MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Karliss | 2025-04-02 10:36:04+00:00
All the pictures for shop listing of PCB are also AI generated/modified.

LEDs look completely wonky, the magnet sensors are not there, hole pattern for through hole parts is inconsistent between pictures and none of them match gerber files or video. Amount of tiles on the board vary between 7 and 9. Size of MCU board relative PCB is way bigger than it should be in real life. And of course MCU board itself is also a mess.

It's already bad for the DIY project, but if you are selling something even a single crappy picture would have been better.
by dietr1ch | 2025-04-02 10:36:19+00:00
I think this shows how the approach LLMs take is wrong. For us it's easy because we simply sort of iterate over every function with a simple prompt of doing a translation, but are yet careful enough taking notes of whatever may be relevant to do a higher level change if necessary.

Maybe the mistake is mistaking LLMs as capable people instead of a simple, but optimised neuron soup tuned for text.
by gpderetta | 2025-04-02 10:36:32+00:00
It is 2025, multithread scalability is a well understood, if not easy, problem.

The reality is that hardware-provided cache coherence is an extremely powerful paradigm. Building your application on top of message passing not only gives away some performance, but it means that if you have any sort of cross thread logical shared state that needs to be kept in sync, you have to implement cache coherence yourself, which is an extremely hard problem.

With my apologies to Greenspun, any sufficiently complicated distributed system contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of MESI.

But of course, if you have a trivially parallel problem, rejoice! You do not need much communication and shared memory is not as useful. But not all, or even most, problems are trivially parallel.
by rollcat | 2025-04-02 10:37:57+00:00
This is technically true, but this pretty much exactly illustrates my point. The SCM URL you've provided, you have to dig it up. It refers you to <https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/index.html>, which again, is a personal website of a member of the community. Then e.g. the fnctl(2) page comes from the 6.10 kernel release - AFAICT I can't browse the past releases or track HEAD. Compare with <https://man.openbsd.org> or <https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi>, you can find both straight from the landing pages.

Meanwhile if you can't find man7.org (Google search results are only getting worse) and start browsing <https://docs.kernel.org>, it refers you to <https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/> which refers you to <https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/maintaining.html>, <https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/missing_pages.html>, and Wikipedia - none of which seem to be relevant, can't tell because it's a wall of text rather than a man page browser.

Now imagine you have to fix a b0rked system that can't display its own man pages. You're now stuck with this mess.
by Kiro | 2025-04-02 10:37:59+00:00
This guy's patronizing rants has made me avoid his software (µWebSockets) even though it seems good. Stop trying to be Torvalds. Even the docs used to be riddled with it:

> In the 1970s, programming was an elite's task. Today programming is done by uneducated "farmers" and as a result, the care for smart algorithms, memory usage, CPU-time usage and the like has dwindled in comparison.
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-04-02 10:38:10+00:00
> (where there's a significant risk that the owners of the factory are slipping the town councillors the odd brown envelope)

This is in no way necessary, and is almost never what's going on. All that is needed is the factory owner quietly telling the town councillors that if they are forced to clean up their emissions, they will not be able to compete with foreign competitors who don't have to do the same, and will be forced to close. Then the town council takes a quick look at just how much of the wages and tax revenues of the town come, directly or indirectly, from the factory, and make sure nothing threatens it.

Now that tariffs are the issue du jour, I'd like to propose that any environmental regulations or labor laws should always be combined with an automatic tariff on any competing products produced in countries that do no have such laws. To not have that means that you are not removing the problem, you are just moving it to somewhere without such laws.
Show HN: I Built a Google Sheets Alternative to $50K/Year in SaaS Subscriptions
by xohails | 2025-04-02 10:40:12+00:00
After spending years paying for dozens of SaaS tools (and watching prices constantly increase), I built an alternative that runs entirely in Google Sheets.

It started as a personal project to automate my own business tasks, but it's now helping thousands of businesses ditch expensive subscriptions.

The core idea is simple: Instead of paying monthly for scattered tools, why not leverage the power of Google Sheets as an automation hub?

What you can do without leaving Google Sheets:

• Build complete WordPress sites (no coding) • Generate AI content at scale • Automate SEO workflows • Manage Shopify/WooCommerce stores • Run email campaigns • Scrape and analyze web data

Technical Implementation: • Built on Google Apps Script for seamless integration • Direct API connections to WordPress, Shopify, OpenAI • Custom middleware for handling rate limits and data processing • Zero external dependencies - everything runs in your sheet

Real Numbers:

• Replaces 15+ separate SaaS tools • Average setup time: 15 minutes • Typical savings: $3,000-$5,000/year • One-time payment vs. monthly subscriptions • 5,000+ businesses automated

The Secret Sauce: Instead of building yet another platform, we turned Google Sheets into one. Users keep working in a familiar environment, maintain data ownership, and use their own API keys. No learning curve, no lock-in.

Open Questions for HN:

What other APIs should we integrate? (Currently supporting OpenAI, WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce) Thoughts on using Google Sheets as a business automation platform? Security considerations when handling sensitive data in Sheets?

Try it: https://smartspreadsheets.co

Currently on AppSumo (lifetime deal): https://appsumo.com/products/smart-spreadsheets/

I'm the founder and will be around to answer questions and discuss the technical details.
by nizarmah | 2025-04-02 10:41:05+00:00
+1 to sound, I'm planning to research that thanks to all the helpful HN comments like yours :D

I find the "instruction app" a little limited because a person needs to be conscious, they need to be calm and collected to remember to open the app, and their phone needs to be accessible.

In its current state, providing instructions is better than just broadcasting BLE which will be weakened and lost by rubble.

In my country, a lot of first responders still rely on asking people to scream if they can hear them. Anyone unconscious would be discovered days later...

There has to be some way of providing an automated signal of life.

The comments about the physics limitations are pretty awesome. They make me wonder if we can assist it in any way... I learned about passive resonators recently. I know they have a short distance transmission, but maybe if they were part of the building material?

I need to start by learning more about the physics. I know I'm limited by it, but maybe there's window we can walk through instead of the door.
by rinka_singh | 2025-04-02 10:42:04+00:00
There's OpenCL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL - this BTW, also runs on NVIDIA GPUs too...

OpenCL is completely open (source) and so why wouldn't we, all of us, throw our weight behind OpenCL.

(no, I have no connection with them and have nothing to do with them, other than having learned a bit).
by Lio | 2025-04-02 10:43:04+00:00
As it's just you I'd stick with Ruby on Rails 8[1] as you already know it and I think it could realistically easily achieve what you're proposing.

There's lots of libraries for calling out external AI services. e.g. something like FastMCP[2]. From the sound of it that's all you need.

I'd use Hotwire[3] for the frontend and Hotwire Native if you want to rollout an app version quickly. I'd back it with SolidCache, SolidQueue, etc

I'd use Kamal[4] to run it on cheap hosting using on something cheap from Hetzner.

1. https://rubyonrails.org/

2. https://github.com/yjacquin/fast-mcp

3. https://hotwired.dev/

4. https://kamal-deploy.org/
by littlestymaar | 2025-04-02 10:44:51+00:00
> every time because nobody on the other side of the conversation, person or AI; can tell whether all my previous options are still valid.

But you can, so as long as the interlocutor tells you what assumptions it made, you can correct it if it doesn't match your current mood.

> So yeah, this argument in favor of conversational interfaces sounds at this point more like ideology than logic.

There's no ideology behind the fact that every people rich enough to afford paying someone to deal with mundane stuff will have someone doing it for them, it's just about convenience. Nobody likes to fight with web UIs for fun, the only reason why it has become mainstream is because it's so much cheaper than having a real person working.

Same for Microsoft Word by the way, many people used to have secretaries typing stuff for them, and it's been a massive regression of social status for the upper middle class to have to type things by themselves, it only happened because it was cheaper (in appearance at least).
by sandworm101 | 2025-04-02 10:45:31+00:00
Yes. Ive done exactly that. A very large number of people in the US, those under various stages of illegal/legal immigration status, are regularly told not to leave. There was even an episode of Frasier about this, about how the Daphne character was not allowed to leave the country, else she couldnt come back. (The one in the RV where they drive to canada.) It is a normal part of life for many in the US.
by UncleEntity | 2025-04-02 10:45:39+00:00
> Author does have a point that slicing the work too small has significant overheads. But they've overstated it.

Exactly.

I was messing around with adding multi-threading to this 3d thing and it slowed it down for the smaller cases up until it overcame the overhead then it sped things up. It was using OpenMP and only a couple shared loop variables so probably not as drastic as whatever node does but it did slow the common case down enough to be not worth the effort.

The author of TFA needs to go run any renderer in single and multi-thread mode then report back to the class.
by ronakjain90 | 2025-04-02 10:45:48+00:00
TRMNL community has published a lot of train/metro schedule recipe[1], that can be installed on any e-ink screen[2]

- [1] https://usetrmnl.com/recipes/

- [2] https://docs.usetrmnl.com/go/diy/byod

Disclosure: I work at TRMNL.
by jFriedensreich | 2025-04-02 10:45:55+00:00
I looked into four interesting incarnations of this over the years:

1. During the peak phase of couchDB as application server (2006 - 2009) it was common to store not just the data but all the app assets and code in the database and replicate everything together. Plenty of the community tried to bring this to the extreme with every function being stored as versioned document (i see it as precursor to FAAS) and the whole application being editable with an integrated IDE. Also functions in my incarnation of this system were not loaded by filename but with a content addressed manifest. You would reference functions by name but the name would be resolved with a hash manifest.

2. There were several systems with erlang/BEAM to take the hot code replacement to the extreme in similar way, storing code in i believe mnesia.

3. I think bloomberg (i cannot find the hn post to confirm it was them, if someone has the link that would be great) has/had a bespoke code database with custom version control and fully integrated IDE. They leveraged this for some pretty interesting workflows

4. Probably not exactly what you mean as it does not include the runtime integration, but google and sourcegraph are building code databases with indices on symbols and semantic understanding of references and more. I hear great things from people who worked with it especially
by eimrine | 2025-04-02 10:46:10+00:00
They do it because of the same reasons they do the brainrot activity?

I used to watch a lot of streams about another videogame (shooter). It is calming, no hard thinking, sometimes the streamer reads your comments which is the dopamine moment, also there is an ability to listen to some kool kid without a risk to be bullied. In my case it was a learning about how to play shooter games, what is FPV/TPV, where the danger is coming from typically, how to play while being on a low ground, or a high ground, how to use different gun parts. Sometimes donaters use to send payed challenges for the streamer like win the game having some handicap for which is always give some extra bits of entertainments because I know the streamer has a hard time.

Last but not least is the reason that my computer is a bit slow so connecting to the game takes a lot of time and there is a risk to be killed early which means at least 10 minutes of concentrated mind wasted, but seeing the streamer killed means I am in one click from another game on the culmination point.

What is not understandable by me is why Minecraft is interesting at all. Watching a proper shooter game is mostly the same as watching some military expert telling (for example) about how to clear a building, but playing blocks stopped being interested for me as soon as I have been introduced to some real-life activity like soldering some electronics - but there were no brainrot in my childhood.
by hilbert42 | 2025-04-02 10:46:35+00:00
I understand the problem with purchasing EtOH in the US. Frankly, I consider adding MeOH, MEK, etc. to denature it as both dangerous and an archaic procedure. (Moreover, outside lab reagents, MeOH should never exist without denatonium, it's just too dangerous.)

Some people will drink EtOH whether it's denatured with MeOH, etc. or with the much safer denatonium. Why blind or kill these people when one doesn't need to? Sure, EtOH will likely get them anyway but why should the State be their executioner?

There's something awfully wrong with that I reckon.
by maccard | 2025-04-02 10:47:00+00:00
It’s really not.

It’s much more of a “everyone who chooses this flavor of soda dies”. Maybe it’s the soda, maybe it’s the people it attracts.

> I'd also guess lesser known frameworks have a higher proportion of better developers - i.e people taking the time to research and try new technologies probably are more competent.

And this is the “you’re holding it wrong” argument.

Facebook and Airbnb are the poster children for react (one of them wrote react). They are both perfect examples of absolutely disastrously monsters of websites plagued with issues related to all of the problems react supposedly solved.
by lm28469 | 2025-04-02 10:48:27+00:00
Yeah if you're into that it's pretty cool, I am too. I don't think nor trust the average joe with maintaining XX kW of batteries next door.

> Do you want to live a few meters from a nuke?

You probably don't know what a nuke is. Anyways, the worst nuclear reactor catastrophe killed ~30 people directly and ~5000 indirectly. Pollution kills ~250k people par year in Europe alone (coal related pollution is ~30k), cars kill about ~4k people in France, per year.

Why do we accept car deaths as an acceptable cost of transportation but not (the extremely few) nuclear related deaths as an acceptable cost of energy production ? Why do we accept 30k deaths per year due to coal pollution but not 5k death, once, because of nuclear ?

It sounds a lot like "dumb apes scared big boom" more than rational reasoning. That or the proverbial boiled frog
Show HN: We built an API to manage usage based entitlement logic
by meowiecfe | 2025-04-02 10:50:27+00:00
We built gater, an API-first user entitlement management system for SaaS teams.

Most SaaS products start by tying feature access/entitlement directly to billing metadata (like Stripe plan IDs or Paddle SKUs). It works early on, but quickly becomes a problem when you need to:

- Launch or tweak pricing experiments - Handle usage-based logic (anyone building AI tools might resonate), add-ons, and trials - Fix entitlement issues caused by billing sync problems

gater solves for these by decoupling user entitlement logic from billing.

You define plans (we call these macros), features, usage limits, and custom rules via our dashboard or API.

Your app calls gater to determine what a user should be able to access, regardless of what billing provider or pricing model you use.

The benefits:

- Reduces engineering time spent maintaining pricing logic - Enables faster experimentation with pricing and packaging - Makes support more self-sufficient when billing and entitlements go wrong - Payment stack agnostic – works with Stripe, Paddle, Paypal, or a homegrown stack - Supports more than feature flags – usage caps, bundled features, add-ons, etc.

We originally built gater for our own projects to avoid rewriting complex feature access logic every time pricing model changes.

We've dogfooded this incessantly and hope this is also useful for other teas!

If you’ve had to battle entitlement logic implementation for your SaaS, we’d love to hear your thoughts or feedback.
by tptacek | 2025-04-02 10:51:58+00:00
No, mostly what zoning was intended to do was to keep Black families (and, before that, Chinese families) out of white suburbs. The documentation on this point is extensive and convincing. That effect is less deliberate, overt, and intensive today than it was in, say, 1964. But "we've always done it this way" is a uniquely weak argument when it comes to single-family zoning.

(The problem, throughout most of America, is lack of multifamily zoning; it's not as much that people own single-family houses near multifamily lots, because their grandparents generally took care of that problem in the late 1940s when most major metro areas got rezoned to eliminate those multifamily lots).
Show HN: I made a platform to load and performance test API's
by lazarkap | 2025-04-02 10:52:00+00:00
I built BuzzBench because I was frustrated with how complex performance testing tools have become. And I was ending up writing my own scripts to test endpoints and manually check out resource usage at the time of testing.

Checkout demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAnbZMoQvmQ
by mandmandam | 2025-04-02 10:52:05+00:00
Long term behaviour change is difficult. Short term behaviour change; not so much.

To take a classic example from the "sociopathic" mind of Bernays himself:

> The targeting of women in tobacco advertising led to higher rates of smoking among women. In 1923 women only purchased 5% of cigarettes sold; in 1929 that percentage increased to 12%, in 1935 to 18.1%, peaking in 1965 at 33.3%, and remained at this level until 1977

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom

And there's far, far more to it all. Sometimes you don't need people to change their behaviour, you just need them to be confused (say, about climate change, or who to vote for), and sometimes you just need media corporations to go soft on you because they like your money.

Sometimes you're advertising to kids, because childrens brains are more malleable. They form habits early.

Advertising made smoking cool; it made diamonds valuable; it greenwashed fossil fuel companies that sold our species future for short term profit. If you don't call that behaviour change, what do you call it?
by nxobject | 2025-04-02 10:53:16+00:00
I agree as well: the Grauniad's UK political reporting is often shameful at the way it covers internal Labour Party warring with anonymous "internal party sources" that often toe the center-right line, and what are often briefed pre-speech announcements for centrist Labour up-and-comers that read like press releases. (Let alone how they'll breathlessly report anything remotely related to "gender confusion" regardless or not of its actual impact.) Sure, the "quality" UK press is often in hock with one party or another, but it still rankles.

Betsy Reed runs the American side with a lot more quality and a lot less political baggage, which is to her credit. I do think that her tenure at The Intercept, and and in particular The Intercept's inadvertent leak of Reality Winner's identity the feds, has made her more thoughtful.
by eimrine | 2025-04-02 10:54:22+00:00
> You can convert mAh to Wh, but only if you know the device’s voltage, which is another spec that’s often obscured.

If talking about Lithium battery, you need to multiple your Ah value by 3.3V and you can get your Wh. If talking about things like the chip's TDP - there are some problems of finding any metrics on a brand new laptop because the vendors try to do their chips as obfuscated as possible.
by dmos62 | 2025-04-02 10:54:44+00:00
I don't know why everyone is so salty. It's like putting "vibecode" in the headline attracted the worst in people.

For context, I'm not a cooking geek or virtuoso. I enjoy it to some degree, but mostly it's just about having a nice, nutritious experience, in line with whatever my mood might be. I only ever measure things super accurately when I'm baking things in the bread maker (because it doesn't let you make corrections). For most meals, I wing half the measurements and time estimates.

In my experience, most "human recipes" are just random variations on some baseline. I hate looking for recipes on recipe sites, youtube, etc. There are food bloggers that are exceptions, but usually I'll just end up scrolling for a long time with just frustration to show for it. If I sort of know some of the ingredients I want to use, have some sense of the type of eating experience I'm going for, and I want a bunch of recommendations based on that, regular "human recipe" sites are not the answer.

90% of my new recipes come from ChatGPT, and that ratio is increasing. I just marinated some chicken based on a recipe it magicked for me. I asked for insights on mixing mayo and yoghurt in the same marinade, because I had leftovers of both. It gave me 5 or so diverse recipes, and I just picked the one that best fit my pantry and mood. I also asked it to convert the recipe from volume to weight, not to mention scale it for my specific quantity of chicken, which was super handy.

I find that ChatGPT is great at providing common sense instructions and approximations. It's absolutely awesome at clobbering together a meal from ingredients I tell it I have. I can have an actual dialogue about any of it, get all kinds of recommendations and insights. That's been very useful to me. I'd go as far as to say that recipe generation is one of the easiest real problems for an LLM to solve. Or, at least for the kinds of recipes I use.

I've done my share of recipes from Serious Eats, but they weren't particularly good. I was doing Breton galettes the other week, which are notoriously fiddly to get right. Serious Eats had a huge article about it, interesting insights, but their final recipe sucked, and I was trying to be accurate. Not only I failed to get the consistency right, the wheat-buckwheat ratio was nowhere near what you'd get in France. I say, write researched articles about what makes recipes work. I can read it, I can bounce my LLM off it. If it's a fiddly recipe, I'll have to fiddle with it no matter what. If I can have a conversation with an LLM about principles at work, that's much better to me than a bunch of "human recipes".

Also, I often have questions about alternatives or things I need advice on as I'm preparing food. I'll also look at the recipe a gazillion times to check the instructions, quantities, etc. I'll set and check a timer often too. A voice-assistant is the obvious answer to this, which I'll try at my earliest convenience.

Kudos to the author!