MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by teamonkey | 2025-04-17 14:16:51+00:00
A lot of science papers are like “we found a hint of this thing, we need to do more research” and it’s reported as “ALIENS??!?”

I understand why this is the case but I think it can lead to a loss in trust in science when the reporting jumps to conclusions that aren’t supported by the research itself.

In this case the abstract is far more grounded. In particular,

> The observations also provided a tentative hint of dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a possible biosignature gas, but the inference was of low statistical significance.

> We find that the spectrum cannot be explained by most molecules predicted for K2-18 b, with the exception of DMS and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), also a potential biosignature gas.

> More observations are needed to increase the robustness of the findings and resolve the degeneracy between DMS and DMDS. The results also highlight the need for additional experimental and theoretical work to determine accurate cross sections of important biosignature gases and identify potential abiotic sources.
by wulfstan | 2025-04-17 14:17:32+00:00
Again, as a thought experiment, what legal protections can we put in place - an encryption ombudsman or independent authority - that would allow an arms length, controlled and expiring mechanism that allows limited access to a user's data? What would we as a society be happy to accept? I don't think the demand is an unreasonable one, but I'm trying to figure out what a reasonable collection of mechanisms looks like.
by duxup | 2025-04-17 14:17:36+00:00
Leadership really has an unspoken influence.

I worked at companies that were well run, then acquired by a company where the leadership was blatantly dishonest and it quickly spread throughout the company. Managers emulate other managers and previously open and honest managers changed over time.

I worry about that when it comes to the corruption in the executive branch / their disregard for the law and so on trickling down through the government.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-04-17 14:17:38+00:00
They're also threatening to pull their tax-exempt status [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/us/politics/trump-irs-har...

This is exactly what dictatorships do: comply with our demands or we will bring you down. Harvard might be able to stand up to them, but many other less wealthy universities will fold immediately.

But if the universities don't bind together and take a stand now, it will be too difficult and too late to do so later. Poor Columbia--now that Trump knows they will cower, he can make whatever demands he wants.

Don Corleone would be proud.
by tstrimple | 2025-04-17 14:17:40+00:00
> However, we know they care about kids.

This is just one more in a long string of lies. They absolutely do not care about kids unless it's about their right to marry them[1]. Or watch passively as they die to easily preventable diseases[2]. Or go out of their way to deny them access to food[3].

[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/wyoming-ending-child-marriage-spark...

[2]: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/03/20/texas-measles-family...

[3]: https://newrepublic.com/post/173668/republicans-declare-bann...
by amy214 | 2025-04-17 14:17:41+00:00
The main thing is to make sure it has no way to access the internet. Just USING it as a dumb TV isn't enough because these things - this TV firmware - it takes snapshots of whatever is playing (even in dumb mode) and utilizes whatever fingerprinting tech on that data - https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/your-smart-tv-watching-what-you...
by cainxinth | 2025-04-17 14:17:42+00:00
It already is for me. I've been using LLMs daily for years now. I don't get the people claiming AGI every two minutes any more than the people claiming these tools are useless.

LLM reasoning abilities are very fragile and often overfitted to training data. But if still you haven't figured out how to do anything useful with an LLM, warts and all, that says more about you than LLMs.
by diggan | 2025-04-17 14:18:40+00:00
> This type of comment literally appears like clockwork under any report of AI doing anything worrying at scale, such as lying etc

Is this a criticism of said comment, or just being sad of not being first?

It's good advice, and unrelated to AI. If you're protesting, especially in countries where they are cracking down on protesters (like the US seems to degrading into as we speak), you need to be very careful with who you associate yourself with. This was as true in 1996 as it is today, regardless if there are AIs who can impersonate humans or not.
by pogue | 2025-04-17 14:19:15+00:00
I don't know the economics of it, but they could run ads on their site, become a non profit & only accept donations, etc etc.

This is slightly unrelated, but I remember in the 2000s, there was a vendor of protein powders who started testing his and other vendors protein powders to see if their labels were true & they weren't protein spiking (adding cheaper collagen instead of whey lying on the labels, essentially). He almost immediately got sued from several large mfgs and had to shut down.

So, for this group, and the fact that they're ignoring cease & desist letters from the toothpaste mfgs they're testing puts them in HUGE legal risk, I suspect, and would not be the least bit surprised if all the funds they're collecting are going to end up in lawyers pockets.
by jeffbee | 2025-04-17 14:19:24+00:00
> Social housing is not one of the solutions the yimby movement in the US promotes

This is not correct at least for the largest organization, California YIMBY. CA YIMBY has endorsed every social housing reform that has emerged at the state level, for example AB 309, AB 2053, etc.

What idealist socialist critics mean when they say "YIMBY doesn't support social housing" is actually "YIMBY refuses to outlaw market housing".
by marcosdumay | 2025-04-17 14:19:32+00:00
I've usually seen it phrased as "let's ban wheels|cars so bank robbers can't escape!".

But well, even that rebuttal is getting tiresome. It's the same people that keep pushing for banning air again and again. They control all the communication channels, so nobody can ever rebut them in a forum that matters, they control the governments, and they are still not popular enough to make that thing pass. Yet, they keep pushing for it.

I don't think we'll solve this by talking about this. We need to talk about systemic corruption instead. (But then, they control the communication channels...)
by Smaug123 | 2025-04-17 14:19:55+00:00
I do amateur improv comedy; doing it with people who have done clowning, it just feels like they're on another level. "Baboon in makeup" is the first-order obvious thing to say, but there's so much skill in a good clown-actor. I've been toying with doing a clowning course for a while just because I'm in awe at what these people can do during improv.

From the article, "The body tells the story.", "Have an emotional reaction and invite the audience to join in your experience.", "A clown is costume and makeup. Clowning is a verb." - these all capture some of what it is. The ability to wholeheartedly commit to a bit with absolutely none of your personal baggage coming along for the ride, to use your body expressively to cause the audience to feel something, to be a perfectly smooth lump of clay that's immediately formed into exactly what the scene requires; it's an astonishing superpower that right now I can only dream of having.
by bluGill | 2025-04-17 14:20:06+00:00
IF the new tires were cheap enough that would be fine. Quick lube places could easially install devices to replace your tires and thus your $100 oil change becomes a $130 oil change. Of if you have an electric car your regular tire rotation (which almost nobody does - but it should be done as often as an oil change!) gets turned into a tire replacement.
Show HN: Norman MCP – handle accounting and taxes from Claude/Cursor
by stanlee_o | 2025-04-17 14:20:11+00:00
Hey HN

Recently built an MCP server to connect https://norman.finance — accounting & tax autopilot for entrepreneurs in Germany — to Claude, Cursor, and other LLMs.

I wanted to experiment with making our product feel natively integrated into AI/dev workflows.

Now I can do things like: write code, generate and send invoices, and reconcile transactions — all within a single dev environment.

Repo to try it locally or build on it: https://github.com/norman-finance/norman-mcp-server

Would love feedback from anyone exploring MCP or building LLM-native apps.
by wiz21c | 2025-04-17 14:20:13+00:00
I usually go with python when my .sh/.bat script files gets too complex. So I guess we wento down the same road.

Like ruby (I guess), python is very pleasant to work with for small scripts and it's portable between linux and windows, which is really cool (at least in my use cases)

In python, glob, Path and subprocess are mostly all I need...
by kube-system | 2025-04-17 14:20:15+00:00
I’m not saying every layer of the onion is individually encrypted. But there are plenty of layers that are.

There is plenty of encryption used when you send any sort of message from an iPhone, even SMS. You can’t even turn the dang thing on and unlock it without encryption. Then when you send it, it’ll be encrypted by the radio before transmission. Then in transit it may or may not be encrypted at various points.

And POTS is not the internet.

My overall point is that encryption is used all of the time when people use the internet for routine tasks that they expect to work, and would not work in a modern reasonable way without it.

People use these technical implementations details to muddy the water of this conversation and demonize encryption, when the reality is that everyone uses it literally all the time for almost everything.
by thisdougb | 2025-04-17 14:20:24+00:00
This reads like mentoring a junior dev. You do mentoring because the pay off is a junior that develops into a senior; writes better code more efficiently. But what's the pay off with going through this process with AI?

A few days ago I spent an hour trying to get Claude to write unit tests for a relatively simple function, without getting anything functional in return. It produced good (but changing) plans of work, but the code generated didn't match the plan (syntax or semantics).

Are people simply replacing 'time spent coding' with 'time spent mentoring AI'? And is that a useful trade off, given AI forgets everything?

I'd love to see a more honest discussion about the overhead of coding with AI assistance. It's still too high an overhead for me at the present capability.
by acureau | 2025-04-17 14:20:27+00:00
This essay is dripping with self pity. I do not care that you're a woman, I do not care that you have a PhD, I do not care that you used to be a barista. You can be technical if you apply that label to yourself. You cannot force others to apply that label to you, so why define yourself by their perception?

For what it's worth (very little), there are many of us for which the technical label means strictly "expertise in X domain".
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-17 14:20:31+00:00
I think of some of the ways LLMs perform better in real life than they do in evals.

For instance I ask AI assistants a lot about what some code is trying to do in applications software where it is a matter of React, CSS and how APIs get used. Frequently this is a matter of pattern matching and doesn't require deep thought and I find LLMs often nail it.

When it comes to "what does some systems oriented code do" now you are looking at halting problem kind of problems or cases where a person will be hypnotized by an almost-bubble-sort to think it's a bubble sort and the LLM is too. You can certainly make code understanding benchmarks aimed at "whiteboard interview" kind of code that are arbitrarily complex, but that doesn't reflect the ability or inability to deal with "what is up with this API?"
by kashunstva | 2025-04-17 14:20:39+00:00
> anti-encryption/anti-privacy laws have caught terrorists

This is undoubtedly so; but much turns on the trust in government. In this U.S., the president, himself a documented profligate liar, just invited an equally untrustworthy unelected person into the halls of government to vacuum up whatever data he pleased. Maybe trust in the UK government is higher.
by hilbert42 | 2025-04-17 14:20:41+00:00
Low hanging fruit. The smart ones likely aren't being caught now.

Moreover, it's only a matter of time until the criminal fraternity all catch up and are on the same wavelength. That's when all but the dumbest know exactly what not to do or say on the net.

The Internet is still comparatively young and like everyone else those who've evil intent are still learning exactly how it works. I'd bet money that it won't be long before a 'bestseller tome' of definitive what-not-to-dos cirulates amongst this mob.

The question is at what level will law enforcement's catch have to fall before it has to turn to other methods.
by MisterTea | 2025-04-17 14:21:14+00:00
> which also means you're instantly connected with every asshole in the world. And with AI a single asshole can now pretend to be 200 assholes.

Technology always seems to be the solution until the tables are turned.

> The solution is to do less things online and more in person.

And then we go right back to these programs being attacked for being inaccessible by e.g. poor people and the disabled. Obviously the solution is to hire people to go out and bring these services to those who need it but once you see how much effort is required to do that it rapidly requires a lot of funding and looks inefficient.

A cultural shift is required to fix all this and I am not sure how that will happen. Even given that the major religion in the west is Christianity which preaches that being selfish is not cool has been appropriated by selfish assholes who vote selfishly. I dunno what to say anymore. I am 100% for these programs which will be massively beneficial for humanity and all these fucks can think of is "muh tax munney."
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-04-17 14:21:23+00:00
Still, in quicksort, big O notation analysis is what tells you that you can further improve efficiency by leaving small subarrays unsorted and then performing a single call to insertion on the whole array at the very end, rather than one insertion call to sort each individual small subarray. This result is far from obvious without big O analysis. So still useful, even there.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-17 14:21:33+00:00
Because it's cheaper and more reliable to outsource that to a company specializing in it.

If one dev had written it, how many times would that tool have failed by now? When the original dev left the company a decade ago, the tool has been transferred between teams six times, it failed a migration and the email address it used to send errors to no longer exists so nobody noticed, and it's literally gotten lost in the shuffle?
by londons_explore | 2025-04-17 14:21:44+00:00
indeed redundancy is fairly important (although the largest part, the training data, actually doesn't matter if chunks are missing).

But the type of consistency they were talking about is strong ordering - the type of thing you might want on a database with lots of people reading and writing tiny bits of data, potentially the same bits of data, and you need to make sure a users writes are rejected if impossible to fulfil, and reads never return an impossible intermediate state. That isn't needed for machine learning.
Ask HN: The Future of SaaS
by pramatosh5125 | 2025-04-17 14:21:54+00:00
We've been in the SaaS game for a few years now—building, shipping, and growing small products—and I just can't help but feel that the landscape is changing in a troubling way.

Prices are going up across the board. Tools that were once affordable for indie founders or early-stage teams are suddenly priced for enterprise budgets. The "freemium" model is giving way to aggressive trials, usage-based pricing, and paywalls around core features. It's as if the barrier to entry is increasing not only for customers, but also for builders.

Meanwhile, competition is fiercer than ever. AI is speeding up development, but it's also flooding markets overnight. Hundreds of clones, minor modifications, and "launch-first-iterate-later" products overwhelm the same niches. Discovery has been broken. Differentiation is more difficult than it's ever been.

And perhaps worst of all, trust is being lost. Users are tired of bait-and-switch, surprise deprecations, and data lock-ins. There's a feeling that too many SaaS businesses are more concerned with growth-at-all-costs than product quality, user experience, and long-term value.

Are we hurtling towards a SaaS winter? Or is this merely a bad patch in a changing ecosystem?

I'd love to know how you're feeling—particularly other indie founders and bootstrapped teams. Are you hopeful, or are you questioning your role in SaaS entirely?

Would you like to customize it for a particular audience—such as startup founders, developers, or investors

We've been in the SaaS game for a few years now—building, shipping, and growing small products—and I just can't help but feel that the landscape is changing in a troubling way.

Prices are going up across the board. Tools that were once affordable for indie founders or early-stage teams are suddenly priced for enterprise budgets. The "freemium" model is giving way to aggressive trials, usage-based pricing, and paywalls around core features. It's as if the barrier to entry is increasing not only for customers, but also for builders.

Meanwhile, competition is fiercer than ever. AI is speeding up development, but it's also flooding markets overnight. Hundreds of clones, minor modifications, and "launch-first-iterate-later" products overwhelm the same niches. Discovery has been broken. Differentiation is more difficult than it's ever been.

And perhaps worst of all, trust is being lost. Users are tired of bait-and-switch, surprise deprecations, and data lock-ins. There's a feeling that too many SaaS businesses are more concerned with growth-at-all-costs than product quality, user experience, and long-term value.

Are we hurtling towards a SaaS winter? Or is this merely a bad patch in a changing ecosystem?

I'd love to know how you're feeling—particularly other indie founders and bootstrapped teams. Are you hopeful, or are you questioning your role in SaaS entirely?

Would you like to customize it for a particular audience—such as startup founders, developers, or investors
by pseudalopex | 2025-04-17 14:22:27+00:00
You stated Endgegner was not used lightly in Germany when it was. You seemed to think Wunderwaffe was used lightly in English when it was not. And searching for Endgegner and Endlösung found our comments and a few opinions they sound similar. No evidence or claims of origin. I conclude Endgegner does not originate from Endlösung probably.
by sanderjd | 2025-04-17 14:22:37+00:00
The Nazi / Hitler comparison was always a poor fit, in my view. But what most people were actually saying was just "this person does not care about the laws and values that keep our government from being a tyranny".

And what happened is like Y2K: People who recognized the risks successfully worked to mitigate the worst of them. It's not really surprising, but it is frustrating, that just like with Y2K, many people thus concluded that it was not necessary to mitigate the risks.

For many people, mitigating risks provides evidence that there were never any risks in the first place. (You can probably think of more examples of this.)

But unfortunately, people were correct when they identified that Trump's character combined with increasing control over one of the two political parties could pose a that to our system. And now it's harder to mitigate the problem, because the control over the party has advanced significantly further.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-17 14:23:06+00:00
I'm not, I think folks are generally passing over the term artificial here. I am aware there is some sources of toxins that occur naturally and really aren't avoidable in any reasonable manner.

However, there is a ton of exposure that constitutes inappropriate risk because it can be mitigated reasonably. There's no reason you have to have lead in toothpaste, for example. We know it can be manufactured lead free and work just as well.

We do this through out the food chain and with manufactured goods and even when science changes and clearly suggests that we need to lower exposure levels of a previously allowable amount of a toxin industry fights tooth and nail. It becomes political rather than a strictly health and scientific assessment.
by wulfstan | 2025-04-17 14:23:07+00:00
I get the hostility towards it - as I've said elsewhere, it's practically an article of faith in our community that strong encryption == unalloyed good. And clearly it needs a lot of thinking to address potential abuse. But we've done it for other things.

> Not to be too pedantic, but I think the distinction between privacy and encryption is incredibly important: almost everyone agrees that privacy is a gradient. The disagreement is whether or not encryption can be a gradient. Most people do not think it can reasonably be without undermining ~everything relying on it.

That is a fair criticism. I would answer that by saying that encryption is just a technology, and you can employ it in very flexible ways (including e.g. n-of-m style keys) which if thought through well and legislated carefully could give the authorities more reasonable access to data when it is legally warranted.
by bondarchuk | 2025-04-17 14:23:09+00:00
>I know people personally with strong gripes about AI "infringement" (in quotes because I believe people are just confused about how these models work), and every single one of them -100%- have a stash of pirated media they casually accumulated over the years.

I don't know them, of course, but it is a consistent and imho reasonable position to be against copyright yet, while we normal people live in fear of copyright, ask for it to be applied to AI as well.

It is even reasonable IMO to be against copyright for individuals but in favour of copyright for businesses. That's how it de facto works in a lot of places anyway.
by kookamamie | 2025-04-17 14:23:18+00:00
> 1. Compose the program into several threads of execution, traditionally scheduled and ran by the operating system

The step 0 is missing:

Compose the program into several lanes of execution, traditionally executed via SIMD.

This is a massive piece of performance left on the table on modern computer architectures, by assuming threading is the first manifestation of concurrency.
by yieldcrv | 2025-04-17 14:23:27+00:00
> However, maintaining weight loss is a considerable challenge, especially as the body seems to retain an obesogenic memory that defends against body weight changes

This is validating as I’m very skeptical about this when looking for a partner that currently has a physiology I’m interested in but had one I wasn’t interested in at some point before, and this seems to be a shared experience
by jamesblonde | 2025-04-17 14:23:28+00:00
Maybe AWS could start by making fast NVMes available - without requiring multi TB disks just to get 1 GB/s. S3FS experiments were run on 14 GB/s NVMe disks - an order of magnitude higher throughput than anything available in AWS today.

SSDs Have Become Ridiculously Fast, Except in the Cloud: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39443679
by mezzie2 | 2025-04-17 14:23:31+00:00
It's mostly about the service's audience. Discord is a huge trans/queer/etc. hub. If Discord were X or Instagram etc. it wouldn't matter. Users of Discord are, as a group, more likely to be antagonistic to anything that could be transphobic or racist than the general populace. (Whereas they don't care about disability rights, which is why people with medically delayed puberty aren't a concern.)

A tactical observation more than anything else.