MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-04-07 10:44:36+00:00
> Germany is in an energy crisis and a few other members are close to a sovereign debt crisis. Domestic production of weapons will be tough and expensive. The EU’s plan to sell bonds to pursue war with Russia looks horrid. They’re in no position to be in a trade war. In a few months time when this reality sinks in, they will have to make a trade deal and remove US tariffs.

This really, really depends on how things evolve this week. Like, the EU will 100% tarriff the US (and probably China to prevent dumping) this week.

The big question is whether or not they use the Anti-Coercion Instrument, and hit US tech and financial services. Selfishly, I hope they don't (as I work for a US fintech while I am based in the EU), but this will probably happen if Trump retaliates to this week's sanctions (which he probably will).

This is gonna get a lot worse before it gets better, unless there's a unilateral pullback on the part of the US (which seems very unlikely).
by compsciphd | 2025-04-07 10:45:39+00:00
3-7 million is somewhat proportional to the # of TI 99/4a (my first computer) which sold 2.5Million or so, but many of those were probably on the fire sale, and at least some of them probably went to backup parts for people that already had it. While the 99/4a is remembered somewhat fondly by those who had it (speech synthesizer, expansion modules for p-code, forth and others), it wasn't a system that had a huge amount of development done for it, and died a pretty quick death.
by JaumeGreen | 2025-04-07 10:46:46+00:00
It's the other way around. Python notebooks fall short compared to this because they don't have the same kind of interactivity with the data as GT has.

A single tool in the toolkit is already equivalent to notebooks, at least from what I glimpsed at the introductory video. Then you have the rest of the tools, how it can easily inspect the objects, and probably manipulate them.

This is probably one of the future ways in which we will work in programming in the future, when someone creates some similar tool, around a mainstream language, that can easily interact with LLMs, APIs, and data visualization tools.
by octacat | 2025-04-07 10:46:58+00:00
"Sony’s software for processing ARW RAW files is called Imaging Edge. Like most first-party software from camera manufacturers, it’s terrible and unintuitive to use — and should be saved for situations like a high-resolution multishot mode where it’s the only method to use a camera’s proprietary feature."

I think the primarily reason is that they have great hardware developers and terrible software developers. So, having ARWs it is maximum they could provide to photographer, so they could take the files and run away from sony as soon as possible (i.e. do the rest in the better software).

Pentax could save DNGs, there are zero reasons for other companies not to do the same.
by n0n0n4t0r | 2025-04-07 10:47:26+00:00
I'm not sure about your argument. For example, symphony can be used as a micro-framework since a long time (https://symfony.com/blog/new-in-symfony-2-8-symfony-as-a-mic...) and very few dependencies are required.

Relying on such heavy tested is a no brainier for me, especially because it offer well designed abstractions. You seem to see them as dragging you down, I see them as opportunity to have hooks at the right place for free.
by ashu_trv | 2025-04-07 10:47:52+00:00
Keeping documentation and SDK updates aligned with evolving "LLM contexts" can quickly overwhelm dev teams. At VideoDB, we've built an open-source solution—Agent Toolkit—that automates syncing your docs, SDK versions, and examples, making your dev content effortlessly consumable by Cursor, Claude AI, and other agents. Ready-to-use template available.
by itchyjunk | 2025-04-07 10:47:55+00:00
Since diamonds are surrounded by danger and if it dies, it loses its items and such, why would it not be satisfied after discovering iron pick axe or somesuch? Is it in a mode where it doesn't lose its item when it dies? Does it die a lot? Does it ever try digging vertically down? Does it ever discover other items/tools you didn't expect it to? Open world with sparse reward seems like such a hard problem. Also, once it gets the item, does it stop getting reward for it? I assume so. Surprised that it can work with this level of sparse rewards.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-04-07 10:48:16+00:00
Yes the latest Goldman Sachs recession forecast is 45% probability, which is what makes it into the headlines.

However the report says this is assuming the tariffs won't go into effect. The flagship policy Trump just announced after going on about how the most beautiful word is "tariff" for four decades.

If they go into effect it goes higher. But why assume that the President of the USA will actually do what he just said he'd do in a big speech with giant printed props.
Show HN: NightScreen Mode extension to reduce eye strain while working late
by mkapoor26 | 2025-04-07 10:48:30+00:00
I built this after getting tired of burning my eyes working late at night. Most such extensions either break websites or don’t filter blue light properly.

So what it does is, it adds a clean dark mode and an amber light filter that helps reduce eye strain and improve sleep quality. It also allows you to manage brightness, contrast of the screen and you can add black and white mode too. It works on all sites and has no ads.

You can check it out here: https://nightscreenmode.app

Would love your feedback or suggestions. Happy to answer questions!
by DarkWiiPlayer | 2025-04-07 10:48:44+00:00
> Some quick searching indicates that the startup rate (per capita) in Germany is about 1.1%, while the USA is 1.5%. Not a huge difference, but the USA doesn't have any of those initiatives afaik.

I believe there's differences between east and west Germany, so if you look at the west specifically, the gamp might get a little bit smaller.

Beyond that, Germany doesn't have as much of a startup culture as the USA, which is precisely why we need to incentivise people in a way that others don't.

> Just wondering what actually moves the needle and how to better create a society that is entrepreneurial

Willingness and awareness, where the latter is probably easy to fix but the former is a bit trickier: You need those people who have the ability to pull it off to want it in the first place.

And there I guess it splits into a) the benefits of entreprenaurship b) the benefits of employment and c) the cultural influence on how these are weighed against each other.

So tl;dr: a) make starting a company attractive, b) make employment suck more and c) convince people that independence beats security.

Employment in Germany is definitely a lot cozier than in the US, so unless we want to get rid of that, a) and c) are the options we have. If you want to achieve it without propaganda, then all you can really do is a), and that's what these programmes are already doing.

I think reducing buerocracy and offering good social safety nets so a failing business doesn't translate to a ruined life are the way to go, at least in the short term.
by grues-dinner | 2025-04-07 10:50:44+00:00
Depends very much on the assembly line. Some are quite reasonable, especially in smaller firms where you don't have a completely detached management in their ivory tower passing efficiency edicts for grinding through disposable anonymous minions. You can't abuse your staff too much if you have to sit next to them in the canteen! It's not exactly stimulating work and obviously not a rockstar salary, but it's comfortable enough indoor work and you don't have to pee in bottles and have a psychopathic delivery schedule every day.
by CrossVR | 2025-04-07 10:51:35+00:00
Running companies like this is how you end up with the current state of Boeing. Only valuing engineers who are directly earning you profit and firing the ones who only have an indirect role in your profit centers.

> If your work isn’t clearly connected to company profit, your position is unstable

You know what really makes your position unstable as an engineer? Delaying a product over "safety" concerns, thereby doing work that's clearly connected to preventing company profit. Only young, bright-eyed engineers would be naive enough to bring up safety concerns right?
by dagw | 2025-04-07 10:52:57+00:00
Could it be because those companies are full of people who somehow occupy important positions without understanding the basics of the engineering work.

Every company I've ever worked at has more work that they would like to do than they have engineers to do it. The problem often isn't that they don't understand why fixing technical debt is important, it's to decide if fixing that particular technical debt right now is the best use of these resources right now. Also they might also know things that I might not know, like long term plans for and the relative profitability of different projects, which will affect how they make decisions. No point in spending effort fixing technical debt if that project/department is already slated for closure.

Also maybe it's a US vs EU thing, but at every engineering and IT company I've ever worked in Europe, the person two steps above me was basically always an engineer or at least has a science or technical background.
by fine_tune | 2025-04-07 10:53:00+00:00
Attempting to train this on a real workload I converted over the weekend after, "step" 8M~ so far and rarely scores above 5% and most are 0% but has scored 60% once 7M~ steps ago.

Adding more than 1 GPU didn't improve speed but that's pretty standard as we don't have fancy interconnect. Bit annoying they didn't use tensorboard for logging, but overall seems like a pretty cool lib - will leave it a few days and see if it can learn (no other algo has so I dont have much hope).
by eloisius | 2025-04-07 10:53:14+00:00
Maybe it's different on the desktop, but on the iPhone it only detects the same photo that may have been saved at different resolutions or things like that. That's useful, but I really want something that can say use an embedding or something to group all 10 photos I shot of friends around the campfire and help me select one keeper and delete the other 9.
Show HN: An AI Powered Legal Assistant
by DavidMercerr | 2025-04-07 10:53:23+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been building Lexence with a small team - it’s an AI-powered legal assistant designed to help people understand, draft, and explore legal content faster.

You can ask legal questions, get clauses drafted, explain legal jargon, or paste full contracts for a breakdown. We’ve trained it using multiple data sources and kept the interface simple for anyone to use - not just lawyers.

It’s free to try right now. We’d love feedback on the product, the UX, and what you think we could improve.

Try it here: https://www.lexence.tech/?ref=HackerNews

We’re around and would love to hear your thoughts
by bambax | 2025-04-07 10:54:51+00:00
I think there is a big divide here. Every adult on earth knows magic is "fake", but some can still be amazed and entertained by it, while others find it utterly boring because it's fake, and the only possible (mildly) interesting thing about it is to try to figure out what the trick is.

I'm in the second camp but find it kind of sad and often envy the people who can stay entertained even though they know better.
by uecker | 2025-04-07 10:54:51+00:00
Rust is one tool which can be used to avoid life time issues. It is not the only tool. It also only works perfectly only when you exclusively limit yourself to using safe Rust and not use C libraries, unsafe Rust, or not directly use APIs that use integers (I assume in this example, Rust may have special safe wrappers, but in general the language also does not prevent this error). Resource management is something model checkers could verify in C. One could also design a safe API around it in C. Possibly GCC's analyzer could find such issues. In any case, the question is how much effort one wants to invest or not and what tradeoffs the solutions have. A small risk of missing such things may also be an entirely reasonable choice, even so Rust proponents irrationally claim otherwise. For example, curl uses C89 which is certainly not the best choice for safety. It is the best choice for portability to obscure platforms, but this requirement would also rule out Rust.
by treetalker | 2025-04-07 10:55:17+00:00
… or don't, if you think the Dark Forest hypothesis is likely to be true.

---

Separately, and with the intention to help, not to be pedantic:

The phrase How it works? is an immediate turn-off. Standard English phrasing is How does it work?. (By "standard" I mean that every native speaker I can imagine would say it this way, and no native speaker I can imagine would ever use the website's phrasing.)

I often see the similar problem of using both how and like together, when either is acceptable, but not both. (Like typically requires what, not how.)

Correct: How does it look?

Correct: What does it look like?

Incorrect: How does it look like?

Sometimes the latter problem compounds the former one.

Doubly incorrect: How it looks like?

To me, a native English speaker, the incorrect constructions smack of "non-native Internet Englishes". A website/service must persuade me (and others) to look at it, let alone use it, so the copywriters should pay close attention to their rhetoric — and reading miscues are all but guaranteed to reduce persuasive power.
by autoexec | 2025-04-07 10:56:01+00:00
> but then you are immediately conflating that with a reputation for being a "stable employer" (read: not firing people when maybe you should), which is not how I want my tax dollars to be used.

You're using an incorrect definition for "stable employer". Employers with low turnover rates are stable employers. The usual reason for low turnover rate is employee satisfaction with the job and their work environment, not a failure to fire people who should be fired. If you know of a government employee who should be fired you can apply political pressure on the people responsible and, if needed, vote them out of office and replace them with someone who will fire that person.

Spending is a legitimate concern, and there are situations where money in government is being wasted, people are bribed, no-bid contracts are awarded, etc. That happens much less than you'd think though and you can run into the same kinds of problems in the private sector too. It's much easier to spot when it happens in government because the books are open records.

> I want the federal government to be exactly as big as it needs to be in order to deliver on the democratically decided goals of the American people.

Consider that governments are capable of proving a service at cost while a private company cannot because on top of the cost they also need to fill their own pockets with taxpayer money. Private companies must make profit, which means that they must charge taxpayers more than necessary.

I'd agree that we want talented government workers, and we often get them, but most of all we want the goods and services we're paying for. We shouldn't have to lower our ambitions, if anything we should be demanding more from our government, and that includes getting more for our money.
by SleepyMyroslav | 2025-04-07 10:56:23+00:00
if you plan to look at pointer provenance please check recent HN discussions like this one ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42878450 ) and transitively links to source papers for C.

TLDR (imho) C has failed to define pointer provenance but had to acknowledge its existence. LLVM and GCC have their own ideas on it which means their open issues on it are different. For practical languages aiming to be useful in embedded ie Rust there are complex workarounds: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ptr/index.html#exposed-provena.... What is relevant for C3 is that it is likely to be exposed to open issues from LLVM and people will need practical ways to solve them.

ps Don't take my word for it. My tldr might be wrong because of my gamedev experience (like we dont ship products with GCC).
by 4ad | 2025-04-07 10:56:57+00:00
No it doesn't. A DNG is just a container that can hold anything, including compressed data, just like the RAF.

Coincidentally, most proprietary RAW formats are just bastardized TIFFs, and DNG is also a TIFF derivative...

There is zero technical reason not to use DNG. Leica and Pentax use it just fine.
by bentley | 2025-04-07 10:57:09+00:00
As an OpenBSD developer who frequently fixes portability issues in external software, this doesn’t match my experience. Upstream developers are typically happy to merge patches to improve POSIX compliance; often the result is simpler than their existing kludges attempting to support desired platforms like MacOS, Alpine/Musl, Android, Dash-as-sh, and various BSDs. It turns out a lot of people find value in relying on an agreed‐upon behavior that’s explicitly documented, rather than “this seems to work at the moment on the two or three distros I’ve tested.”
by WillAdams | 2025-04-07 10:58:14+00:00
For the machine shop there are the "Gingery" books:

https://gingerybookstore.com/

which is a multi-volume series based on the fact that a lathe is the only tool in a machine shop which can replicate itself, so the first volume has one make an aluminum casting foundry in one's backyard, the second how to use it to make a lathe, then one can use the rough-cast lathe to improve itself (or make a better lathe), and from there make the entirety of a machine shop.

Blacksmithing as noted in the original article is unique in that it is self-sufficient in a way that few other processes are, and downright elemental in what one needs.

Another book which touches on this sort of things is Verne's _The Mysterious Island_ which has a couple of escaped Civil War prisoners making things from essentially first principles:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1268

Less on the nose are _Robinson Crusoe_ and _The Swiss Family Robinson_, though those have starter kits in the form of flotsam and jetsam (rather more than that for the latter).
by ffsm8 | 2025-04-07 10:59:36+00:00
Notably, Warren Buffett essentially exited the stock market over the last few years because he believes all his investments were massively overvalued.

That does paint a pretty grim picture wrt potential stock growth, if this finally triggers the correction back to a more sane stock price (last I read about it, you'd have to hold the stock for 65 years for the investment to break even).

The current stock valuations are essentially based purely on the same mechanic that makes Ponzi schemes to successful... At least short term.
by debarshri | 2025-04-07 11:00:17+00:00
I was part of mittelstand once.

I think it is very hard to compete in the market where lot of things are subsidized by VC money. The new VC backed companies have more money for marketing, subsidized sales wherein older orgs are hard to move.

Esp. for german orgs, they are very hierarchical, getting an innovation out is hard. Add union to the mix. Their margins are razor thing. It is a struggle. I can imagine back in the day, they moved the innovation needle.

Lot of these companies are often bailed out by the government as they employ alot of people.
by b-mmxx | 2025-04-07 11:00:37+00:00
Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?

Annual admin costs very much depend on how complex the business is, no? The primary recurring obligation for a UG is the mandatory retention of 25% of annual net profits until the share capital reaches €25k, enabling tax-neutral conversion to a GmbH.

What I could think of for UG with idea on converting to GmbH, you could have:

- UG setup cost (fairly low compared to GmbH)

- UG/GmbH accounting & tax compliance

- Commercial register updates

- Notary fees for structural changes, and eventually the conversion process
by mentalgear | 2025-04-07 11:01:22+00:00
Good to see startup strategies which help build stable, solid middle-sized companies.

Germany has a great success story by the name of the "Mittelstand" (SME businesses), which means a big part if the market are small to middle enterprises. This is far more consumer-friendly and innovative, as more competitive as it's not relying on a few big players like in the US that might also collude with each other.
by cookiengineer | 2025-04-07 11:02:05+00:00
I can recommend watching the free documentary "The Microsoft Dilemma - Europe as a software colony" which highlights and explains how they target corrupt branches of the government, with under the table deals for specific threats and doxxes against politicians, up until "shilling" as government officials when they are not even working there, creating fake email addresses on their tenant's email domains to make it look like they have an administrative say in decisions in other teams of the projects.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=duaYLW7LQvg

Yt-dlp while it's hot. Microsoft sure sends DMCA takedowns after this one.
by fransje26 | 2025-04-07 11:02:14+00:00
> here is an analysis that says it was the phone at fault, not human error

> I have trouble believing anything except butt covering at play.

No, I did not cheat. We just happened to be hanging around without undergarments, and, you know, we had been eating bananas, and somehow some banana peel fell on the floor, and then I slipped, and grabbed the first thing I could hold on to, and that's how we both accidentally fell on the couch, and then the dog got excited and jumped on us to play, and that's how I unvoluntarily got jump-humped into this unfortunate event..
by shailendraht | 2025-04-07 11:02:27+00:00
Simple test agent that: - records traces; input, output, Db/ORM queries, inter-service calls, events and their responses - records from any environment (record from pre-prod environment to start with) - Run traces using our CLI at every PR to compare the recorded trace to the trace of the build with the code change. Best thing - it mocks all outbound calls
by grues-dinner | 2025-04-07 11:02:28+00:00
> doesn't have quite as robust processes

They do have a double-pass system for all works based on scanned pages, which is quite nifty. Green means two passes complete: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Sophocles%27_King_Oed...

Plus you can just jump in to any work, in true wiki fashion.
by jlcases | 2025-04-07 11:03:28+00:00
Based on my experience building AI documentation tools, I've found that evaluating LLM systems requires a three-layer approach:

1. Technical Evaluation: Beyond standard benchmarks, I've observed that context preservation across long sequences is critical. Most LLMs I've tested start degrading after 2-3 context switches, even with large context windows.

2. Knowledge Persistence: It's essential to document how the system maintains and updates its knowledge base. I've seen critical context loss when teams don't track model decisions and their rationale.

3. Integration Assessment: The key metric isn't just accuracy, but how well it preserves and enhances human knowledge over time.

In my projects, implementing a structured MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive) approach reduced context loss by 47% compared to traditional documentation methods.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-07 11:04:04+00:00
Honda has been working on moving much of it's supply chain to the US for a long time - they have multiple factories across Ohio and Alabama.

In 2023, they announced that they were moving all Honda Accord manufacturing to the US [0], and their prices haven't changed significantly either ($27,615 in 2022 to $28,295 in 2025 compared to median household incomes rising from $74,755 in 2022 to $77,719 in 2023 - 2024 and 2025 numbers aren't out yet).

Most base model products won't see significant prices changes due to price elasticity of demand and better in built margins, but mid-upper tier products will see prices soar because the customer base targeted with those products tend to have a greater tolerance to price increases.

The biggest pain will be bore by dealerships, as manufacturers finance cars to them at a wholesale rate, and the dealers set the final list price. As such, they will now have to either reduce their margins or see their local demand leave.

[0] - https://www.wdrb.com/news/honda-decides-to-move-all-accord-p...