demographics of the businesses being addressed.
by vessenes | 2025-04-08 14:00:13+00:00
The author said the original liquid paper specifies random starting weights. I think what would happen is you get a bit of a random personality each time you redo the randomization, and then it will self-referentially update over time. I mean you have to start somewhere. You could start with all 1s, I guess, if you’re going to norm.

Update: Even if this is a good idea, and I’m not sure it is, it probably makes sense to have a pretty fast early move away from the random weights, and then slow down.
by kurdish-yoda | 2025-04-08 14:00:15+00:00
Got my masters, and walked into my first real interview brimming with confidence. Then a behavioural question hit, and I froze. Turns out, interviewing in itself is a skill nobody taught me. Something you outta learn alongside theory.

After licking my wounds, I teamed up with my business partner to build Mindorah, an interview prep platform that’s now live. It’s designed to help you avoid my fate and actually shine in front of recruiters.

It features: • Realistic mock interviews that level up as you go, sharpening your communication skills.

•Interview analysis to review your performance and pinpoint growth areas.

•Personalized coaching with tips and answers to boost your confidence.

•Performance analysis to spot weaknesses and track progress.

Want to practice without stakes? Mindorah’s got a free demo to kick things off. I learned the hard way that tech skills alone don’t cut it, interviewing takes deliberate prep.
by cies | 2025-04-08 14:00:24+00:00
I think free speech is something to protect for humans, not for companies.

I can say "you should get the vaccine!" Companies that want to say these kinds of things have rules to abide by: and thanks fully so.

I'm much for free speech, but more in the sense that we should be able to discuss policy/politics/critique/bitch/bash/religions/etc. Not so we can make terror plans, defame, harass, bully and share child porn.

Not sure what happened to your cousin... But I'm curious now. Care to share?
by wiradikusuma | 2025-04-08 14:00:48+00:00
I built my app (Show HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43483919 ) using Cloudflare for various functions. They seem to nail the services a typical SaaS needs (except email service), but localhost development can be challenging for some newer services.

Also, their Queues service seems to get stuck randomly, and I need to "flush" it manually from the dashboard.

But I hope they get better over time. Can't beat the ease of use and the pricing.
by ellen364 | 2025-04-08 14:00:49+00:00
I don't know where I stand on this, but not everyone thinks that 100% on-task, uncritical, 0 conflict communication is essential or even normal for work.

It reminds me of an article that claimed Britain has become a more civil and less honest place in the last few decades. (The Economist, maybe?) Perhaps some workplaces are like that too. Whether it's a good thing or not, who knows. People clearly have their preference one way or the other.

This specific case is tied to complicated American politics, but I guess small versions of the same debate are happening in workplaces all over the world. Though maybe, ironically, not in the most intensely policed workplaces.
by Woodi | 2025-04-08 14:00:56+00:00
Nope.

How many times companies was forced to pay for MS Windows, OEM or not ?

That COBOL apps and os'es used there are all already payd production quality software from XX dot 50's and all that is needed, sometimes, is to put in new piece of hardware. That is totally other civilisation.

Ok, I may be colorizing but this is a general concept.

Don't mention 100 years of "software modifications" because windows ecosystem can't win that contest anyway.