MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Lerc | 2025-04-29 18:57:33+00:00
I kind of want to try something like this at a larger scale in an always-on mode where I have a 'senate' of debate. Rather than responding to prompts on a case by case basis, provide a list of tasks (potentially with deadlines) and let the senate work on them, break off into groups to manage subtasks, challenge results , make suggestions. Even potentially a tree of analysts where suggestions only gets passed up the tree when the parent node thinks a lower analysis is particularly insightful.

I definitely think that directing models to approach a problem from a specific perspective can generate better or worse results. Creating a diverse set of perspectives along with critical analysis of their results should be able to produce some impressive results.

Things like this would generate a massive number of tokens, but the cost per token is definitely heading in the right direction to allow for this. There is also the possibility of setting up an AI only IRC server where anybody can connect their own models for a shared debating chamber.
by consumer451 | 2025-04-29 18:57:37+00:00
This is generally worse UX vs. just opening Safari. There have been exactly zero times where I was happy that a link opened in an app's WebView, instead of in Safari or the appropriate external app.

Why does a seemingly privacy-focused Apple create the compromisable WebView system for apps? Is there some weird edge case for apps that they need this, for a non-evil reason?
by hysan | 2025-04-29 18:57:39+00:00
Primary use cases for me:

1. Organizing threads of research into context groups. Usually doing heavy deep dives where it’s uncertain if I need to revisit a previous branch, so rather than closing, it’s much more beneficial to group and collapse. It’s also easier to reopen and glance at the topics you looked at.

2. Similarly, grouping tabs by purpose while developing. It lets me organize tabs in a way that makes it so they I don’t need multiple browser windows open. It makes for a much more zen-like development environment.

3. Testing across dev, staging, and prod. Want the same tabs open but grouped so that I don’t accidentally do something destructive on prod that I meant to do locally. Now that this is in Firefox, I can also combine it with multi-account containers for more workflows.
by ricardo81 | 2025-04-29 18:58:35+00:00
It definitely took hold. It was an act of political union, albeit the democratic vote was heavily biased towards a larger English population, but the Scottish influence is imprinted in UK law, US law and any ex-colony.

The works of Adam Smith and David Hume arguably shaped the modern capitalist world which India is part of and branched off from.

Maybe there are nuanced arguments why it's less of a democracy, but I'm fairly sure nowadays every democracy has similar arguments.
Show HN: UXCanvas.ai – Idea to UI/UX Prototype in Minutes
by miketromba | 2025-04-29 18:59:20+00:00
Hello HN,

As a technical entrepreneur, working with designers is often way too slow - when I have an idea, I want a prototype the same day - not days/weeks later.

I created UX Canvas because I wanted a better way to communicate my UI/UX ideas to developers, without having to spend thousands on hiring UI/UX designers or opening Figma and spending days/hours manually creating, iterating on, and prototyping designs myself.

UX Canvas unlocks the ability for anyone - technical or not - to rapidly prototype their design ideas and instantly share them with team members in minutes.

If you can put your idea into words, you can design it. No design skills required. (Although they are helpful)

The agent has the ability to do cool things like generate it's own image assets to be used in the design, and you can even export your designs to clean React/Typescript code - so you can hand the code over to your developers (or other AI tools like Cursor, Windsurf, etc.) to bring your product idea to life.

Try it for free and let me know what you think!

https://uxcanvas.ai
by mike_hearn | 2025-04-29 18:59:52+00:00
Well, today I spent a lot of time waiting for some slow software that I wrote and maintain, a program that helps ship large desktop apps that use JVM or Electron. It can do native apps too but nearly nobody writes those. So I guess I both feel and create your pain in several directions.

Why is my software slow? Partly because the task is inherently intensive. Partly because I use an old Intel MacBook that throttles itself like crazy after too much CPU load is applied. Partly because I'm testing on Windows which has very slow file I/O and so any app that does lots of file I/O suffers. And partly because it's a JVM app which doesn't use any startup time optimizations.

But mostly it's because nobody seems to care. People complain to me about various things, performance isn't one of them. Why don't I fix it anyway? Because my time is super limited and there's always a higher priority. Bug fixes come first, features second, optimizations last. They just don't matter. Also: optimizations that increase the risk of bugs are a bad idea, because people forgive poor performance but not bugs, so even doing an optimization at all can be a bad idea.

Over the years hardware gave us much better performance and we chose to spend all of it on things like features, reducing the bug count, upping complexity (especially visual), simplifying deployment, portability, running software over the network, thin laptops and other nice things that we didn't have on Windows 98. Maybe AI will reduce the cost of software enough that performance becomes more of a priority, but probably not. We'll just spend it all on more features and bug fixes.
by tdhz77 | 2025-04-29 19:00:01+00:00
It reasoned its choices. Told me the vineyard, what most people say about it. It gave me 3 food options originally and I said go by best value. It would be the same as if a friend recommended it to you or a server. How do I know the AI is giving me good advice? I don’t, but I’ve lived on earth long enough to know it’s not bad advice. End of day, the human makes the decision. We don’t lose agency unless we just say ok to everything. In this case, it was reasonable other cases maybe not. We still make decisions even if we use ai.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-29 19:00:08+00:00
> The people that open the issues and don't generally know what CVSS is, are not otherwise checking these databases first

Add a notice to the issue template checklist to check the database. Maybe link to a wiki page that illustrates how. Mercilessly issue temporary bans for violations.

This is a spam issue plain and simple even if the perpetrator didn't intend it that way.
by copperroof | 2025-04-29 19:00:09+00:00
When I last compared it to mypy a few months ago adding typechecking to an old project that had types but I had for some reason never actually run a typechecker on it:

* Was overwhelmingly slower than mypy

* Had a few hundred more false positives. I gather from reading their philosophy afterward that this was on purpose. Rigid dogma > doing the right thing in the circumstance in their opinion.

* Did not find any actual bugs, whereas mypy identified 3 errors that lead to fixing real issues AND had fewer false positives, due to its better understanding of python code.

* Comically overweight with its typescript dependency.

My first impression of it was of a very low quality, over engineered project prioritizing noise over signal. Looking forward to trying out the astral typechecker as well.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-29 19:00:40+00:00
That's such an intensely personal decision that is affected by so many things that strangers can't possible know about that I don't know if anyone could usefully respond to your broad question.

I would question whether the problem is that you don't want to be in the field at all, or that you are fed up with specific positions/companies that are a poor fit for you. You only have 4 jobs in your history, and having 3 of them suck can be pretty gloomy.

So maybe consider doing contract-to-hire, where you're working 6 month (or so) contracts. That lets you sample the work environment at different companies and when you find one that works well for you, you'd have the option to stay as a permanent employee.
by olejorgenb | 2025-04-29 19:00:41+00:00
Are you kidding? Pycharm's pychecker is very incomplete. My whole team moved away from pychram due to the shitty typehint support which barely moved forward. (5+ year old bug, inconsistent behavior across the different features in pycharm indicating to me a fragile mess of heuristics behind the curtains)

I agree that most of the functionality on top of the type checker/engine is better in pycharm though. But a correct implementation is more important
by nemothekid | 2025-04-29 19:00:53+00:00
I agree. Unless the downstream data is going to be used to feed a system to make automated decisions (ex. HFT or Ad buying), having real time analytics is usually never worth the cost. It's almost always easier and more robust to have high tail latencies for humans to consume and as computers get faster and faster that tail latency decreases.

Systems that needed complex streaming architectures in 2015 could probably be handled today with fast disk and large postgres instance (or BigQuery).
by pllbnk | 2025-04-29 19:01:01+00:00
During COVID WFH peak I naively thought that the government, especially the EU, will take the growth of remote working as an opportunity for its Green Deal the bureaucrats love so much talking about. It started falling apart quickly when they started subsidizing restaurants, albeit that was the national government prerogative.

To this day I still wonder why there are no parties that tout this as part of their election programs. It's the way to reduce pollution and stimulate less-populated regions which have been dwindling as cities have been growing and getting so expensive.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-29 19:01:04+00:00
But from a judicial standpoint, most of the strengthening around civil liberties as mentioned in the Scottish Enlightenment only happened in the 20th century.

Indian (and Malaysian and Singaporean) jurisprudence largely forked off from British jurisprudence in the 1940s-1960.

A number of the reforms in jurisprudence that happened post-WW2 weren't incorporated in the judicial codes for most colonies at that point, so judicial norms remain paternalistic.

> Scottish influence is imprinted in UK law, US law and any ex-colony

In Canada sure (Scots were overrepresented in "anglophone" Canada), but not the rest of the Commonwealth.
by taeric | 2025-04-29 19:01:24+00:00
I think I'm largely looking for what makes this different from telling someone to just not be depressed?

I can see approaching things in a different way. I was fond of a more Socratic approach for a while, as an example. But that is more than just reframing, that is using a different approach.

For your example, it looks like you are making sure to consider things in a way that does not assume the outcome?
by hnuser123456 | 2025-04-29 19:01:29+00:00
Having a chatgpt style experience locally requires about 24GB of dedicated VRAM at a bandwidth of about 1 TB/s. These "AI PCs" are nothing close to this. They can only run much smaller neural networks for a small variety of data operations. Think of like, photoshop filters. Any AI chat experience on an AI PC is still being sent over network to a datacenter. Some new photoshop filters does not define a whole new category of computer.
by team_pyrefly | 2025-04-29 19:02:06+00:00
We totally get why you might be skeptical and even address this in our FAQ: https://pyrefly.org/en/docs/pyrefly-faq/#how-do-i-know-this-...

We know we can't just ask for trust upfront. Instead, we want to earn it by showing up consistently and following through on our commitments. So, take us for a spin and see how we do over time. We're excited to prove ourselves!
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-29 19:02:23+00:00
It's actually trivial, even with the best LLMs on the market:

Try to rapidly change the conversation to a wildly different subject

Humans will resist this, or say some final "closing comments"

Even the absolute best LLMs will happily go wherever they are led, without commenting remotely on topic shifts

Try it out

Edit: This isn't even a terribly contrived example by the way. It is an example of how some people with ADHD navigate normal conversations sometimes
by ryandrake | 2025-04-29 19:02:35+00:00
These HN threads with people that have 20K tabs living for years are so wild! I guess I'm the only savage in the world who closes my browser window and quits the browser application whenever I'm done with my computer for the day. I occasionally use tabs to temporarily have one or two web pages open at a time, usually because I need to browse/compare both of them actively, but when I'm not actively reading a page, I see no reason to keep a tab around.
by olyjohn | 2025-04-29 19:02:35+00:00
You don't even need a penny, or have to remember where on the penny you're supposed to be looking... There are wear bars in the tread in every single tire. If the tire tread is flush with them, the tires are shot. Also there is a date code on the side, and if your tires are getting near 10 years old, it's probably a good time to replace them.
by aditya1081 | 2025-04-29 19:02:39+00:00
We are building Bree - a better way to create and maintain technical docs.

Here to discuss what pain points do people face in creating and maintaining proper internal docs. For me it was - capturing valuable discussions from Slack into a doc that can be accessed later.

PS: We are looking for early paid pilots - preferable series A to B startups.
by UltraSane | 2025-04-29 19:02:41+00:00
It can be incredibly useful. One example is to have every every process linked to the VM it is running on and the host the VM is running on and the TCP port the process is listening on. If you have all the correct relationships defined then you can write a query like this to find every process on every VM listening on port 80 on a given VM host.

MATCH p = (host:VMHOST {name: 'your_host_name'})-[:RUNS]->(vm)-[:HAS_SERVICE]->(service)-[:EXPOSES_PORT]->(port:TCPPORT {port: 80}) RETURN p

This can save a absurd amount of time for analyzing the impacts of failures and security isolation compliance.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-04-29 19:03:06+00:00
I talk and work with plenty of non-tech-savvy people. They don't give a flying fuck about Meta AI.

The HN crowd is indeed overly dismissive of Meta and their reach across numerous markets, and my experience is not the end-all-be-all of data collection of course. But I have yet to see any casual users of anything who give a ghost of a shit about AI. Like I'm not even saying they're anti-AI or skeptics or whatever, I'm saying: any time in the last like 2 years when some product or another has had some damn AI or another integrated into it: reactions range from indifference to irritation.

Most I've seen is people see it, wonder what it is, ask it a few things, and then get bored with it and go back to what they were doing.
by gizmo686 | 2025-04-29 19:04:05+00:00
The specific issue identified by the parent would not be helped by batteries. Like solar panels, batteries output DC voltage, and have no inertia on the AC side.

The solution in either case is the same. Put enough smarts in the inverter for it to have "synthetic inertia". If we didn't have the ability to do something like that in inverters, the solution would be something like flywheels to augment the chemical batteries.
Tell HN: EasyList breaks a decent chunk of the internet
by LiamPowell | 2025-04-29 19:05:11+00:00
I've once again ran in to a case of EasyList, which is one of the most popular ad blocking lists, breaking a website in a subtle way. I think many people here who use ad blockers are not aware of how ridiculous many of the rules in EasyList are and how unwilling the authors are to fix it. Therefore I have compiled a small list of examples to try to compel people to switch to just about any other list:

- https://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?t=48142-supermicro-ipmi - Blocking anything called eventlog.js because a website they didn't like must have used that name once.

- https://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?t=48173-300x250 - Blocking a few hundred variants of NNNxNNN because some ads happen to have that in their file name, nevermind that this also blocks probably millions of not-ad images that also happen to put their resolution in their file name.

- https://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?t=48478-go-oracle-com - Blocking Oracle's link redirection domain just because I guess.

- https://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?t=48491-belong-curtin-edu-au - Blocking a university's outreach program page because they dared to use an Oracle service.

- Blocking anything called `disclaim_bar`, `disclaimer-box`, `disclaimerBox`, `disclaimerC`, or `disclaimerDialog_modal`, which as you might imagine blocks all sorts of important warnings on websites.
by temp0826 | 2025-04-29 19:05:12+00:00
Kagi is something I want to use purely for their principles alone. But I still struggle to justify the cost. I'm not opposed to paying for anything- one (not directly, but comparable in my mind) service I pay for is NextDNS- if the cost were in that range it would be a complete no-brainer for me. I just hope the economies of scale can get there some day. (Keep it simple, don't add more cruft. The core product and idea is gold.)
by _p2zi | 2025-04-29 19:05:25+00:00
> The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index® fell by 7.9 points in April to 86.0 (1985=100). The Present Situation Index—based on consumers’ assessment of current business and labor market conditions—decreased 0.9 points to 133.5. The Expectations Index—based on consumers’ short-term outlook for income, business, and labor market conditions—dropped 12.5 points to 54.4, the lowest level since October 2011 and well below the threshold of 80 that usually signals a recession ahead. The cutoff date for preliminary results was April 21, 2025.
by jaredklewis | 2025-04-29 19:05:32+00:00
No one knows, but if history is any guide, it is very unlikely.

I would also be surprised if the twice the work was "suddenly" required, but would you be surprised if people buy more of something if it costs less? In the 1800s ordinary Americans typically owned only a few outfits. Coats were often passed down several generations. Today, ordinary Americans usually own dozens of outfits. Did Americans in the 1800s simply not like owning lots of clothing? Of course not. They would have liked to own more clothing, but demand was constrained by cost. As the price of clothing has gone down, demand for clothing has increased.

With software, won't it be the same? If engineers are twice as productive as before, competitive pressure will push the price of software down. Custom software for businesses (for example) is very expensive now. If it were less expensive, maybe more businesses will purchase custom software. If my Fastmail subscription becomes cheaper, maybe I will have more money to spend on other software subscriptions. In this way, across the whole economy, it is very ordinary for productivity gains to not reduce employment or wages.

Of course demand is not infinitely elastic (i.e. there is a limit on how many outfits a person will buy, no matter how cheap), but the effects of technological disruption on the economy are complex. Even if demand for one kind of labor is reduced, demand for other kinds of labor can increase. Even if we need less weavers, maybe we need more fashion designers, more cotton farmers, more truckers, more cardboard box factory workers, more logistics workers, and so on. Even if we need less programmers, maybe we need more data center administrators?

No one knows what the future economy will look like, but so far the long term trends in economic history don't link technological innovations with decreased wages or unemployment.
by erelong | 2025-04-29 19:06:01+00:00
I do think it's about the incentives, but I've had conversations elsewhere between a perceived distinction between "morals" and, for lack of a better word, "ethics"

Morals you might not want to violate under nearly any circumstances: theft, violent crime, and so on, regardless if there are "good incentives" for you to do so.

"Ethics" might be more of things that produce bad outcomes but aren't a "sin". You might choose to uphold a personal ethic for example against participating in some of these practices which seem to make society worse over time, but which might personally benefit you. But you might not be under a "moral obligation" to do so.

Or, for example, otherwise violence might be a bad thing, but violence used in self-defense is generally accepted as being "ok". You might out of "self-defense" do some of these things that otherwise seem to produce "bad outcomes for society", out of coercion by the mass of people making "bad" decisions. But you might also "virtuously abstain", for whatever reason, as well.
by sieve | 2025-04-29 19:06:21+00:00
> If you just keep sprinting through such exercises, in a sense, mindlessly, without asking yourself how each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen, then yes, IMHO you are likely to fail.

This is where comprehensible input shines.

- you start reading actual long form content from day one instead of practice sentences

- the content maintains the context across its length, letting the brain use its pattern recognition apparatus

This does not happen with the grammar translation method. You lose the context. I would compare it with RAM being swapped to disk repeatedly in a low-ram situation on your computer.

I have never studied the grammar of my mother tongue. But I can speak complex sentences rapidly because my brain managed to recognize the patterns in the language and store the sequence information somewhere.

If they expend deliberate effort on it, some people might find methods like the ones Duolingo uses somewhat useful. However, I believe if you are capable of doing that, comprehensible input might give you more bang for the buck. It has, at least for me, provided faster results and a better vocabulary than grammar translation and half-hearted attempts at CI. I felt more confident with the language after 10 days of CI-based learning than the previous six months of memorizing noun and verb forms and meanings and translating random sentences.
by nomel | 2025-04-29 19:06:28+00:00
"fix it" was the definition of the the old usage of brick though, with the "fix it" generally meant a hardware fix, like replaced components. if the fix is reinstalling software, then that means it's still a completely functional piece of hardware. there's nothing wrong with it. you don't say your car is broken because someone who can't drive sits in the driver seat! get off my lawn!
by mfitton | 2025-04-29 19:06:31+00:00
I think it's quite common that a company has way too many things that it could work on compared to what the amount of people they should reasonably hire can get done. And working on more things actually generates more work itself. The more products you have, or the more infrastructure capabilities you build out, the more possible work you can do.

So you could work on more things with the same number of employees, make more money as a result, and either further increase the number of things you do, or if not, increase your revenue and hopefully profits per-employee.
by paulvnickerson | 2025-04-29 19:06:38+00:00
This line of worry has never panned out. There are two points:

1) AI/automation will replace jobs. This is 100% certain in some cases. Look at the industrial revolution.

2) AI/automation will increase unemployment. This has never happened and it's doubtful it will ever happen.

The reason is that humans always adapt and find ways to be helpful that automation can't do. That is why after 250 years after the industrial revolution started, we still have single-digit unemployment.