MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-22 14:55:18+00:00
The problem with this kind of tool is that it competes with Notes.app, Numbers.app, Google Docs, Excel, notepad.txt which are much simpler than remembering how to use some bespoke CLI app every time you finish a book and then figuring out how to back up the database. And being unable to log a book because you don't have your laptop around.

One idea is to use a spreadsheet as a back-end (like an iCloud-stored Numbers.app spreadsheet on macOS and a OneDrive Excel doc on Windows) with a simple human-editable structure, and your CLI tool is a front-end for interacting with it, exporting/importing from services, basically a value-add on top of a document that users could edit by hand.
by jermaustin1 | 2025-04-22 14:56:07+00:00
A lower dose strain, or a strain with higher CBD:THC ratio would keep you basically at stage 1/2 all night.

The thing about weed is that, if you are getting it legally at a dispensary in a state with strict and enforced testing laws (so not CA), you can get yourself a nice low strength sativa/hybrid while avoiding anything with high CBN (that's the couching chem). You will be buzzed off a hit or two, and you just take another hit every 30-60 minutes or so (everyone's mileage WILL vary). It is just like staying buzzed on alcohol is approximately 1 beer/hr (according to the ancient wisdom of older brother's since the dawn of time).

All drugs have their tolerances and and all drugs have people who abuse them and people who are "allergic" to them and should avoid them at all cost.
by lurk2 | 2025-04-22 14:56:08+00:00
> And the line of text with "Windows Update is committed to helping reduce carbon emissions" is as superfluous as many other controls as well. I mean nice for MS, but it really doesn't belong there.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, but would note that this isn’t anything new. I can remember seeing messages like this on HP and DELL machines as early as 2007.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-22 14:56:29+00:00
In general, I don't routinely carry a credit/debit card anymore; only exception is when I'm in the US, where it's still somewhat common to find swipe-only setups. I do normally carry a small amount of emergency paper money; if I'm visiting somewhere where paying with paper money is normal/preferred/mandatory (notably Germany), I'll have more.

But for normal usage, why would I carry around a card to tap on terminals when I can just tap a phone on them instead?

I think the US is possibly slightly behind the curve here because mobile terminals are a fairly new thing there; they mostly became common with Apple/Google Pay, so about ten years ago. In most of Europe, chip and pin became largely mandatory around the turn of the century, so people taking your card out the back to process it was no longer an option, and they pretty much had to have a solution that could come to the payer anyway.
by MetaWhirledPeas | 2025-04-22 14:56:43+00:00
> LLM also don't tend to question its own decisions in the past

An attribute I would like to see is the ability for an LLM to express justified self-doubt. Likewise (and perhaps directly related) would be the ability to self-critique prior to providing an answer. It's possible they are already steered to do this; if so I would like to see more of that dialogue surfaced to the user.
by piva00 | 2025-04-22 14:56:44+00:00
Cavalry was replaced by mechanised cavalry, the concept still exists with better equipment.

Drones don't replace artillery, they are a new weapon, just like air dropped bombs didn't completely replace artillery. An army with drones and artillery is more capable than an army with only drones.

The main difference is that armies learnt how to counter artillery: keep squads separated enough, assault units more dispersed, dig more foxholes, etc. They haven't learnt how to counter drones yet, the arms race for that is raging on Ukraine.
by griffzhowl | 2025-04-22 14:58:08+00:00
It's just that it's physically impossible to measure such small scales. To probe a smaller scale you have to put more energy into a volume (roughly, because you have to force particles closer together), and at some point you have to put so much energy into such a small volume that it becomes a black hole, then any more energy you put in will just make the black hole bigger. So there seems to be a fundamental limit to how short a scale we can probe, and therefore we can't give a physical meaning to smaller scales. Nima Arkani-Hamed talks about htis in a few lectures online.

This is just according to our current theories, and you don't need any speculative ideas about granularity of space. Mathematically, there's no problem in considering arbitrarily small length scales, because current theories are based on continuous space and time dimensions, but since we can't give physical meaning to small length scales, that's a clue that a more fundamental theory will somehow not be based on continuous space and time
by dspillett | 2025-04-22 14:58:11+00:00
> They cached my calls to rand() way too often although documentation promised not to do that.

For some DBs (SQL Server definitely), RAND() and similar are handled as if they are deterministic and so are called once per use. For instance:

SELECT TOP 10 RAND() FROM sys.objects SELECT TOP 10 RAND() FROM sys.objects

just returned ten lots of 0.680862566387624 and ten lots of 0.157039657790194.

SELECT TOP 10 RAND(), RAND(), RAND()-RAND() FROM sys.objects

returns a different value for each column (0.451758385842036 & 0.0652620609942665, -0.536618123021777), so the optimisation is per use not per statement or even per column (if it were per column that last value would be 0, or as close to as floating point arithmetic oddities allow).

This surprises a lot of people when they try “… ORDER BY RAND()” and get the same order on each run.

One workaround for this is to use a non-deterministic function like NEWID(), though you need some extra jiggery-pokery to get a 0≤v<1 value to mimic rand:

SELECT TOP 10 CAST(CAST(CAST(NEWID() AS VARBINARY(4)) AS BIGINT) AS FLOAT)/(4.0*1024*1024*1024) FROM sys.objects

For the example of sorting, the outer cast is not needed. You might think just using “ORDER BY NEWID()” would be sufficient, but that is an undefined behaviour so you shouldn't rely upon it. It might work now, a quick test has just worked as expected here, but at any point the optimiser could decide it is more efficient to consider all UUIDs as having the same weight for sorting purposes.
by thewebguyd | 2025-04-22 14:58:12+00:00
> What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations.

This is what drives me crazy on macOS. Specifically, the animation for switching between virtual desktops. When I hit Ctrl+1/2/3/etc I want it to switch instantly, no animation - not slide into place. It's even unresponsive until the animation finishes.
by aeturnum | 2025-04-22 14:58:35+00:00
One should not practice these things in actual high security areas, but it can be fun to simply walk around a strange place with a look of purpose and velocity. Not making eye contact, perhaps on a phone. As long as you won't get in trouble it's easy to practice the body language of belonging and that skill can be really useful even if you are not trying to use it for malicious purposes (i.e. if you are actually supposed to be there, the best thing for everyone is you look the part and don't cause more worry than required).
Show HN: Cursor for Email
by doruletzz | 2025-04-22 14:58:40+00:00
Hey!

For the past months I've been building an MVP cursor for email and looking to get my first 10 early users.

The project is still in early development, but would love to hear your input on this project.

current features: categorization, auto draft, using llm to edit/add text, auto task creation from email.

under development: keyboard shortcuts, Cursor-like tab navigation, lots of bug-fixes

I'd love to hear what feedback you have, features you'd like to have or if you'd use/buy the product.

Cheers Doru
by rsynnott | 2025-04-22 14:58:47+00:00
I was about 30 when Apple Pay/Google Pay showed up; I use it fairly exclusively now. If nothing else it is much _faster_.

(Before that I was mostly using card-based tap-to-pay, but that has the disadvantage that there's a limit both on transaction size and on transactions since last validation, after which it requires pin validation. The phone-based solution don't have this; being able to unlock the phone satisfies the PSD2 requirements.)
by skydhash | 2025-04-22 14:59:13+00:00
Code is formal language, there’s nothing to be solved because it’s already as precise as 2*2. The issue is not with programming language, the issue is the domain where the problem is and the human that does translate the solution.

Let’s take text rendering. We already have words on papers and various ways to get them there. But doing the same with computer is a difficult job because of all the parameters for drawing characters and laying them to form words and lines. Once you find those parameters, you have to account for future changes so you write you code in a way that minimize that impact. And because someone else will probably do maintenance, you try to come up with good abstractions so that your solution become understandable.

If AI will solve coding, it may as well write machine code directly or be embedded as firmware, because every programming language was made for humans.
by tomhow | 2025-04-22 14:59:40+00:00
Dang has written about this at length several times over the years and did so again just three days ago:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

We don't manually intervene to deemphasise content just because it's political, and indeed we often manually intervene to restore political stories to the front page when they have been automatically downweighted due to flags or flamewars.

We moderate to optimize for intellectual curiosity, nothing more.
by sentinal-cloud | 2025-04-22 14:59:41+00:00
Hey folks,

We are a pair of engineers who have been developing on Kubernetes for many places and different scales. We keep running into the same pain: logs scattered everywhere, unclear root causes, and everything always boils down to reading a wall of (poorly formatted) logging.

So we built [*Sentinal*](https://sentinal.cloud/) — a developer-focused tool that deploys AI agents inside your Kubernetes cluster to help you find and fix issues faster.

We’re building these agents to be like having a staff engineer who lives in your cluster 24/7. You can:

- Ask them questions about your system (they know your code and infra). - Port-forward to a live agent and interact with it via a UI. - Watch what they’re doing — see the commands they run, the reasoning behind decisions, and what files they access (it’s all transparent).

We’re focused on making this feel natural for devs:

- Helm-based install - Safe by design — access controls + sandboxing - It doesn’t just summarize logs — it digs into your business logic, and we aim to develop agents that can uncover hard to spot errors that similar tools would fail to spot. - Think of tools that just feed off of prometheus and kubernetes events, they would only capture so much!

Right now we’re in *open beta* with a very simple agent - and its free! We’re looking for real feedback from real users — especially engineers who’ve felt the pain of debugging distributed systems.

Follow the link below, to find out more:

[https://sentinal.cloud](https://sentinal.cloud/)

As we start a funding round and get our project off of the ground, your feedback, good or bad, would be really helpful! And if you are interested in the project, and want to get involved in any way, get in contact!
by mystified5016 | 2025-04-22 14:59:44+00:00
Well, it was a totally bespoke CPU, and we don't have any working models on earth.

Writing an assembler for a bespoke CPU is one thing, many of us have done it as a toy project, but stakes are a bit different here. You'd have to mathematically prove your assembler and disassembler are absolutely 100% correct. When your only working model is utterly irreplaceable and irrecoverable upon error, it probably takes a lot more resources to develop.
Launch HN: Infra.new (YC W23) – DevOps copilot with guardrails built in
by TankeJosh | 2025-04-22 14:59:53+00:00
Hey HN, we’re Caleb, Michael, and Josh, the founders of infra.new (https://infra.new/), a DevOps Copilot that can configure and deploy apps on AWS, GCP, and Azure using Terraform and GitHub Actions.

You start by describing your infrastructure needs in detail and optionally attach any source code. The agent will clarify your requirements and either execute the task immediately or generate a plan with step-by-step instructions for you to approve. Once you’re happy with the changes, export everything to GitHub or let the agent provision it in your cloud account. Here’s a quick demo of deploying a new app to GCP / AWS: https://www.loom.com/share/4627b3cd96cc439e9981a38363b7f6f7

Why build a new coding agent when there are good ones already out there? We believe there’s room for a new agent that is specifically built for DevOps tasks since the risks are much higher – it's easy to rollback AI-related errors in a web app, but fixing a misconfigured database is not nearly as easy. By focusing specifically on cloud infra, we can provide all the visibility and checks you need to feel confident in your configuration changes.

At our previous jobs, we built an internal data / ML platform at Google Life Sciences that involved migrating off of internal Google infrastructure to the public cloud (GCP). We quickly learned how complicated it can be to configure cloud infrastructure well, even for seemingly simple tasks. Configuring an app with CI/CD requires knowledge of multiple infra tools, cloud services, and best practices. Mistakes can be costly and diagnosing issues can send you down a rabbit hole of cloud docs.

Our goal is to help engineers feel confident when making changes in their cloud. We designed the workflow to start with a prompt, a template, or a GitHub repository. After clarifying your requirements, the agent will start generating IaC, CI/CD, and other configurations using the latest docs, public Terraform Registries, and a set of best practices we dynamically load into the context window.

All changes are run through static analysis to detect hallucinations, estimate cost changes, and visualize your infrastructure components as you go. Once you’re happy with the changes, you can export everything to GitHub for review. You also have the option to deploy directly to your cloud from the workspace and let the agent diagnose any deployment issues. The deployment flow is "pseudo-deterministic" in that it follows a checklist of human-guided instructions that help it stay in bounds, but we still recommend only using this feature for dev environments and using GitOps for any changes to production.

The current plan is to continue adding support for more tools (Kubernetes and GitLab are next) and we may add a CLI that lets you bring the agent into your local workspace.

We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas!
by eesmith | 2025-04-22 15:00:16+00:00
It would be nice if the AI-generated image at the top of the page were the "precise" attributed the distinctly German approach.

The "fl" ligature jumped out at me, followed by the 'Enlianced', the high hyphen before 'water', and the general size and kerning wonkiness.

I can't figure out what "CO2-per-bubble ratio" can be. Aren't all the bubbles 100% CO2? How does the machine affect that ratio? It's a dissolved CO2 solution, with bubble formation caused by (I believe) the CO2 concentration and nucleation sites in the container, which should be independent of the how it was pressurized.

I guess there's some O2 in there, so is that difference?

If that's typical of the kind of question Germans are asking, I don't think I have much to worry about.
by sujayakar | 2025-04-22 15:00:22+00:00
Here's an interesting negative result.

After watching this video, my first thought was whether recent results from columnar compression (e.g. https://docs.vortex.dev/references#id1) applied "naively" like QOI would have good results.

I started with a 1.79MiB sprite file for a 2D game I've been hacking on, and here are the results:

PNG: 1.79 MiB QOI: 2.18 MiB BtrBlocks: 3.69 MiB

(Source: https://gist.github.com/sujayakar/aab7b4e9df01f365868ec7ca60...)

So, there's magic to being Quite OK that is more than just applying compression techniques than elsewhere :)
by fnands | 2025-04-22 15:00:53+00:00
> yet it crashed spectacularly in Phase III clinical trials.

I don't think this necessarily means the approach is flawed: my understanding is that the value these companies/models try to deliver is that it brings down the search space of molecules you test in your funnel by several order of magnitude.

Some will still fail, but as long as you do better than how things used to be done before, you bring value.

Maybe it will just take one blockbuster success for Pharma companies to decide this approach is worthwhile.
by piva00 | 2025-04-22 15:01:00+00:00
It would only make sense if consumption of tariff-imposed goods would keep steady to make up for the loss of income taxes, with consumer confidence cratering there's no way consumption keeps steady. On top of that you have inflation which will cause the Fed to raise interest rates, further lowering credit offering for consumption, bond yields raising which costs more of the budget for interest payment, requiring more taxes, it's a stupid plan all around...
by monocularvision | 2025-04-22 15:01:04+00:00
It was literally in the bill when it passed! What are you talking about? I very distinctly remember this being promoted as part of the package.

The deal was “if a business spends a percentage this money on payroll, it will be forgive”. It was designed to keep businesses afloat for a set amount of time as we locked down for COVID.
by mdhb | 2025-04-22 15:01:11+00:00
What is even the logic here? I understand the concept that when you have multiple threads going on about one article or story AT THE SAME TIME… then sure, the dupe option makes sense.

When you are manually putting a dupe tag on a story because someone posted it a week ago I think people feel very differently about that.

This is very literally the kind of behaviour people are referring to when they make the accusation that the mods are actively interfering with what people want to talk about.

This idea that you’re here telling me and others with a straight face that everything is above board while also doing this just doesn’t pass the credibility test, the logic makes no sense.
by raffael_de | 2025-04-22 15:01:19+00:00
The appeal of this UI can be boiled down to: form follows function + vintage rendering. Minus the vintage design it's basically isomorph to most common Linux window managers. Be it Cinnamon, xfce, KDE, mate ...

https://imgur.com/a/A3VfeSk

But if there was a good Windows 95 theme I'd probably use it.
Show HN: Minimal AI-based news aggregator for AI news!
by ponderingfish | 2025-04-22 15:01:21+00:00
I built a minimalist AI news aggregator while teaching myself NLP. It's a single static HTML page that updates every 4-6 hours with clustered AI news stories - no accounts, no cookies, no JS frameworks.

Technical approach: - Python scraper for AI/tech sources - Custom NLP pipeline with BERT embeddings to filter for AI-specific content - Hierarchical clustering to group related stories - ChatGPT API for generating cluster titles and short summaries - Served as a static HTML via Cloudflare Pages - Lightweight analytics with GoatCounter and Umami (understanding these two frameworks to choose one over the other) - Experimental JSON-based search (considering proper search if this scales)

The project started when I realized I was wasting hours daily checking multiple sources as a PM trying to track AI developments. Built this over 3 months between work commitments.

Interesting challenges: - Finding the right threshold for story similarity (still tuning this) - Balancing comprehensive coverage with noise filtering - Keeping the page lightweight while maintaining content density

Would appreciate feedback on clustering accuracy, false positive/negative rates, and overall UX.

Link: https://currentai.news
Ask HN: Finding investors after leaving cofounded startup
by takklz | 2025-04-22 15:01:29+00:00
Hey all! I was wondering if anyone has experience in this arena. Currently leaving the startup I helped cofound. In my time we’ve raised something like $1.5m from seed investors on safe notes at a $xxm valuation.

I still have a lot of friends in the startup and want to see them be successful. Selfishly, I would like a little bit of a win for my time as well.

I was thinking about reaching out to investors to see if anyone would be willing to buyout my roughly 30% for our 409a valuation price which is a significant discount to the latest round.

Is this a normal thing or am I wasting my time here?
by timmytokyo | 2025-04-22 15:01:54+00:00
Actually it kind of is. View the "active" page to see.

Here are some recent HN posts that have been flagged into oblivion:

>Dow Headed for Worst April Since 1932 as Investors Send 'No Confidence' Signal (wsj.com)

>Trump's Fed Attacks, Trade War Push World to Sell Off US Assets (bloomberg.com)

>White House plagued by Signal controversy as Pentagon in "full-blown meltdown" (arstechnica.com)

>An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here's how to survive. (nytimes.com)

>The Crypto Con: How Trump Is Looting America from the Oval Office (mitchthelawyer.substack.com)

>RFK Jr.'s autism study to amass medical records of many Americans (cbsnews.com)

HN is its community, and the community is speaking loud and clear about its allegiance.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-22 15:02:17+00:00
Your video is an hour long and spends the first half(?) explaining what vectorization and RAG is. If you're trying to introduce folks to feast (et al?) then you'd benefit from a much, much less chatty one

Closer to the bits, your docling-demo.ipynb has some alarming times in it:

> INFO:docling.document_converter:Finished converting document 2203.01017v2.pdf in 101.48 sec.

What is it doing to that PDF for almost 2 minutes?
by tialaramex | 2025-04-22 15:02:30+00:00
This used to be normal in a lot of the world, which is pretty wild. Lots of weird changes like this, Floppy Disks, "Appointment Television", home phone numbers ...

For most of recorded human history literacy was rare. A typical Roman citizen could not read, certainly beyond the ability to understand a handful of marks or make their name. By the nineteenth century it is entirely unremarkable that Patrick Brontë's daughters are taught to read and write, but it is also entirely unremarkable that several of them† died of TB since at the time we didn't know a cure for it.

† It's contested whether, for example, Charlotte died of TB, it probably didn't help.
by morkalork | 2025-04-22 15:02:55+00:00
Hiring a whole bunch of contractors is almost providing cover. "No, I didn't work on the gulag candidate selection tool, I was just a FAA navigation coder".

During the downfall of ISIS there was a funny quote from a commander in the Iraqi military along the lines of "if you listen to what the prisoners said, you'd think ISIS was entirely staffed by innocent drivers and cooks and never any jihadists"
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-04-22 15:03:49+00:00
Not exactly, the transmitted power tends to be centered on the frequency you desire, but there are unwanted harmonics off the center frequency. Its like having a fire hose that hits the desired target with water (something on fire), but it also hits everything else around the target in a large radius as well which may be very sensitive to water (precious art, high power transformers, etc)