MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lijok | 2025-04-03 02:14:58+00:00
In most companies, writing code is the last thing developers (should) do. You're there to achieve business objectives, and you were hired because someone thought your experience and skillset will be necessary to achieve those business objectives. Sometimes those objectives are met with an excel sheet, sometimes they're met by losely integrating various 3rd parties, sometimes they're met by integrating various libraries, and sometimes it requires treading new ground and writing some real code.

The best web dev isn't the one that knows .Net, React, Svelte, GraphQL, micro-frontends, etc. The best web dev is the one that can convince their manager that their business objectives can be achieved by using WordPress.
by jgord | 2025-04-03 02:15:09+00:00
> making actual things ..

ahh, am trying to do that - largely self-funded RnD over 4 years -

Also trying to wake people up about the scope for ML to be applied to real engineering problems / processes ..

We hear of applied-RL/ML examples at the elite end, such as taming fusion plasma, weather prediction on a desktop, solving protein structure from DNA sequence etc..

Yet there are vast applications such as training robot hands to sort refuse for recycling, optimal heat flow in industrial processes, silicon chip layout, 2D photos to 3D models ...

My own startup domain is detecting geometry in pointclouds .. which is currently a lot of repetitive manual labor done for the construction industry.

It is frustrating talking to VCs .. because they really dont believe there is any other AI than LLMs.

My guess is the only people who will fund this kind of useful tech are post-exit technical founders.
by bigyabai | 2025-04-03 02:15:48+00:00
> Turns out all the Reaganites got sucked into just handing China our economy. It’s not sustainable.

You're looking at this from a pretty jingoist perspective. Take it from another angle - what was Intel doing in the 60s and 70s that China couldn't copy in some guy's garage? What are American businesses exporting today that China has to copy to take for themselves? Why is globalism such a bad idea, why can't other countries copy our cheap cashgrabs?

You can't protect American businesses if they can't compete on their own merits. You can't demand that people respect your judgement if you reject the institutions of international justice. This is the starting gun into the foot of global trade that will leave America limping to the finish line.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-03 02:16:25+00:00
In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, the big chart the administration showed with "tariffs charged to the US" was not real.

They used trade deficit numbers in the "tariffs charged to the US column". The numbers in that column are not actually tariffs charged to the US.

The entire "reciprocal tariff" claim was based on a big lie.

Trump also repeated claims that the US trade deficit with Canada was "close to $200 billion" when the official trade deficit is significantly less.
by devmor | 2025-04-03 02:17:05+00:00
LLMs in their entirety are unlikely to move past tokenization - it is the inescapable core from the roots of NLP and Markov Chains.

The future of AI and all of ML in general likely does exist beyond tokenization, but I find it unlikely we will get there without moving past LLMs as a whole.

We need to focus on the strengths of LLMs and abandon the incredibly wasteful amount of effort being put into trying to make them put on convincing facsimiles of things they can't do just because the output is in natural language and easily fools humans at first glance.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-04-03 02:17:19+00:00
I think letting devs 2 hours a day, that they can flex so if they wanna use it on Fridays its fine, for personal projects, whether internal or otherwise. Just think of all the random tech debt that could be resolved if devs had 2 hours a day to code anything, including new projects that benefit everyone. Most people can only squeeze out about 6 hours worth of real work anyway. You burn up by the end of the day.
by natmaka | 2025-04-03 02:17:28+00:00
> the worst nuclear reactor catastrophe killed ~30 people directly and ~5000 indirectly.

This is highly debatable.

A glimpse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

> Why do we accept car deaths

Because those who refuse to be exposed to induced risks can prevent most of it, while those who refuse to be exposed to nuclear's induced risks (for them and their children, and their children, and their children... thanks to nuclear waste) are out of practical and realistic options.
by zanecodes | 2025-04-03 02:18:59+00:00
Presumably by configuring the system-level HTTP proxy settings to point to a tool like mitmproxy or similar running on a machine on their LAN, and then installing a locally signed root CA certificate generated by the proxy, to enable it to decrypt TLS connections. I'm not familiar with the process on iOS, but it's pretty straightforward on Android. Some apps bundle their own root CA certificate (see "certificate pinning") and ignore the system certificates, which defeats this method unless you can decompile the app package, replace the bundled certificate with your own, and recompile/sideload the modified package. It's also possible they statically analyzed the app package to discover URLs.
by IG_Semmelweiss | 2025-04-03 02:19:08+00:00
Its not even cruel. Its just dumb. Really dumb.

You are going to invest significant resources into hiring, onboarding, and injecting new staff into workflows for people that will not be there as soon as they are actually productive.

So its not just the cash burn - its the tieup of 3x team members to getting new people trained to become effective and successful contributor. Time is finite.

It makes no sense to throw away all that time spent by your team, who could have use that same time to get a few more features out, proposals sent , or projects spec'd instead.
by DebtDeflation | 2025-04-03 02:19:24+00:00
And the LangChain definition is a further simplification of Anthropic's:

"An AI agent is a system that uses an LLM to decide the control flow of an application."

What gets left unsaid is whether current SOTA LLMs actually have the reasoning and planning capabilities to do this reliably. I would argue that except for code debugging tasks and simple research tasks (iterative Googling with a web browser and then formatting the results into a report format) they do not. That may change in 6 months, but right now the hype has gotten ahead of the capability.
by don-code | 2025-04-03 02:19:54+00:00
I have a coworker who _excels_ at writing code - one of those engineers who can metabolize caffeine directly into code.

They write code to implement the all-important features. They write code to work around lack of process. They write code to work around problem people not doing their jobs well. They write code to work around buggy code by other developers. They write code to work around their own code, written weeks or months earlier.

I've been encouraging them to _reduce_ the amount of code they write, and instead consider the context around why they're writing the code. Code is just one way - and not always a particularly good way - that we can solve people and process problems.
by dyauspitr | 2025-04-03 02:20:00+00:00
Disagree. Just the other day I needed someone to replace my chimney cap. The quotes from the big companies ranged from $3k-10k. Utterly ridiculous. I got some guy from an app who bought the stainless steel cap for $300 and installed it for $300 more for a total of $600 and the work is fine.
Show HN: I built a 1B+ contact database as a solo founder in 60 days
by InfiniteBox | 2025-04-03 02:20:25+00:00
After evaluating lead generation tools like Apollo, Hunter, and RocketReach, I noticed a common problem: they rely on old database technologies that often contain unverified emails, yet charge premium prices — this inefficiency bothered me.

I decided to approach this differently by leveraging modern AI technologies. I spent time learning the strengths of various LLMs (Grok, DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Claude 3.7) and combined the best aspects of each for my solution.

The technical challenges were substantial. To reach 1B+ verified contacts, I had to:

- Implement residential proxy networks using Luminati/Bright Data, with Node.js for connection management and Redis for IP rotation scheduling

- Develop captcha-bypassing systems combining Puppeteer's browser automation with 2captcha API integration and custom computer vision models using TensorFlow

- Perfect web scraping at scale with Python (Beautiful Soup, Scrapy), optimized with asyncio for concurrent execution, and Playwright for dynamic content rendering

- Build a robust backend infrastructure using Laravel PHP framework, vanilla JavaScript for lightweight frontend interactions, and PostgreSQL for storing the structured data with proper indexing

I hope you enjoy using the trial, I made it especially for you guys.
by rayiner | 2025-04-03 02:20:38+00:00
Why is there a trade deficit with a country if there aren’t trade barriers or other unfairness, such as China’s weaker labor laws and environmental laws? Mathematically, “free trade” treats those things as a “comparative advantage” but we don’t have to pretend that reflects reality.

The formula simply reflects the premise that, in a fair system, trade deficits would average out to zero. It also escalates the tariffs as the trade deficit goes up, and reduces them as the other country imports more of our goods. It’s an elegant formula.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-03 02:21:44+00:00
Related:

Evidence mounts that shingles vaccines protect against dementia (42 points, 8 months ago, 14 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41073127

Evidence that the shingles vaccine prevents a good chunk of dementia cases (667 points, 2 years ago, 273 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36083620
by gnabgib | 2025-04-03 02:22:31+00:00
Related:

Evidence mounts that shingles vaccines protect against dementia (42 points, 8 months ago, 14 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41073127

Evidence that the shingles vaccine prevents a good chunk of dementia cases (667 points, 2 years ago, 273 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36083620
by dooglius | 2025-04-03 02:22:54+00:00
Ah, I meant comments rather than posts (and I think flagging posts has a different meaning since one cannot downvote posts) but it looks like comments are visible by adding `&kind=comment`. Anyway, the most recent comment I vouched is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43530295 which I think is a good example of what I'm talking about.
by dyauspitr | 2025-04-03 02:23:25+00:00
It depends. When I go to Costco and make huge purchases to last a month, I unload the cart onto the payment conveyor and the bagger bags them on the other side. By the time I’m done unloading the cart and have finished paying, the cart is ready to go. I would say that’s like a 40-50% time save. Those really add up to shorter lines and more purchases for the stores.
by yallpendantools | 2025-04-03 02:23:47+00:00
It's easy to call that a "tell" in light of Matt Mullenweg's recent activities. No one was saying shit when Wordpress was the darling of Web 2.0.

Justifiable evidence of Matt Mullenweg's unhealthy/excessive narcissism only surfaced within the past year or so (I'm fuzzy on the timeline, cut me some slack ya?). Automattic the company has been so named for, goodness, close to twenty years now.

It could be Matt's been a narcissist from the start. But people also change and not always for the better so maybe he became a "narcissist" much later in life and his chosen company name just so conveniently fell into the narrative.

There are CEOs in bigger spotlights with a bigger case for narcissism who don't put their names on any of their companies (emphasis on the plurality). One of them has a name with a similar inflection pattern to other well-known albeit fictional narcissist, Tony Stark.

I don't know what "Automattic" as a company name says about Matt as a person. I'll tell you what it is though: a damn good pun, one I would gladly score myself given the chance.
by kelipso | 2025-04-03 02:23:53+00:00
You can be patient and wait gently for the former Biden administration to admit what they did. I am sure you will wait a long time but who cares.

Meanwhile people who matter and people who vote can use their brains to deduce the truth that it was a politically motivated attack that made use of the judicial system.

For one reason or another, it seems that humans are able to use deductions to arrive at conclusions without having it be spoonfed to them. The people who need to be spoonfed can sit in their highchairs and be irrelevant I guess.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-03 02:24:31+00:00
These tariffs are a soft blockade carried out as part of a decapitation strike[1] against America.

Imagine you are Russia, and you want to stop American support of Ukraine or that you are China and you want to annex Taiwan. You can't enact a blockade or take military action against America yourself, but you can attempt to destroy us from within by compromising people in positions of power. Oligarchs have more in common with each other than with their countrymen.

This administration lies with the truth. It is true that there are trade deficits harmful to America and that not being able to produce our own masks is a national emergency, but enacting a policy like this is insanity. Those trade deficits are born out of financialization[2] which is a result of the exorbitant privilege[3] of managing the reserve currency.

I can't imagine anyone who writes software intuitively supporting this. Radical changes in policy/code break things. Maybe you do it with something vestigial, but would you do something like this to your databases? The economy, the beating heart of the country, is being put at risk.

[1]Timothy Snyder -- Decapitation strike: https://archive.is/1xkxK [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
by Aurornis | 2025-04-03 02:25:21+00:00
> It’s my understanding that generally country don’t lower tariffs voluntarily. They are usually bargaining chips.

Tariffs are a tax. Tax on us, the people buying goods.

It's a massive tax increase. People are slowly waking up to that fact.

Rolling back the tariffs is giving everyone a tax cut. Well, tax cut back to baseline of what everyone expected.

As people realize that they are the ones paying the tariffs, this is going to be very unpopular.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-04-03 02:25:59+00:00
>The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.

The boomer types are now in their 70s and even 80s and mostly retired (or dead). It's the generations after them that run many of the anal-retentive, bureaucratically obsessive compulsive managerial postings today, and among those are a good number of gen z turds who are at least as toxic, while being smugly self-righteous about their habits. We'll be blaming boomers for decades after they're dead, for things long since out of their hands.
by jongjong | 2025-04-03 02:26:28+00:00
Also, I should add that the job-hopping is likely a feature of our inflationary monetary system; as inflation is ongoing, people find that if they change jobs after 1 or 2 years, they can get some non-trivial salary increase... In reality, changing jobs every 2 years doesn't actually give you a real salary increase; it merely allows you to maintain your buying power in the face of inflation...

The elite class is basically using the monetary system to constantly squeeze value creators by forcing them to job-hop frequently as it demoralizes them, lowers their self-esteem and thus helps to keep their salary expectations down. The manager class also contributes to the demoralization aspect of value creators by imposing unnecessary constraints on value creators.

The reason we have population collapse in the west is because value creators are systematically demoralized. It's literally the enslavement of value creators by value extractors.

I think this is why coding is increasingly seen as a low-class skill nowadays... If you possess any productive skill, it signals that you're part of the lower 'value creator' class.

There is even a belief that if you have to create value for a living, then it means that you're just not smart enough to figure out how to make other people work for you... Completely ignoring the reality that it's all about social networking; literally all about your position in the social graph and distance to money printers.
by tombert | 2025-04-03 02:28:01+00:00
There's "poisoning" from lots of stuff that we wouldn't traditionally classify as "poison", like water [1] or oxygen [2].

I am not a chemist or a doctor, but I think the common adage is "it's the dose that makes the poison". Most stuff is bad for you if you get too much of it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-03 02:28:19+00:00
Yeah, national debt is splattered all around the US economy, but that doesn't mean it is uniform, or the payers and recipients are the same in terms of participation, returns, or even time.

Foundationally, national debt is about passing costs into the future, which also creates another huge dichotomy in payers and beneficiaries. Minimal federal spending is on growth, so isn't really about investment as how much value can be extracted from one group to another, largely, but not entirely overlapping group.
by hunter2_ | 2025-04-03 02:32:02+00:00
I never got into this aspect of networking, so I truly don't know what I'm talking about and wish someone will correct me, but on some level, IP does indeed have broadcast/multicast capabilities that cause the sender's egress traffic to remain independent of the number of recipients rather than being equal to the sum of recipients' ingress traffic, right? Does this only work downstream of the last router, and therefore has limited usefulness on the internet?
by anenefan | 2025-04-03 02:32:47+00:00
Not that we should speculate since it is the sort of thing where one's proverbial neck is on the chopping block with all access revoked ... 10 minutes or a couple hours could well feel like a lifetime. Resolving problems often take time, possibly only when whomever has been tasked with it begins their next work day.

As for accusing replies they received -- probably just the cookie cutter responses when their account went dead from the outwards facing staff at Hostinger. Reviews take time generally. Again this is just speculation on my part.

I have observed in the nature of the web, some people expected to be treated like royalty or better ... often way better and not accepting of this day or days but this second, now I demand it. It would not be the first time a; not at this minute, in time, under investigation, not until type response is construed to be hostile, unhelpful, being an utter bast@rd, or worse.

Given the reply by Jellyfish8785, their account was compromised. With about 70 sites, it would not be surprising if one or more had an older version of forum or blog software which would allow a scrip kiddie to gain access to one site and from there others.

As for suspended domains. In the absence of a reply from abuse or admin @somesite.foo the next usual step is for netizens who've spotted a big issue is to report the site to the domain host as it is (well has been) easy enough to find and file a report.
by nostrademons | 2025-04-03 02:33:25+00:00
The issue was interest rates. Money was free in Feb 2022; the interest rate was literally 0%, and so any cash-generating investment at all is profitable. Fed started raising rates in Apr 2022, at which point leaders started freaking out because they know what higher rates mean, and by Jun 2022 the Fed was raising them in 0.75% increments, which was unheard of in modern economics. By Jan 2023 the rate was 4.5%, which meant that every investment that generates an internal rate of return between 0% and 4.5% is unprofitable. That is the vast majority of investment in today's economy. (We also haven't yet seen this hit fully - a large number of stocks have earnings yields that are lower than what you can get on a savings account, which implies that holding these stocks over cash is unprofitable unless you expect their earnings to grow faster than the interest rate drops, which doesn't seem all that likely in today's environment.)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS

Now, you'd have a point if you complained about how centralization of government and economic power with the President and Fed chair, respectively, is a problem. That is the root cause that allows the economy to change faster than any leader can adapt. There used to be a time when people would complain about centralization of executive power on HN, but for some reason that moment seems to have passed.
by gus_massa | 2025-04-03 02:33:55+00:00
I agree, but even with all the authorizations, it looks like a hard problem. You need like 20 persons with cancer. Before starting chemo? A matching group of 20 healthy persons. What about symptoms of cancer, like big moles in skin cancer or low weight in colon cancer?

Since the person with/without cancer know the situation, they may give involuntary hints. Just sedate them so they are sleeping while testing?

What if the person can detect some cancers and no others?
by tootie | 2025-04-03 02:35:33+00:00
I have never caught even the slightest whiff of Trump knowing what he's doing on any topic. I'm genuinely not trying to be glib either, this is a sincere observation. When has he publicly or privately intimated that he understands how tariffs or trade work? Or energy or immigration or infrastructure or technology? His public persona gives facile and misleading explanations that are ostensibly just politicking, but every tidbit of leaked insider accounts or hot mics or unguarded moments don't show anything more than the same persona.
by stubish | 2025-04-03 02:36:12+00:00
Apparently electric cars are no longer tech, since every post mentioning Tesla gets flagged. And Musk is no longer appropriate, despite remaining CEO of Tesla and owning SpaceX and Twitter. Did you know Tesla announced how many cars it delivered, giving actual numbers to the recent speculation? Not news here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43556443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43556463

(and probably others with fewer upvotes)
by tombert | 2025-04-03 02:36:15+00:00
Anecdata, sample size of one, so obviously take what I say with a giant grain of salt.

Due to a sleep apnea diagnosis, I don't drink any alcohol anymore at all, and outside of a single White Russian at a friend's house last Halloween, I haven't had anything to drink in more than two years.

Even before that, I didn't drink a lot, and I don't think anyone would classify me as an alcoholic, but I definitely felt like when I did drink, especially if I got drunk a part of me would kind of feel "different" in a sort of intangible way, well after I sobered up, sometimes for what felt like weeks.

It's kind of hard to explain, just sort of an odd, lingering sort of ethereal feeling that persisted.

I kind of thought it was just in my head, some sort of psychosomatic thing, but now I'm wondering if it was a physiological effect that messed with my brain.

I don't miss drinking, I fortunately never really developed that vice, and now I'm glad that I never got into it. I don't do other drugs either; I don't even consume caffeine anymore, so I'm especially lame :)
by watusername | 2025-04-03 02:36:40+00:00
Your devices will connect to each other peer-to-peer (even behind complex NATs) with no manual configuration, subject to ACLs you centrally manage. It just works.

People sometimes dismiss Tailscale as "just" a WireGuard orchestrator, but it's actually much more than that - From a product perspective, WireGuard is just an implementation detail.