MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Billdrip – Invoice scheduling with payment links and reminders
by neutronsoup | 2025-04-07 17:14:49+00:00
I built a web app that helps freelancers and small businesses schedule invoice emails with automatic reminders and optional Stripe payment links.

Background: My partner and I run a small property development company, and we often get invoices (from contractors, cleaners, HOAs) as email attachments. Paying them involves logging into my banking portal, which is my case requires access to a list of codes printed on a card issued by my bank (I know that some EU countries even need card readers to make online payments), and I often don’t have access to that right away, or can't be bothered to do it at that time. As a result, I sometimes forget to pay those invoices until much later.

My hypothesis with Billdrip is that letting businesses create scheduled invoice emails that includes the invoice PDF and, optionally, a "Pay Now" button (Stripe payment link) will increase on-time payments.

Let me know what you think, any feedback is appreciated!
by tarentel | 2025-04-07 17:14:57+00:00
I graduated in this time period and that makes sense. I definitely didn't start doing what I wanted until some time later. I guess in a sense that makes my career overall a few years behind resume wise but at this point, being in the industry 15 years instead of 17 probably isn't going to move the needle too much in terms of salary but who knows. Either way, at this point in time, I don't feel like I've missed out really.

Also, I graduated from a pretty mediocre state school. I'm by no means starving.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-07 17:15:28+00:00
> I've worked at a couple of BigTechs, where there were between 5-20x more engineers than actual work. The trade-offs are... strange in that world.

Never seen that in my life, and I've worked at small, medium, and huge companies. Sounds wild. So they actually have zero bugs in their bug tracker, and no feature on deck waiting to be built? What do they do all day?

Typical case I've seen at many companies is: Team has N engineers, with a rough capacity to fix N x 2 bugs per week. Bugs come in at a rate of N x 3, and the bug backlog is N x 80 and constantly growing until the team does periodic "bankruptcy" ritual where they mass-close N x 50 bugs that they admit they'll never get to fixing. Repeat forever.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-07 17:15:54+00:00
Oh really? We banned billboards here in Maine in 1978ish, and you know what we don't have? Insane attempts to get around the law! There's an occasional person hired by a shady political organization to drive a couple trucks with signs on them around, but that's already not allowed by the law, it's just poorly enforced, and it's very rare.

Know what we have instead?

Peace.
Ask HN: Can you use a quantum RNG to create all possible programs?
by parpfish | 2025-04-07 17:16:24+00:00
Woke up this morning with a strange thought that I'm hoping the geniuses here at HN can poke some holes in.

let's say that I take a quantum random number generator and use it to create a random-length sequence of random bits.

it'll probably be a meaningless random sequence, but by pure dumb luck you might just end up with something that could be compiled and run as a program.

if you looked across all the universes in the multiverse, would it be true that all possible programs now exist (within their universes)?

in one universe, i'd get a playable version of tetris. in some other universe, i'd have a program for efficiently cracking passwords. and if AGI were possible, in some universe i'd end up creating AGI.
by diggan | 2025-04-07 17:16:29+00:00
For being an article about "open source" and the implications on geo-politics, it seems like a not sufficiently researched article. Something obvious that sticks out:

> Meta & Llama: In 2023, Meta was behind OpenAI and Google in AI. By releasing Llama openly, Meta gained community support and adoption, striking at rivals’ closed approaches.

Meta might call Llama "open source" in their marketing material, but all their legal documents call Llama "proprietary" and anyone taking a closer look at their license/use policy would immediately be able to point out how Llama isn't open source.

Since the article gets something really basic wrong, how could we trust the rest of the article?
by mulmen | 2025-04-07 17:17:05+00:00
> Clarification: doesn't align on the lack of pocket depth or on the ease of firing?

Pocket depth. If the government actually had infinite money there wouldn't be so much gnashing of teeth about the budget. I don't see any assertion about the difficulty of firing so I can't respond to that.

> My understanding for most of the bureaucracy was that there are some very solid policy guardrails set up around termination of bureaucrats; once you're in and have some time under your belt, only gross malfeasance gets you removed.

Your understanding is commonly repeated but I'm beginning to question how true it is. "Bureaucrats" is a pejorative used to describe government workers and imply they don't do valuable work but I don't find it persuasive. I have no idea how easy or hard it is to fire someone in government or the amount of oversight involved in identifying abuse and incompetence.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-04-07 17:18:08+00:00
2002 felt similar, although it was never so bad that even MIT grads had trouble finding jobs, just those of us from low tier schools.

The classmates who took non-tech jobs after graduating in 2002 never came back to the industry. They generally did alright, but taking a job outside the industry makes it really difficult to get back in. Employers expect to hire people with no experience straight out of school.

That MEng sounds like the best option to me. That was definitely the best option for my 2002 classmates.
by trollbridge | 2025-04-07 17:18:22+00:00
Payroll is relatively simple for a basic LLC. You can use a service like Rippling or a local CPA to do it for you. Usually costs around $40 per month per employee.

S Corp filings are drop dead simple. The tax return may take a CPA’s help if your structure is complicated or you want to get the absolute best tax breaks possible.

Yes it could be simpler - jurisdictions like Estonia figured this out.
by lukan | 2025-04-07 17:19:42+00:00
The wiki article implies the Professor was fine with it, so stolen is maybe not correct.

" Harvard officials were not pleased that Gates and Allen (who was not a student) had used the PDP-10 to develop a commercial product, but determined that the computer itself, which technically belonged to the military, was not covered by any Harvard policy; the PDP-10 was controlled by Professor Thomas Cheatham, who felt that students could use the machine for personal use. Harvard placed restrictions on the computer's use, and Gates and Allen had to use a commercial time share computer in Boston to finalize the software."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
by Muromec | 2025-04-07 17:19:50+00:00
>Cookie banners aren't a requirement unless you wish to store cookies that aren't strictly necessary (statistics, marketing, etc)[0]. Cookies that are essential for the user to browse the site (login tokens) don't require consent.

So if I use telemetry to catch some dirty frontend blob throwing a hissy fit of an exception and that telemetry is tracking sessions rather than individual events (hello ms app insights) -- is that functional or, statistics or etc?
by sterlind | 2025-04-07 17:21:08+00:00
> AFAIK the 1st Amendment is about whether the government can prevent you from speaking, not there are 0 consequences to all speech.

1A prevents the government from punishing or compelling speech. it's not absolute - slander and death threats aren't protected, for example - but it's pretty broad. you can publish classified documents, for example. the leaker can be punished, but not the journalist.

1A doesn't just protect your right to speak while somehow not protecting you from arrest for your speech. punishment is how all laws are enforced.
by sureglymop | 2025-04-07 17:21:31+00:00
In this case the result/output is plain text. Since it's not code it may be harder to imagine an attack vector. As an attacker, here would be some of my capabilities/possibilities:

- I could change the meaning of the output and the output entirely. - If I can control one part of a larger set of data that is analyzed , I could influence the whole output. - I could try to make the process take forever in order to waste resources.

I'd say the first scenario is most interesting, especially if I could then potentially also influence how an LLM trained on the output behaves and do even more damage using this down the line.

Let's say I'm a disgruntled website author. I want my users to see correct information on my website but don't want any LLM to be trained on it. In this case I could probably successfully use prompt injection to "poison" the model.
by int_19h | 2025-04-07 17:21:31+00:00
I think this is very much a cultural issue rather than a technical one. Just look at array bounds checking: widespread in the mainframe era even in systems languages, relegated to high-level languages for a very long time on the basis of unacceptable perf hit in low-level code, but more recently seeing more acceptance in new systems languages (e.g. Rust).

Similarly in this case, it's not like we don't have languages that do checked arithmetic throughout by default. VB.NET, for example, does exactly that. Higher-level languages have other strategies to deal with the problem; e.g. unbounded integer types as in Python, which simply never overflow. And, like you say, this sort of thing is considered unacceptable for low-level code on perf grounds, but, given the history with nulls and OOB checking, I think there is a lesson here.
by Volundr | 2025-04-07 17:21:36+00:00
> Could there be a reason that the Trump administration is continuing to persevere on something that is seen across the board as an objectively bad idea?

From cofefe to tarrifs there's always someone out there insisting that whatever inexplicable move Trump is making at this moment is actually 4D chess, and ready to explain how this is some convoluted move we just don't understand. In reality I think the answer is no. I've seen nothing to convince me over the years that Trump is operating at this level, and it's telling that it's never Trump whose explaining how these moves are supposed to lead to wonderful outcomes through convoluted paths, but instead some rando on the Internet.
by jermaustin1 | 2025-04-07 17:22:15+00:00
I did something similar for a "game engine" let the NPCs remember things from other NPCs' and the PC's interaction with them. It wasn't perfect, but the player could negotiate a cheaper price on a dagger for instance if they promised to owe the NPC a larger payout next time they returned to the shop. And it worked... most of the time, the shop owner remembered the debt and inquired about it on the next interaction - but not always, which I guess is kind of "human".
by int_19h | 2025-04-07 17:22:53+00:00
The difference is that C# has well-defined behavior in this case - a non-nullable notification is really "not-nullable-ish", and there are cases even in the language itself where code without any casts in it will observe null values of such types. It's just a type system hole they allow for convenience and back-compat.

OTOH with Rust you'd have to violate its safety guarantees, which if I understand correctly triggers UB.
by cylinder714 | 2025-04-07 17:22:58+00:00
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC

"Tiny BASIC was designed by Dennis Allison and the People's Computer Company (PCC) in response to the open letter published by Bill Gates complaining about users pirating Altair BASIC, which sold for $150. Tiny BASIC was intended to be a completely free version of BASIC that would run on the same early microcomputers."
by carabiner | 2025-04-07 17:22:58+00:00
I don't think it was that bad. I graduated 12/2008 in aerospace engineering from a big state school. Not MIT. We all had at least 1 offer from big companies, even the middling students. I had 2 offers, and probably could have swung a third. It felt like the recession mostly affected the housing market and older career folks, but for us new grads things were mostly normal. This feels like a permanent shift due to AI in part, and interest rates going back up since pandemic.
by margalabargala | 2025-04-07 17:23:11+00:00
They probably mostly don't need to be.

Most SaaS companies are not doing anything particularly innovative or novel. Most of them provide value via putting in the work to glue together several other APIs, automating something that previously was harder to script/automate, or simply applying an idea that another company pioneered to another market segment: "It's like Theranos but for barbers!"

These use cases are generally so typical of the technology being used, that LLMs can do a lot of work to script things and it's usually pretty easy to QC.
by alaxhn | 2025-04-07 17:23:55+00:00
I broadly agree that free trade increases the pie and is beneficial. I would still like to point out that I can think of two examples where the pie might actually decrease even while conceding in the vast majority of cases the pie does increase and that free trade is largely a good thing.

(1) The comparative advantage of a country is that they do not have strict environmental standards and becomes the low cost leader in a "dirty" industry.

(2) An individual in the rich country loses their job to an individual in the poor country who produces exactly the same level of output at lower cost and the individual in the rich country ends up having to subside on government benefits

For both of these examples, shareholders profit financially from the outsourcing (and so I would argue it is likely happen) even as the world in example 1 or the rich country in example 2 loses out.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-07 17:24:33+00:00
If I have to seek it out, say a product catalog or a website, it really isn't marketing or advertising.

The "problem" is that everything is vying for our attention because the internet made it vastly cheaper for any random joe blow to force a set of pixels in front of our faces.

That's the distinction. If I can't ignore it, then it shouldn't be legal. Companies should have no right to my attention.
by recursive | 2025-04-07 17:24:36+00:00
The given examples seem disconnected from the duty cycle radios on my browser. I mean changing them changes the sound, but it's as if the one I selected is not the one playing.

Anyway, what could have been the purpose for the gameboy hardware to provide both 25% and 75% duty cycle? In audio, these sound identical to a human, no? They are the same waveform with inverted polarity. They have the same overtone content.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-07 17:24:37+00:00
It didn't happen because like everything else that the peanut gallery deems "obvious" the actual pros and cons of implementing it didn't pencil out until recently.

This was tried in the 1950s and 1960s. IDK why it didn't make the cut then. Probably cumulative weight of tanks. It takes A LOT of air to run an engine.
by Gracana | 2025-04-07 17:24:38+00:00
Yup, that's the problem I run into. You give it some lore to draw on or describe a character or give them some knowledge, and it'll just blurt it out when it finds a place for it. It takes a lot of prompting to get it to stop, and I haven't found a consistent method that works across models (or even across sessions).
by sensodine | 2025-04-07 17:24:55+00:00
(I work at S2.)

> what are some of the notable issues that were find using the DST approach

We've discovered a few distributed deadlocks. And in general it's been incredibly helpful in exercising any parts of the system that involve caches or eventual consistency, as these can be really hard to reason about otherwise.

> if a LLM system would be able to help analyze the TRACE logs

Neat idea! For us, the logs are typically being dug into only if there is a failure condition for the test as a whole. Often times we'll inject additional logging or state monitoring to better understand what led to the failure (which is easy enough to do given the reproducibility of the failure in the sim). Trace logs are also being analyzed in the context of the "meta-test", but that's just looking for identical outputs. (More about that here: https://github.com/tokio-rs/turmoil/issues/19#issuecomment-2... )
by erikerikson | 2025-04-07 17:25:14+00:00
Even your gilded claim is breaking down these days it seems.

I started in state schools and leveraged that into one of the world's best (half the MIT professors had graduated from my alma mater when I was deciding where to go) for my MSc.

As [likely] one of the people you reference, I am a counter example to your guarantee. No one should fail who contributes in good faith. Live life well, be responsible, have fun, spread joy, and no matter what happens in your career you'll have succeeded.
by giuliomagnifico | 2025-04-07 17:25:28+00:00
The article talks about the fact that those model are "available to anyone", even Llama is Open Source from that point of view: https://github.com/meta-llama/llama-models Where Llama is not Open Source is in total respect of certain ethical principles: https://opensource.org/blog/metas-llama-license-is-still-not...

So, it’snot 100% Open Source inside the context of the article it’s acceptable. Moreover, even DeepSeek is not OpenSource, it’s "OpenWeight"
by Retric | 2025-04-07 17:25:47+00:00
FMEA/FMECA are only the first step in a system reliability study, it isn’t an analysis of mitigation strategies. Fault tree analysis (etc) concerns itself with things like how long an aircraft can fly with an engine failure. Doing that involves an assessment of various risks.

> I agree there may be cases where there are no reasonably safe options. That means your engineered system (especially in a public-facing product) is not ready for production because you haven't met a reasonable risk threshold.

Individual failures should never result in such scenarios, but ditching in the ocean may be the best option after a major fuel leak, loss of all engine power, etc.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-04-07 17:26:29+00:00
The "whole article" includes:

"A. baumannii can cause infections in blood, lungs, urinary tracts, and wounds. It typically causes these in healthcare settings, such as hospitals. Owing to its ability to resist antibiotic treatment, it has been listed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a critical priority antibiotic-resistant pathogen."
by Muromec | 2025-04-07 17:26:39+00:00
it's not that it's hard to comply, it's fighting malicious compliance which is hard. nevertheless, it's a good damn question why every single operator that has "accept all" and doesn't have "reject all" right there on the consent banner isn't fined on the spot.

I think the commission noted this behavior and malicious compliance is already factored into the DMA act. The "deregulation" of GDPR could as well be retrofitting all the lessons learned into the GPDR v2.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-07 17:26:45+00:00
Yeah, for LLMs what we label "prompt-injection" isn't an exception or an error, it's a fundamental feature.

Get a document, provide a bigger document that "fits". In that document, there's no fundamental distinction between prompt, user input, or output the LLM generated on a prior iteration. (Hence tricks like: "Here's a ROT13 string, pretend you're telling yourself the opposite of that sarcastically.")

The kind of "proper" security everyone wants would require a whole new approach that can--at a high and debuggable level--recognize distinct actors/entities, logical propositions, contradictions, and when one entity is asserting a proposition rather than quoting/rejecting it.
by DeathArrow | 2025-04-07 17:26:48+00:00
>I've always been pretty vocal about my dislike for Trump too. Well, for the first time, I'm worried that, when traveling to the US, some overzealous TSA agent could ask me to get access to my social media accounts, and that I could be refused entry, or even get sent to one of those wonderful privately owned jails;

I've been a vocal Trump supporter on social media. By this measure they should give me a green card if I'll ever plan to visit US.
by SoftTalker | 2025-04-07 17:27:13+00:00
OpenBSD often takes an approach of removing rarely-used or archaic functionality to achieve simplicity in code or configuration or improved security. They gutted a lot of openssl when they made libressl. Their OpenSMTPD is vastly simpler than something like postfix or sendmail.

openrsync is very likely good code, but that doesn't mean it replicates every feature of the rsync utility.
by throwanem | 2025-04-07 17:27:20+00:00
I'm (at least) a third-generation Nikon shooter, and I still have my grandfather's FTn. For its era, predating CNC and CAD, it is very comfortable to use, but the leather "eveready" case shell is welcome.

(One reason I shoot Nikon is because I can still shoot his glass on modern bodies. Indeed, that's what my D5300 spends a lot of its time wearing these days.)

True revolutions in consumer imaging excepted, I doubt I'll feel more than an occasional gadget fan's urge to replace my D850 and D500 as my primary bodies. Oh, the Z series has features, I won't disagree, even if I'm deeply suspicious of EVFs and battery life. But the D850 is a slightly stately, super-versatile full-frame body, and the D500 is a light, 20fps APS-C, that share identical UIs, lens and peripheral lineups, and (given a fast card to write to) deep enough buffers to mostly not need thinking about.

For someone like me who cares very little about technical specs, and a great deal for the ability to hang a camera over their shoulder and walk out the door and never once lose a shot due to equipment failure, there really isn't much that could matter more. I may have 350 milliseconds to get a flight shot of a spooked heron, or be holding my breath and focusing near 1:1 macro with three flash heads twelve inches away from a busily foraging and politely opinionated hornet. In those moments, eye and hand and machine and mind and body all must work as one to get the shot, and having to think at all about how to use the camera essentially guarantees a miss.

Hence the five years of work I've put into not having to think about that. I suppose I could've done more than well enough with any system, sure. But my experiences with others have left me usually quite glad Nikon's is the system I invested in.
by Volundr | 2025-04-07 17:27:22+00:00
> Presumably, even if people supported this tariff strategy, they might still disagree that the president should be the one doing it.

You can sort of count me among this number. Not this wild tarrifs everyone strat, but I've long thought we should have tarrifs on goods from countries like China that are happy to exploit their workers to steal market share. 54% doesn't seem crazy to me. The thing is to actually encourage investment they'd need to a) phase in over time to give companies a chance to react, and b) be something more permanent than an executive order.

If it was the legislature putting in place something more targeted and gradual I'd probably find myself arguing for the Republican position on something for the first time in a long time.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-07 17:27:47+00:00
That caused me to re-read the article. Actually it is surprisingly ambiguous on that point inside the text of the article, with wording like

> the human remains likely belonged to soldiers who died during a battle involving ancient Roman legionaries.

Doesn’t say which side they were on. The most direct bit seems to be

> X-ray images of the sheath revealed typical ancient Roman decorations: silver wire inlays […]

But a German could just have traded with a Roman at some point.

Of course, the headline says they are Roman soldiers. I wonder if it is hard to tell definitively.