MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by baq | 2025-04-22 17:28:45+00:00
Slow VMs on overprovisioned cloud hosts which cost as much per month as a dedicated box per year have broken a generation of engineers.

You could host so much from your macbook. The average HN startup could be hosted on a $200 minipc from a closet for the first couple of years if not more - and I'm talking expensive here for the extra RAM you want to not restart every hour when you have a memory leak.
Every Interaction Is a Turing Test
by scottfalconer | 2025-04-22 17:28:54+00:00
I see at least one email or LinkedIn post a day that screams "written by AI". Using AI is fine, but if there’s no human fingerprint I drift off midway...same reaction as if I realize a cool photo is a fake.

Why do we spot the bot voice so fast?

* We riff off our audience. Models average everyone.

* Real people leave fingerprints...jokes that land, typos that don’t.

* Polished‑generic prose feels like a local news anchor gate‑crashing your group chat.

How I keep drafts human:

1. Spell out who's talking and why. "Support rep, one frustrated customer."

2. Paste the customer’s actual rant. Makes the model sweat. 3. Drop a paragraph in my voice, ask it to revise. Works better than rules.

4. Crank temperature a notch, then chop anything weird.

5. Read it aloud. If it sounds like corporate wallpaper, I rough it upswap a comma for an em dash, toss in a "whoops."

That’s my routine. What’s yours? I’m collecting tricks so my inbox stops looking like office ceiling drop in tiles.
by Igrom | 2025-04-22 17:30:06+00:00
What a pointed title. That aside, I am rather surprised that a committee's investigation report is this light on what in my opinion are fundamental details, including the make-up of the committee, the members' respective duties and the course of the investigative process. Notwithstanding the potentially political raison d'etre of the report, is that customary for Congressional committees?
by LiquidSky | 2025-04-22 17:30:06+00:00
This could be combined with crypto. You could endlessly spin up entire shitcoin ecosystems that briefly exist to eke out a bit of money from marks then collapse and disappear like cherry blossoms in the spring. It doesn't matter if any of them have any longevity or reach as long as each one keeps grinding out a little money for you.
by tootie | 2025-04-22 17:30:14+00:00
My former place ran a lot of RDS Postgres but also loved Supabase. It's more than just hosted DB because it has loads of value adds like web-based table editing, auth, edge functions, row-level security, easy hooks and triggers. We were capable of operating RDS but the cost of operations in dev hours was high. Supabase was super easy for moderate price and readily compatible with our RDS and Redshift.
by gwern | 2025-04-22 17:31:04+00:00
Yes, exponential smoothing in forecasting is another classic example of the robustness of simple models. You can throw all your fancy ARIMAs and Box-Cox transforms at a time-series, and much of the time, it is hard to distinguish from a simple moving average.

Specifically, the Makridakis M forecasting competitions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makridakis_Competitions) have shown for a long time that beating the baselines is shockingly difficult.

In fact, classic machine learning only really started to convincingly win with the second-to-last, M5: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016920702... ; and neural methods only just sort of began working with the latest one, M6: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016920702... . (Possibly with M7 we'll see scaled-up meta-learning Transformers finally start beating the Bayesian or decision-tree forecasters. But I don't know if or when a M7 might be held.)
by o1o1o1 | 2025-04-22 17:31:30+00:00
This article really hit home—especially this part from the conclusion:

> In a world pushing for “reflexive AI usage,” I’m advocating for something different: thoughtful, intentional collaboration with AI that preserves the essence of coding as a craft. > ... > Like Rocky, we sometimes need to step away from the comfortable, civilized environment and return to the old gym – the place where real growth happens through struggle, persistence, and focused practice.

> Because coding isn’t just about output. It’s about the journey of becoming better problem solvers, better thinkers, and better engineers. And some journeys can’t be outsourced, even to the most advanced AI.

But here’s the reality: those ideals feel increasingly out of reach. Business demands and short-term thinking rarely leave room for “intentional” or “thoughtful” work. For many of us, having time to grow as engineers is a luxury.

Worse, it’s often personal. I’ve had to carry the weight for friends in crisis, pretending two people were working just to help someone keep their job. It’s brutal—and sadly, not rare.

As AI gets more buzz, many stakeholders now think our work is overvalued. A quick AI PoC becomes “good enough” in their eyes, and we’re expected to polish it into something real—fast, cheap, and under pressure. Meanwhile, we’re constantly defending our craft against the next threat of being replaced by “cheaper” labor.

When I started out, we cared about clean code and craftsmanship. Now, I feel like I should be taking sales courses just to survive.

Today, it’s all about output. Ship faster or get replaced. Quality only matters when it’s too late—after the person who made the bad call has already cashed out.

I know this sounds pessimistic, but for many of us who aren’t in the top 1% of this industry, it’s just reality.

Thanks for the article, Christian. You’re not wrong—but I think you’re one of the few lucky enough to live that perspective. I wish you all the best, and hope you can keep enjoying that rare luxury. There will be a need for true craftsmen—especially when the rest of us have gone numb just trying to keep up.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-04-22 17:31:50+00:00
Ignorance is not a surprise or a fault. Anyone choosing to act from ignorance very much is.

I reiterate that this is not complicated. If you still find it complicated, then you need to speak to an attorney or someone else qualified to give you direction before attempting to use someone else’s code.

We have been doing this for nearly 60 years. Correct examples abound if you’re willing to do basic research.
by NoTeslaThrow | 2025-04-22 17:32:11+00:00
> The use of the word 'insane' is a bit strong of you don't mean disrespect.

I'm insane, too. All the best people are.

> But your argument seems to be: the authors didn't pay much respect to the science, in favor of clickbait; they should've read work of fiction instead.

I am definitely not making an argument for anything. I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. I'd rather have my teeth ripped out than get roped into a good-faith argument with a stranger from VC culture.

> I cannot asses how scientifically accurate Kim Stanley Robinsons' writing is, but he's a doctor of literature rather than a astrobotanist.

WHAT?! Why didn't anyone tell me?
Show HN: AI Sales Gym.Do sales demos on video, screenshare and get feedback
by bsayanthan | 2025-04-22 17:32:22+00:00
We built a “gym” for inside‑sales teams. • Start a video call with an AI buyer who matches your ICP & accent. • Share slides, get hit with objections. • Manja AI scores the convo and returns a coaching card.

Looking for honest feedback on realism, latency, and analytics. No card required, test it out for free: https://manja.ai/sales‑gym Thanks!
by jen20 | 2025-04-22 17:32:37+00:00
> Why would a license like this be considered non-free when the GPL is free?

Do you consider the SSPL to be free? If so, this would be. If not, it probably would not be. Why does SSPL require unsatisfiable numbers of dependencies by the way? It seems pretty clear to me (though, clearly, not free).

> if you can just launder code through a LLM and magically remove any licensing for it.

If you can actually do this, I look forward to unencumbered Windows-compatible source code having run variously leaked source through copilot.
by SkyBelow | 2025-04-22 17:32:55+00:00
One thought I had while looking into regression recently is to consider the model created with a given regularization coefficient not as a line on a 2 dimensional graph but as a slice of a surface on a 3 dimensions graph where the third dimension is the regularization coefficient.

In my case the model was for logistic regression and it was the boundary lines of the classification, but the thought is largely the same. Viewing it as a 3d shape form by boundary lines and considering hill tops as areas where entire classification boundaries disappeared as the regularization coefficient grew large enough to eliminate them. Impractical to do on models of any size and only useful when looking at two features at a time, but a fun consideration.

More on topic with the article, how well does this work with considering multiple features and the different combinations of them. Instead of sigma(n => 50) of x^n, what happens if you have sigma(n => 50) of sigma(m => 50) of (x^n)*(y^n). Well probably less than 50 in the second example, maybe it is fair to have n and m go to 7 so there are 49 total terms compared to the original 50, instead of 2500 terms if they both go to 50.
by danielvf | 2025-04-22 17:33:05+00:00
It's buried deep in the article, but what made PC Connection amazing was the shipping.

You could phone call a human in the wee hours of the morning, and have it show up later that same day. Or pay only a little and have it into two days. Compared to every other mail-order retailer in the universe at the time, it was insane, to have such selection and speed.
by duxup | 2025-04-22 17:33:32+00:00
I took some programming courses in college. I loved computers and was very interested. However, the classes were a guy reading from a book about C. That was pretty much it. You did what the book said and hoped something stuck in your head.

This was early days of the internet, the book(s) were largely the only resource. The instructors were folks who just understood coding in C naturally and had no idea how to communicate with those who did not. No joy in anything, just raw code.

I dropped out.

Decades later after age 40 I was at a career crossroads and took a web development class. I loved it, I could make things quickly, the instructor actually understood how to teach / introduce concepts. I've been happily coding professionally and personally since then.

How things are presented sometimes makes all the difference.
by kbolino | 2025-04-22 17:34:21+00:00
Also, CoW isn't some kind of magic. There are two meanings I can think of here:

A) When you modify a file, everything including the parts you didn't change is copied to a new location. I don't think this is how btrfs works.

B) Allocated storage is never overwritten, but modifying parts of a file won't copy the unchanged parts. A file's content is composed of a sequence (list or tree) of extents (contiguous, variable-length runs of 1 or more blocks) and if you change part of the file, you first create a new disconnected extent somewhere and write to that. Then, when you're done writing, the file's existing extent limits are resized so that the portion you changed is carved out, and finally the sequence of extents is set to {old part before your change}, {your change}, {old part after your change}. This leaves behind an orphaned extent, containing the old content of the part you changed, which is now free. From what evidence I can quickly gather, this is how btrfs works.

Compared to an ordinary file system, where changes that don't increase the size of a file are written directly to the original blocks, it should be fairly obvious that strategy (B) results in more fragmentation, since both appending to and simply modifying a file causes a new allocation, and the latter leaves a new hole behind.

While strategy (A) with contiguous allocation could eliminate internal (file) fragmentation, it would also be much more sensitive to external (free space) fragmentation, requiring lots of spare capacity and/or frequent defrag.

Either way, the use of CoW means you need more spare capacity, not less. It's designed to allow more work to be done in parallel, as fits modern hardware and software better, under the assumption that there's also ample amounts of extra space to work with. Denying it that extra space is going to make it suffer worse than a non-CoW file system would.
by frereubu | 2025-04-22 17:34:35+00:00
The post by James Somers that this article references at the top inspired me to buy the David Goodsell book The Machinery of Life. I would seriously recommend that to anyone who doesn't have a background in biology (like me). The phrase is a bit of a cliché, but it genuinely blew my mind, to the extent that I had to read it slowly because there's so much fascinating stuff packed into such a small book. It's obvious to me now, but the fact that so much of this stuff is about physical shapes locking into each other, and doing it at an almost unimaginable speed, was absolutely enthralling.
by momoschili | 2025-04-22 17:35:16+00:00
interesting, you're right they are devoid of warnings. I thought maybe it was an EU/Germany thing, but looking at American listings it's similar. This may be due to the level of UV-C exposure you're getting. EG weak laser pointers won't have the same caution signs as a Class IV laser.

Edit: Looking into it a bit more, seems that "far-UVC" light is a bit higher energy than the typical "UVC". It seems that far-UVC penetrates less deeply and critically is apparently much better absorbed by the dead layers of the skin than UVC, so it is currently recognized as safe... All I could find on it was a Columbia research artcle.
by firtoz | 2025-04-22 17:35:20+00:00
A lot are paying, including me for multiple projects. They have a pretty good offering. I used to use them for dev and prod, but now using neon for dev. Supabase still for prod. I had switched from mongo to supabase. I may switch to neon for prod but not in a rush.

They also offer so much more than just postgres. Though I use them only for postgres myself.
by runjake | 2025-04-22 17:35:34+00:00
Lots of people questioning what Pike brings to the table. Be aware that Pike has been around for over 31 years[1]. It's kind of dead now and a lot of people have moved over to Lua[2] (which is over 32 years old!).

So long ago, that it took me a minute to recall having programmed a lot of CGI code with it, back in the Roxen web server[3] days.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_(programming_language)#Hi...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxen_(web_server)
by WillAdams | 2025-04-22 17:36:01+00:00
Somewhere, I have a printout of the (quite slim in terms of page-count) Oberon manual --- turns out there is a Pi build:

http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/project-oberon/obe...

will definitely have to experiment with that.

EDIT: but it's apparently an emulated version?

Perhaps:

https://github.com/MGreim/ultiboberon

is better?
by f-algebra | 2025-04-22 17:36:16+00:00
I’m one of two local devs from BC who just launched a tool we’ve been working on: it uses AI to summarize Canadian MPs’ voting records in plain language.

We built it because we were frustrated by how hard it is to understand what our elected reps are actually doing in Ottawa unless you’re willing to wade through a ton of Hansard transcripts and vote logs. This tool pulls that info together and gives you a quick, readable snapshot of how your MP votes on key issues.

It’s free to use, and we’re hoping it helps make politics a bit more transparent and accessible — especially for folks who care, but don’t have hours to dig through government websites.

Would love any feedback or suggestions — and happy to answer questions if anyone’s curious!
by fragmede | 2025-04-22 17:36:17+00:00
Any discussion about San Francisco's fortune is woefully incomplete without touching on the effects that marijuana legalization across the country has had on the industry and thus the economy of not just San Francisco but the also the broader Bay Area and the rest of California. The black market marijuana industry was worth tens, if not hundreds of millions in untracked cash in California. Legalization in California and Oklahoma has moved all of that cash money out of San Francisco, out of the Emerald Triangle, and out of the state because it is no longer lucrative to grow it here. I can't speak how it's related to crime rates, but it means that many people can't afford to live in the area since they're no longer employed by that industry. The area can no longer afford art that was funded by cash money from hippie types that couldn't be used in the mainstream market any other way. as a curious detail, San Francisco used to have tons of illegal grow ops that forced upgraded electrical infrastructure that can now be used to charge electric vehicles instead.
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-22 17:36:35+00:00
Take the nugget of truth that is the problem (there are inefficiencies in government work, there are arguments that tariffs could be adjusted for economic reasons) and act like the deliberate system breaking actions being taken aren’t the part worth discussing. Then blame immigrants, China, and “something something woke”. Then let “centerists” distract/water down the conversation by injecting random “both sides” arguments to frame things as nothing out of the ordinary and nothing to be done.
Show HN: Open Source Image AI Router
by dawe35 | 2025-04-22 17:37:16+00:00
Hi HN,

I use OpenRouter.ai frequently for LLMs and wanted a similar unified interface for image generation models. Since I couldn't find exactly what I needed, I built Image Router.

GitHub: https://github.com/DaWe35/image-router Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/image-router-beta Image Router: https://ir.myqa.cc/

It provides a single API and interface to access multiple image generation models (currently 27, with 3 available for free). The goal is to make switching between different image models effortless.

I do not store any generated images on the server, so you'll need to download any images you want to keep permanently. (Some image links might expire after an hour, while others are stored in your browser's local storage)

It's still in beta, so feedback is very welcome. Happy to answer any questions here.
by amavect | 2025-04-22 17:37:25+00:00
You implicitly used an axiom to ignore the differences between the apples. Someone else could use different axioms to talk about the sizes of the apples (1 large + 1 small = ?), or the color of the apples (1 red + 1 green = ?), or the taste of the apples (1 sweet + 1 sour = ?).

People "axiom" their way out of 1+1=2 in this way: by changing the axioms, they change the topic, so they change the conclusion. I observe this pattern in disagreements very often.
by searine | 2025-04-22 17:37:43+00:00
I think one of the things I love most about biology is its uncertainty. Things like Math and engineering are all rigid and rules based. Life is wibbily wobbly, lifey-wifey. An enormous soup of changing alleles cast as probabilities over eons all creating endless interactions you can't ever comprehend.

You have to become comfortable with the fact that there is uncertainy and there are parts of it you can't control. So instead you have to be obsessed with introducing order where you can. It is so refreshing to see a beautiful experiment that can wrestle a clear signal from the endless noise.
by kokada | 2025-04-22 17:38:37+00:00
Android actually have a special mode for apps that needs to work after a reboot (e.g.: while the FS encryption is still locked), and Alarms is one of the apps that uses this special mode. I don't remember how it is called though so sorry for the lack of sources, you will have to trust me on this one.

The amount of misinformation in this thread is huge though. I generally read every changelog for major Android updates and the amount of engineering going on is amazing. People just assumes that a few things doesn't work while they do.

Unless of course OP is using a custom alarm app this may be true, but then it is the app fault and not Android.

Edit: accordingly to ChatGPT the feature is the WorkManager: https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/architecture/w.... I can't confirm this but looks correct to me after a quick look at its documentation.
by tonyarkles | 2025-04-22 17:38:48+00:00
> how repulsive is a world in which human value is used like a number

On the surface, morally, I agree with you.

But when it comes to practice, things get tougher. Whether capitalist or communist or random utopia, ultimately most of it comes down to: how do we decide, individually and collectively, how each person spends their finite time on Earth? While imperfect, in most places we use money as a way to compensate individuals for the time they’ve spent performing an activity that they wouldn’t have spent time doing on their own. They can then trade that money for the product of other peoples’ labour (things that they wouldn’t have done on their own).

Distilling it down to a dollar value sucks, but is essentially acting as a proxy for “how many hours of how many of the right peoples’ lives gets spent on solving problem X?”. Problem X could be an individual problem: how many hours of how many oncologists lives should be spent trying to cure this specific person’s cancer? And given a finite supply of oncologists and a finite number of hours each one can work in a day, how do we divide their time between different patients? This scales up to national and international levels; people work, the governments take some fraction of that compensation and redistribute it to others in order to take on tasks that people and companies don’t want to do on their own for free. But there’s a finite amount of that money too, stemming from there being a finite number of humans qualified to solve specific problems and finite time from each of them.
by mhitza | 2025-04-22 17:39:09+00:00
It's a fun afternoon experiment. Grab some editor with free credits (I tried cursor) and ask the language model via chat to build the app. Accept all changes, check results, repeat.

Fully immersing myself to the vibe it took me somewhere between 1-2 hours to have the AI loop in an endless ~"i fixed the issue" message while I kept telling it that the thing is still broken.

Pretty fun when it works, but don't buy the hype that products are built exclusively with this strategy (though claims are out there that really like to make it seem so).