MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cduzz | 2025-04-29 12:52:23+00:00
Oracle is in the small family of companies that have a business model of "you give us money and we solve _all_ your problems."

So it's likely that, for a specific task, the oracle solution is crap, but oracle has crap for everything so the oracle sales droid can sell a "one throat to choke, one check to write" policy to a company that likely has technology problems but produces a "not technology" product.

Amazon's moving into this space and their crap is even stickier than oracle's...
by lelia_florina | 2025-04-29 12:52:36+00:00
I'll definitely look into this more. I’m intrigued by your idea. A simple, shareable flashcard viewer with zero UI clutter could actually complement the printed version. Just to make sure I understand: 1.the main need is to have a link you can prepare in advance and revisit anytime, so you can review flashcards fullscreen, one by one, from any device (like a phone or tablet)? 2. would you use it as your main way to study, or more as a casual daily reinforcement tool?
by felipevb | 2025-04-29 12:52:41+00:00
Walking, and Writing on Substack

Currently; > Main goals: Improving my writing and finding some people with similar interests Writing about my current walking season that I'm in, combined with reflections during the walking, recently about walking around the island of Menorca, and Aloneness:

>> https://felipevanbeetz.substack.com/p/build-some-capacity-to...

Thinking about starting another Substack: > Main goal: Audience growth Called something like: "Walk more", "Walk intentionally", "Move intentionally", "How to walk more" About: Short, (bi)Weekly, Practical tips/inspiration, to Move (and specifically Walk) more and more intentionally.
Show HN: Shaded – Learn Japanese with SRS and LLMs
by kegs_ | 2025-04-29 12:53:14+00:00
Hi HN, a good intro to what the app does can be found via the link so instead I will take the time to go over some of the technical aspects instead.

Shaded presents the user with a sentence at the start, and asks for a translation. Based on the user's response, it tokenizes it into words/grammar and grades it using structured outputs. Those words are fed into an SRS system.

When the user goes to start a new lesson, the system knows which words are difficult, due (to be remembered), and easy and adjusts the exercises to the user's level.

Is there anything you want to see? New language options, better beginner level support? Let me know!
by spudlyo | 2025-04-29 12:53:30+00:00
These are some great tips. Having consistent daily exposure to your target language I think is important. Compelling graded readers can make spending that time every day enjoyable and not feel like a chore. A stress-free positive learning environment helps quite a bit with the subconscious process of language acquisition; it's what Krashen calls the "Affective Filter Hypothesis".
by ghaff | 2025-04-29 12:53:40+00:00
Probably especially with a related language. I remember high school French (vaguely) abd it was probably a pretty good 4 years of high school French. But I also remember memorizing a ton of complex tenses and the like, many of which I probably rarely use in English, couldn't name, and would probably be hard for a lot of people to parse if I did, especially conversationally and mixed with negation.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-04-29 12:53:48+00:00
I enjoy good puzzle games, but I really dislike the trend towards "daily" games. Whenever I find one, I look for whatever option they have for randomly generated "practice" games (ignoring the "daily" puzzle), and if they don't have one, abandon the game entirely. I can understand that people enjoy comparing their results on a particular game, but to me, that's much less interesting than being able to actually play the game for more than five minutes.

The latest small browser-based puzzle game I've enjoyed: https://danielben.itch.io/dragonsweeper
by antgiant | 2025-04-29 12:53:54+00:00
Kind of. The default behavior is to create a new link. So when you grant someone access you are actually creating a new link. However, you can find the buried manage access settings and change the permissions on the original link. If you do that then they can use the original link.

(Teams makes this Byzantine in the extreme to accomplish as you have to go find the folder it drops all shared files in to gain access to manage access settings. But it does allow you to retro change access even for things shared in Teams)
by mabster | 2025-04-29 12:54:19+00:00
We were using a modified Luajit, in assembly, with a bit of other assembly dotted around the place. That assembly takes a long time to write (to beat a modern C++ compiler).

Then we had C++ for all our low level code and Lua for gameplay.

We were floating a middle layer of Rust for Lua bindings and the glue code for our transformation pipeline, but there was always a little too much friction to introduce. What we were particularly interested in was memory allocation bugs (use after free and leaks) and speeding up development of the engine. So I could see it having a place.
by wonderwonder | 2025-04-29 12:56:10+00:00
I see Ai not replacing all workers but reducing head count. On a software team I could see a team of 8 reduced to a team of 4 with Ai. Especially in smaller, leaner companies.

You already see attorneys using it to write briefs; often to hilarious effect. These are clearly the precursor though to a much reduced need to for Jr / associate level attorneys at firms.
by keiferski | 2025-04-29 12:56:32+00:00
There are a million reasons why a photograph is not equivalent to an in-person artwork, but the most convincing one in my experience is scale. Computers make every painting into the size of your screen. Seeing a gigantic painting in person by an artist that specializes in scale is an entirely different experience.

As examples: Botticelli’s Venus is a much different experience in person, when you see it from across the room. Anslem Kiefer’s paintings don’t hit you nearly as hard via photographs vs. in person. And so on.
by WillAdams | 2025-04-29 12:56:36+00:00
I tried creating a workflow:

>Given a folder of scanned files, create a .bat file with move commands which renames each file using the information from the scan of the form and superimposed check using the naming convention: $<amount of check>_<date of check in YYYY-MM-DD format>_<Invoice ID>_<PWS ID>_<name of company from population line>.pdf

https://app.getflowcode.io/api/run/7344545b-116c-44f1-83e0-2...

and when I run it, I get:

>{"message":"No matching HTTP trigger found"}

but I was expecting to be prompted for a folder.
by cobbzilla | 2025-04-29 12:56:44+00:00
I find it implausible that anyone who actually rode these could remember them fondly.

To the defenders: I ask you to please describe your memory of “the BART smell” from the cloth-seat era, if you have such firsthand experience.

I do remember. Many years make a strong impression. And while that specific smell-memory is largely indescribable, it’s nonetheless and unfortunately quite unforgettably awful.

My attempt: imagine a laundry hamper very full of very dirty clothes, including a few with fecal/other/mystery stains, slow-baked for weeks in a warm closet. Now open the closet door and take a deep nasal breath— that’s what stepping onto the train was like. I feel zero positive nostalgia.
by mubou | 2025-04-29 12:56:49+00:00
I bet you could do something generic like this in languages that have deferred execution like C#'s IEnumerable. Something like

foreach (Node node in EnumerateNodes(root, x => x != null, x => [x.Left, x.Right]))

where EnumerateNodes uses `yield return` (i.e. is a generator) and calls itself recursively. Though it'd probably be easier / better performance to write an implementation specific to each node type.
by al_borland | 2025-04-29 12:57:07+00:00
Also worth noting, the Kagi assistant is now available to all paid Kagi users. This gives you conversational chat with a few ChatGPT models, Gemini, Llamas, Nova, Deepseek, and other.

https://kagi.com/assistant

Additional details on the blog post about it.

https://blog.kagi.com/assistant-for-all
by jqpabc123 | 2025-04-29 12:57:28+00:00
The USA's 3 biggest exports are:

#1: Stability/security/trust #2: Debt #3: Services

#1 was killed by Trump's election. Why negotiate with someone who has a long history of violating agreements?

#2 was put in serious jeopardy on "Liberation Day". The "allies" he attacked are the same people who buy our debt. Oooppsie! T-bill rates jumped by 1/2 a percent in the week afterwards and "liberation" was immediately put on hold.

#3 has been largely ignored thus far in the "trade war". But the services we export are larger than the goods we import. A "tariff" on services would pretty much negate any negotiating advantage Trump think he holds. Sorry, but you were conned --- the emperor has no clothes.

Bottom line: There are no "winners" in a broad scale trade war. Everyone loses. The sooner we put this misadventure out to pasture the better.

And by the way, there is nothing "free" about economics by decree. It is really a socialist idea.
by hbsbsbsndk | 2025-04-29 12:57:49+00:00
I worked on a product where there was basically no automated testing, just a huge product surface to click around with a bunch of options. Because of technical debt some of the options would trigger different code paths, but it was up to the developer to memorize all the code paths and test accordingly.

After I shipped a bug the Director of Engineering told me I should "test better" (by clicking around the app). This was about 1 step away from "just don't write bugs" IMO.
by dkarbayev | 2025-04-29 12:58:02+00:00
I've learned English by scrolling endless memes on Imgur (back when it used to be an image storage for Reddit), and watching a lot of Youtube videos on the topics that interested me (tech and car reviews - like LTT and Doug DeMuro). But that only developed my passive vocabulary (reading and listening). I only really learned speaking English once I started working remotely for an australian company, and further improved the fluency after moving abroad (to the Netherlands).

I'm currently doing German lessons on Duolingo, and what I dislike the most is that it keeps shoving "useless" words into my face (the words that are irrelevant for me and that I'll most likely never use) - I wish there was an option to choose the topics that I find interesting so that it'd mix the words that more relevant with the everyday use words to better taylor the vocab for me. Another shortcoming is that it never actually explains the grammar rules, you can only try to analyze the examples yourself, trying to notice any patterns. Some are good in that, others are bad - so why don't they spare us that mental gymnastics and provide at least minimal explanation?
by psychoslave | 2025-04-29 12:58:32+00:00
There is this mental creed that to reach something really better, a phase of total purge is an absolute requirement, and the resulting gap between the situation once everything was "completely cleaned" and the wonderful world of "everything is fabulous for everyone now" will spontaneously happen out of the sheer expression of the virtuous dynamics then put as new foundations.

Possibly in such a mindset it’s impossible to envision that destroying everything indiscriminately will generate a more challenging situation. One from which it will be far harder to build anything. And which will be far from leaving the world with more pure innocent souls willing to construct a better place for everyone. It won’t percolate into their conscientiousness that the process is just most likely going to create more traumatized people full of fear on the one hand, and people accustomed to impose unilaterally their cruel point of view with violent means on the other hands. And that none of this will be a fertile soil to foster cooperation and trust, things without which humans are unable to create anything worth lauding.
by imtringued | 2025-04-29 12:58:33+00:00
VPS/Cloud providers skimp on RAM. The JVM sucks for any low RAM workload, where you want the smallest possible single server instance. The startup times of JVM based applications are also horrendous. How many gigabytes of RAM does Digital Ocean give you with your smallest instance? They don't. They give you 512MiB. Suddenly using Java is no longer an option, because you will be wasting your day carefully tuning literally everything to fit in that amount.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-04-29 12:58:33+00:00
And even a "perfect system" might not be perfect for all users. I've seen lots of "old-school, battle-tested, rock-solid software" with bizarre behavior that supporters insist is an intended feature and can never be changed or configured, on account of it being convenient for some workflow back in the '80s or whatever. No system is so "perfect" that it can be all things to all people, unless it's truly trivial in scope.
by orwin | 2025-04-29 12:59:17+00:00
Let's say that as long my as the complexity is low, it is really worth using AI, and you can be twice as effective, maybe more, because it can take care of most of the coding/testing/integration which are 80% of project, and can help you with the architecture part as long as it is easy/standard.

As the complexity grow, the usefulness of AI agents decrease: a lot, and quite fast.

In particular, integration of microservices are a really hard case to crack for any AI agent as it often mix training data with context data.

It is more useful in centralised apps, and especially for front dev, as long as you don't use finite state machines. I don't understand why, even Claude/Cursor trip on otherwise really easy code (and btw if you don't use state machines for your complex front end code, you're doing it wrong).

As long as you know what your agent is shitty at however, using AI is a net benefit as you don't loose time trying to communicate your needs and just do it, so it is only gains and no loses.
by vfclists | 2025-04-29 12:59:24+00:00
> The used radio protocols Versacom and Semagyr, which carry time and control signals, are partially proprietary but completely unencrypted and unauthenticated, leaving the door open for abuse.

You don't think the omission of encryption and lack of authentication imply a criminal absence of due diligence.

I guess some huge contracts are in the offing fix those necessary features which should have been built-n in the first instance.
by ajb | 2025-04-29 12:59:36+00:00
A bold assumption, that it will continue not to.

I have a 185 year old treatise on wood engraving. At the time, to reproduce any image required that it be engraved in wood or metal for the printer; the best wood engravers were not mere reproducers, as they used some artistry when reducing the image to black and white, to keep the impression from continuous tones. (And some, of course, were also original artists in their own right). The wood engraving profession was destroyed by the invention of photo-etching (there was a weird interval before the invention of photo etching, in which cameras existed but photos had to be engraved manually anyway for printing).

Maybe all the wood engravers found employment; although I doubt it. But at this speed, there will be a lot of people who won't be able to retrain during employment and will either have to use up their savings while doing so, or have to take lower paid jobs.
by dgfitz | 2025-04-29 12:59:40+00:00
> Do you think they'll be paying graphic designers, musicians etc. for now on

People generating these things weren't ever going to be customers of those skillsets. Your examples are small business owners basically fucking around because they can, because it's free.

Most barber shops just play the radio, or "spring" for satellite radio, for example. AI generated music might actively lose them customers.
by conductr | 2025-04-29 12:59:52+00:00
I’m a bit of a skeptic too and kind of agree on this. Also, the human employee displacement will be slow. It will start by not eliminating existing jobs but just eliminating the need for additional headcount, so it caps the growth of these labor markets. As it does that, the folks in the roles leveraging AI the most will start slowly stealing share of demand as they find more efficient and cheaper ways to perform the work. Meanwhile, core demand is shrinking as self service by customers is increasingly enabled. Then at some step pattern, perhaps the next global business cycle down turn, the headcount starts trending downward. This will repeat a handful of times, probably taking decades to be measured in aggregate by this type of study.
by jimmySixDOF | 2025-04-29 13:00:46+00:00
Or you can apply the Bezos/Amazon anecdote about anecdotes:

At a managers meeting "user stories" about poor support but all the KPIs looked good from the call center so Jeff dials in the number from the meeting speaker phone, gets put on hold, IVR spin cycle, hold again, etc .... His take away was basically "if the data and anecdotes don't match always default to the customer stories".
Show HN: Memex is a Claude Code alternative built on Rust+Tauri for vibe coding
by davidvgilmore | 2025-04-29 13:00:48+00:00
Hi HN,

TL;DR Memex is a cross-platform desktop app for vibe coding. Think ChatGPT + Claude Code rolled into one.

Why we built it: We love chat tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT. We also love coding agents, like in Cursor and Windsurf. We don’t like that web-based app builders are opinionated about tech stack and we can’t run them locally. So, we built Memex to be a chat tool + coding agent that supports any tech stack.

What it can do today: Claude Code-like coding. Agentic web search / research. Pre-built templates (e.g. fullstack, iOS, python + modal, etc). Inline data analysis + viz. Checkpointing (shadow git repo). Privacy mode.

How it works: Written in TS+Rust+Python, using Tauri for the cross-platform build (macOS, Windows, Linux). It has a bundled python environment for data analysis. Agent uses a mix of Sonnet 3.7 + Haiku.

Status & roadmap: Free download with free tier and paid plan: https://memex.tech. Up next: [1] Additional model support (e.g. Gemini 2.5). [2] MCP support. [3] Computer use.

Ask: Kick the tires. Give us feedback on product + roadmap. If you love it – spread the word!

Thanks! David
by acdha | 2025-04-29 13:01:38+00:00
RIM was already dying technically. They had a few corporate-friendly features (push notifications, some good security features) but even by the standards of the 2000s their software was lousy and the hardware unremarkable. It looked like the same problem as Nokia at the time, and Google a decade later, where the management were so busy milking the cash cow that they neglected long-term R&D and responding to market trends. I think even without the iPhone to copy from, Android would have killed them because the tech stack was a generation newer and far more capable.
by venusenvy47 | 2025-04-29 13:01:45+00:00
I'm friends with someone who works for a logistics company, and collecting the tariff from each company, and sending to the government, is part of the service they provide. It actually wasn't a complicated part of their business until a couple months ago, because of how little that aspect would change. But now their compliance teams have to read the Federal Register every day to keep up. They are getting stuck in the middle of this, because they quote the delivery costs to the company, but by the time the shipment arrives, the tariff has suddenly risen and then the company complains "that is not the cost you quoted us".
by Zanfa | 2025-04-29 13:02:07+00:00
> The "Google's search is garbage" paradigm is starting to get outdated

Quite the opposite. It's never been more true. I'm not saying using LLMs for search is better, but as it stands right now, SEO spammers have beat Google, since whatever you search for, the majority of results are AI slop.

Their increased revenue probably comes down to the fact that they no longer show any search results in the first screenful at all for mobile and they've worked hard to make ads indistinguishable from real results at a quick glance for the average user. And it's not like there exists a better alternative. Search in general sucks due to SEO.
by fhd2 | 2025-04-29 13:02:48+00:00
Can't directly answer your question, since I'm not working at a company that makes any claims about hiring less human engineers because of automation.

But I think the central question is not how much of software development can be automated. It's rather how many engineers companies _believe_ they need.

Having spent some time in mid sized companies adjacent to large companies, the sheer size of teams working on relatively simple stuff can be stunning. I think companies with a lot of money have overstaffed on engineers for at least a decade now. And the thing is: It kinda works. An individual or a small team can only go so far, a good team can only grow at a certain rate. If you throw hundreds of engineers at something, they _will_ figure it out, even if you could theoretically do it with far less, by optimising for quality hires and effective ways of working. That's difficult and takes time, so if you have the money for it, you can throw more bodies at it instead. You won't get it done cheaper, probably also not better, but most likely faster.

The mere _idea_ that LLMs can replace human engineers kinda resets this. The base expectation is now that you can do stuff with a fraction of the work force. And the thing is: You can, you always could, before LLMs. I've been preaching this for probably 20 years now. It's just that few companies dared to attempt it, investors would scoff at it, think you're being too timid. Now they celebrate it.

So like many, I think any claims of replacing developers with AI are likely cost savings in disguise, presented in a way the stock market might accept more than "it's not going so well, we're reducing investments".

All that aside, I also find it difficult as a layperson to separate the advent of coding LLMs from other, probably more consequential effects, like economic uncertainty. When the economy is stable, companies invest. When it's unstable, they wait.
by rchaud | 2025-04-29 13:02:49+00:00
> I'd love to live and work in Canada but I'm not taking a massive pay cut to do it.

Then you have your answer. Canada is not "US with free healthcare". It has a different history, economic and political setup. A quarter of the population are Francophone, and they govern very differently from the rest of Canada. Canada's wealth is also concentrated in the mining and natural resources industries, not in knowledge economy services. You cannot tweak policy here and there and turn it into a nation of SaaS billionnaires any more than you could in the UK or France.

For a real-world juxtaposition of the differences, think of Blackberry. In 2007, they saw the iPhone and told their partners at AT&T that the bandwidth load a portable Youtube/Internet device would put on AT&T's towers would cause call interruptions. Lo and behold, they did: AT&T was synonymous with dropped calls from 2007-2010 [0], when they finally spent billions into upgrading their towers to 4G. Blackberry ultimately lost the handset market, but for many other reasons besides their oft-mocked reaction to the iPhone.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/08/cnet.iphone.att.dropped....
by entuno | 2025-04-29 13:02:54+00:00
Yeah, it's pretty common. Some years back I reported a stored XSS vulnerability in an online marketplace with hundreds of thousands of users - a proper writeup with HTTP requests, proof of concept, impact, etc. No mention of bounties/rewards or anything like that - just a vulnerability report.

I made multiple attempts to report it to their security team/mailbox over a several months and never got any response or acknowledgement back from them. Then a few months later they quietly fixed the issue.