MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by peab | 2025-04-11 15:05:13+00:00
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

>In retrospect, I think it's possible I took all of this the wrong way. But even after reading the post a 2nd time, I can still read it both ways.

I think what you're saying resonates with me, and tbh yes this type of tool could definitely go in the direction of having the AI write slop. That wasn't my intention with it, because at that point you could just have chatGPT write the whole thing from the start. But I think the very nature of the tool lends itself to being able to do that.

>This isn't necessarily your fault - I think the issue is that the current tech landscape is filled with tools and people eager to use those tools to pump out content. When I read "write more efficiently", my mind goes to the tools that promise the same thing and accomplish it by generating slop. I realize you explicitly stated you don't want to contribute to slop, but that stated goal and what a tool does are potentially different things.

I think it's an interesting problem. Autocomplete could be great in theory if it actually predicted what I was going to say. If it's putting words in my mouth, I agree, it's not great in this context. The research topics is an attempt at this - the goal is to generate suggested search queries to lookup references, based on the existing content of the blog. These are queries that I would have to do manually otherwise.

>One suggestion - a very brief demo that shows the UI in operation would go far to clear up these misconceptions. The generative part of my own brain took the static examples and imagined outcomes that may be essentially hallucinations.

Great idea, I'll do that next time.

Anyways, thanks for the feedback! I just started blogging recently, so I appreciate it.
by DontchaKnowit | 2025-04-11 15:05:19+00:00
I dont mean to be negative, but this is garbage. What is this accomplishing that one cannot accomplish with a pen and paper?

Is it creating a custom plan for WHAT you should be studying/practicing? If so, it could not possibly cater to a learner properly. If not, what is the point?

And theres no examples of a plan actually produced by this so if youre purchasing it you are purchasing completely blind.

Do you have any sales so far? Those revjews seem fake. This wreaks of a grift.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-11 15:05:21+00:00
Yes, republicans in congress can stop this at anytime, and once people tangibly feel prices increase congressional leaders will get scared.

If congress turns heavy blue in 2026, they can rain hell on the mild conservative goals that Trump seems to have taken a nuclear approach to. Congressman do care about their seat, and they do get scared of losing power. Right now Americans are particularly sensitive to price increases as well, with the pandemic inflation still fresh on everyone's mind.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-04-11 15:05:32+00:00
When I worked as a consultant, the majority of the work was done by younger/less tenured/lower-level people.

The skill balance (actual, tangible IT/software skill) was heavily in favor of the "younger" (as above).

Most of the managers/those in supervisory roles were busy "showing impact" and "aligning cross-functional teams".
by bitmasher9 | 2025-04-11 15:06:02+00:00
You can solve this by either having wide bands or by preferentially promoting those that make extra contributions.

Just increasing the salary band would do a lot to attract more talent, which is a good-not-perfect solution. Last time I checked going to work at a federal job would have cut my total compensation in half, but if it was just a 20% cut I would have looked deeper.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-04-11 15:06:05+00:00
This was fascinating to see unfold. What if there was a social network that had taste and rejected things that suck?

Is it a failure of Bluesky to never become the global town square, if it means being a place where a brand can't find it a safe space to promote itself?

Can a social network thread the needle of having enough traffic to be worthwhile but not so much as to attract the Eternal September?
by WorldPeas | 2025-04-11 15:06:15+00:00
So many of the burrs on my experience with anything are that I still expect the paradigm I had with my discman as a kid to the nth degree, back then I would load my favorite songs onto a disc, then play them, or play an album on repeat. I-tunes lets me do this still, but it's trying to push more of its streaming features on me like when I search my library, it defaults to searching Apple's network music volume, that I'm not interested in. I fear that the iphone will continue to hamper one's efforts to download media until you are forced into more fiscally expedient platforms like Spotify, where my favorite PM dawn song was replaced by a "superior" remaster where the artist was much older and lost the tone of his voice. Sadly one of the consequences of convergence is that so much else in the phone is done right I'd probably still have to use it.
by ghusto | 2025-04-11 15:06:21+00:00
So happy to read this and all the comments in agreement. I thought it was just me.

In my bombastic opinion, Spotify has the _worst_ goddamn user interface of anything I have ever used, including my dishwasher with a single button. Netflix is less frustrating, but that's likely because "here are some films" is more acceptable than "here are some songs, but fuck you if want to listen by album".

Smashing content into my face isn't making me love you.
Show HN: RSS Launchpad – a tiny Firefox (mobile) RSS extension extractor
by k0tan32 | 2025-04-11 15:06:22+00:00
Hello there!

I'm sharing a small Firefox extension that I created for my own use (and for fun, of course!). The extension partially restores the RSS support that was removed from major browsers a long time ago: it extracts (or derives) RSS feeds from pages and shows them in a nice way and easy to export to some external reader.

Motive I've been reading HN for quite some time, and some articles there helped me rediscover RSS. Nowadays, it has become my top source for reading, especially on tech topics, helping me to focus and detox from social media.

There are a few reasons for its existence compared to other extensions I was able to find, primarily:

- I wanted an up-to-date extension with the fewest possible permissions (hence, no global background scripts, most FF extensions ask this). This extension can only access the active tab and only when it is used.

- I aimed for a native look and feel, including Firefox for Android.

- I wanted some special logic for websites that support RSS but hide it (like YouTube).

So sharing it here for other RSS enthusiasts! All MIT Licensed.

Links: Gif screencast: https://github.com/ilya-m32/rss-launchpad/raw/master/screenc...

Firefox addons page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rss-launchpad...

Edit: \n added
by slaterdev | 2025-04-11 15:06:25+00:00
> notice that this takes over 5s. How is anything like that acceptable in 2025 is beyond me

I tried it just now. 18.09MB and 8.81s to show a 67 file diff. The fetch for /diffs was 4.6MB.

The page is usable from about 4s on but things keep loading.

Some my extensions probably make things worse: Stylus, Tampermonkey, Vimium. Others like Ghostery are blocking tons of tracking requests (collector.github.com)
by georges_gomes | 2025-04-11 15:06:35+00:00
My dear hackers,

We have been working on figma.to.website for the last 18 months.

The vision is to add the missing [Publish] button to Figma. Design in Figma and directly publish to the web.

When Figma added the "Autolayout wrap" feature, we saw that this could be a reality.

We think we have something that can be proudly presented here today :)

## Features

The feature list is intense:

- Custom domain - Custom code - Embed HTML - Accessibility - Password protection - Redirects - Bring your own analytics - Open Graph metas - Favicon - ...

We recently added following major features:

- Forms - Localization (with variables modes) - Notion as CMS (for blog post, changelogs, etc...) - RSS generation

## Performance

We generate static "vanilla" HTML, CSS and JavaScript for maximum performance.

Images are uploaded to a CDN and delivered in the best possible format (WebP/AVIF when possible) and best possible size for the device.

Everything is served from Cloudflare CDN 300+ edge locations.

In a world where everything is AI, this has been done in pure brute-force old-fashion engineering :D

## We use it ourselves

The website https://figma.to.website it self is made with it. The blog post are coming from a Notion database directly. It's a real pleasure to maintain content in Notion and design in Figma!!

## Thanks for reading!

I hope you will enjoy it as much we do.

Ask us anything.

Cheers,

Georges and the ‹div›RIOTS team (https://divRIOTS.com <- homepage also made with figma.to.website)
by dathinab | 2025-04-11 15:06:39+00:00
On of the larger dangers of AI for startups, investors and similar (i.e. we are not speaking about end users here) is

"AI makes it easy to produce the first 50-70% solution, but you often need a 80-95% solution to not fall over hard and it's not rare that getting there isn't just hard but hardly possible at lest for an affordable price"
by whatnow37373 | 2025-04-11 15:06:54+00:00
Fair enough. It's just that in my experience the "cool bits" are quickly done and then we get bogged down in endless layers of inter-systems communication (HTTP, RPC, file systems, caches). I often see FP people saying stuff like "it's not 100% pure, of course there are some isolated side-effects" and I'm thinking.. my brother, I live inside side-effects. The days I can have even a few pure functions are few and far between. I'm honestly curious what percentage of your code bases can be this pure.

But of course this heavily depends on the domain you are working in. Some people work in simulation or physics or whatever and that's where the interesting bits begin. (Even then I'm thinking "programming" is not the interesting bit, it's the physics)
by p_l | 2025-04-11 15:07:03+00:00
a bit of the problem is that modern elements like display + touch screen require a lot more bandwidth than 3110 - for example the displays require ridiculous bandwidth in comparison to the nokia, like 10 gigabit/s for Samsung Galaxy S25 (basic model, not plus/ultra), plus connectors for the cameras.

At the very least you can't really make the screen soldered-on, and the simple connectors used in Nokia might not work out for such high bandwidth use case. Same with cameras.

Thin ribbon connectors are one of the hardest things to automate from what I remember regarding Sony's efforts to automate PS5 manufacture.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-11 15:07:23+00:00
If I remember clearly, Apple's hiring process low-key also looked for "good taste" and "product sense" even for pure engineers. Subtly different than anywhere else I interviewed. It's really hard to measure and quantify good taste and an intuitive feel for what's great, which is why most companies don't bother trying. "Just make number go up" is the norm.
by taeric | 2025-04-11 15:07:51+00:00
Oddly, I think '0' (or 'O') may make more sense for rotate? With '=' good for horizontal flip and '|' good for vertical flip? I'm probably trying to force more meaning in the character than makes sense. :(

I will say that these are immediately useful when any of the automatic splits picked the wrong "side" from what I wanted. Really really useful.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-04-11 15:08:13+00:00
Based on my personal experience and that of many others I know, that's about as wrong as one can get. A great many government workers are there to collect a paycheck and go home (just like many other people working for many other employers). Their commitment to 'the mission' hovers near zero.

Just ask them.

Where do people get these crazy ideas about government employees? There are some wonderful people in public service, but it's not some Wonkaland of saints who toil just to help others and do the right thing.
by rtkwe | 2025-04-11 15:08:30+00:00
There's ways to do that that aren't the mindless slash and burn that's happening right now. If it were done thoughtfully I'm sure there's places that some fat could be trimmed. (And if you're looking for places to do that look at the Pentagon who hasn't passed an audit in living memory...)

Would it be worth the extra hurdles required to actually catch that waste/fraud though? My bet is on probably not, it's like the many many attempts to drug test welfare recipients, they all wind up costing far more than they save because the actual rate is pretty low so catching those is far more expensive than what you save.
by sheepscreek | 2025-04-11 15:08:49+00:00
You’re way overestimating the effect an enthusiast has. Evangelism only goes far enough to introduce people to the thing. How often someone uses the thing depends entirely on its utility (usefulness).

As long as Netflix was successfully reading the author’s mind, they were satisfied with the experience. However, Netflix assumed that they want to keep watching the same content, oblivious to the author’s desire to discover something entirely new. Netflix failed to meet the expectations of those seeking something entirely different.

I can understand why Netflix made this change. They’ve replaced many shows with their own in-house productions. By doing so, they prevent users from searching for specific shows and then realizing that Netflix doesn’t have them. If this happens frequently, they risk losing customers.

On the other hand, Spotify doesn’t face this issue. Therefore, I’m puzzled by why they’ve made it more challenging to explore content by categories. (Disclaimer: I don’t use Spotify, so my experience is based solely on author’s observations.)
by feitingen | 2025-04-11 15:09:14+00:00
Personally, it's not that the alternatives are so awesome.

It's when i meet against some awful design choices in systemd, like how it decides to wait forever rather than hard fail, and by wait forever, i mean wait for 30 seconds, no, 1 minute 30 seconds, no 5 minutes... you get it.

Or you can easily lock yourself out when there's a typo in /etc/fstab.

Or the hardcoded 5 minute timeout for sysv-generator: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/src/sysv-genera...

God forbid you used cgroupsv1 for anything when poettering unilaterally decided to punish everyone with a 30 second delay for using it.

If you stray off of the intended opinionated path, be prepared for the least user-friendly experience linux has to offer. You might even get some abuse from the developers if you try to ask for help, but they've probably toned it down since CoC became a thing (I hope).
by tpmoney | 2025-04-11 15:09:16+00:00
Unless the ai model is being run at build time to generate inputs to the build I disagree that the model, its prompts or its weights and seeds constitute part of “the build” for reproducibility purposes. Static source files generated by an AI and committed to source control are indistinguishable from a build perspective by source files generated by a human and committed to that same source control. We (reasonably) dont consider the IDE, the auto-complete tools or the reference manuals consulted to be requirements for a “reproducible” build and I don’t think the AI models or prompts are any different in that respect. They might be interesting pieces of information, and they might be useful for documenting intent of a given piece of code but if you can take the same source files and run them through the same compile process and get the same outputs, that’s “reproducible”.
by sdkgames | 2025-04-11 15:09:17+00:00
1. One can use the browser's devtools (press F12 when browsing the site) to figure out the needed files.

2. Create a list of the files (files.txt).

https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/oegames/landnav/forest/Build/Buil...

https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/oegames/landnav/forest/Build/Buil...

https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/oegames/landnav/forest/Build/Buil...

https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/oegames/landnav/forest/Build/Buil...

https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/oegames/landnav/forest/Build/Buil...

https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/oegames/landnav/forest/Build/Unit...

https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/oegames/landnav/forest/index.html

3. Download the files using the browser or a downloader:

wget --input-file=files.txt --show-progress --directory-prefix=forest --force-directories
by phh | 2025-04-11 15:09:55+00:00
> It is therefore in the provider's interest to make you satisfied with less and/or cheaper content.

After getting annoyed by their interface that was showing 80% of content I have already seen, I've come to a realization:

Their incentive is not even to make me watch crap. No! Their best outcome for them is for me to watch nothing and still pay.

Showing me old shows gives me the warm feelings and make me associate them with Netflix, making me keep the subscription even

Hypnodrones are corporate dreams
by munificent | 2025-04-11 15:09:57+00:00
This is a good insight, though I wouldn't limit it to software engineering.

I've discussed with my therapist many times that my biggest mental health challenges are from the exact same personality traits that bring me my greatest joy and value. Every maladaptive trait has its adaptive aspects and vice versa. If I were to try to eliminate those maladaptive aspects, I'd probably lose much of the adaptive side as well.

There is a real zen to being able to note that the things which cause the most anguish also cause the most joy and accepting both sides of that coin at the same time.
by lbhdc | 2025-04-11 15:10:11+00:00
For big companies like this, I like to go look at the activity on sdks and related projects. Typically activity will flat line before a sun setting announcement is made. Its hard to say how much lead time that buys you, but I have found it a useful barometer.

It seems like the firebase repos have had a fair amount of activity.

https://github.com/orgs/firebase/repositories
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-11 15:10:33+00:00
I thought the interesting thing was this quote from Hegseth:

> The contracts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform, Hegseth said in the memo released late on Thursday.

I obviously don't know the details of these specific contracts, but the general sentiment that qualified federal employees can do better than overpriced private contractors is something I agree with, at least in broad brushstrokes.

But, that said, this would appear to be in direct opposition to DOGE and the Project 2025 playbook - here is a recent article, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/30/doge-pr....

This is why I hate what DOGE is doing. I could definitely get behind a coherent effort to streamline the federal government and save money - BTW, this was done rather successfully by Clinton and Gore in the 90s, who eliminated a huge portion of the federal workforce, they just didn't go on stage with chainsaws to promote it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv.... But now it's just "throwing bombs", and the overt corruption of the administration leaves me little faith that government will actually become more efficient with this current kakistocracy.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-04-11 15:10:41+00:00
What do you mean 'they were caught by the system already'?

Claudine Gay is still employed by Harvard. According to her Wikipedia page, she is the "Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University".

And she wasn't exposed by folks in academia, but by people outside that system.
by hedora | 2025-04-11 15:10:46+00:00
I was about to say you were being paranoid, then I read the article. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would be so reckless!

The proposed workflow involves cloning your dev environment and sharing it with the internet.

At most places, that’s equivalent to publishing your production keys, or at least github credentials.

Even for open source projects where confidentiality doesn’t matter, there are issues like using cargo/npm/etc keys to launch supply chain attacks.

Your nonce attack is harder to pull off, but more devastating if the attacker can man in the middle things like dependency downloads.
by maltyr | 2025-04-11 15:10:53+00:00
If we're only in the realm of video games, Nintendo has some of the highest prices for their games, and rarely drop below half price. This does factor in somewhat, since their games (assuming you get a physical version) maintain their value better.

I think Nintendo should include a few months of free online play for their flagship titles with Nintendo Online service. The fact that all online activity is basically gated to a monthly subscription is one of the few things I dislike as a consumer about Nintendo's product strategy.

If we're going across different "entertainment" forms, I would argue the cheapest form of entertainment is probably football, aka soccer, or something similar as that just requires a ball.
by rtkwe | 2025-04-11 15:11:04+00:00
And/or they decide on cuts by ^F "diversity" or "transition" cutting of programs like the US seed vault which stores a lot of different crop seed varieties so we can restart our agriculture if there's a blight that knocks out our massive monocultures but it's getting axed now because it protects crop _diversity_... and that's suddenly a kill word for funding because we're being run by ideologues and idiots.
by wdkrnls | 2025-04-11 15:11:06+00:00
R works exactly as you describe. You can type `+`(1, 2) and get 3 because in R everything that happens is a function call even if a few binary functions get special sugar so you can type 1 + 2 for them as well. The user can of course make their own of these if they wrap them in precents. For example: `%plus%` = function(a, b) { `+`(a, b)}. A few computer algebra systems languages provide even more expressivity like yacas and fricas. The later even has a type system.
by osmoscraft | 2025-04-11 15:11:09+00:00
React turns out to be a powerful tool to management the state of anything hierarchical and dynamic.

For the UI, we can show stuff dynamically with JSX; and the JSX would include actions that let user modify the state; the updated the state would trigger a re-rendering of UI to reflect the latest the state.

What if we can apply this paradigm to model Human + AI interacting with a shared piece of state? We can let React and LLM see the same state and use the same tools to change that change.
by jmclnx | 2025-04-11 15:12:15+00:00
Wait to see what happens when the firings in mass begins as Trump cuts social protections. Plus inflation will soon start that will make the Covid Inflation Rates look like good times.

So I expect a delayed huge raise in Crime thanks to Trump.

But at least gas prices will probably fall once the firings kick in. That is the only thing MAGA seems to cares about.
by duxup | 2025-04-11 15:12:37+00:00
Big name.

Makes sense that this first shows up with companies who have high volume and are directly dealing with tariffs day to day. They don't want to eat the costs for long / if at all. Feels like a lot of companies with all the uncertainty didn't want to just proactively raise the prices, but as their suppliers and folks raise them it will spread.
by skerit | 2025-04-11 15:12:42+00:00
I unfortunately pay for Spotify.

I also pay for Youtube premium, but I can't even switch to that because their music player is even worse than Spotify.

I really miss the good old days of music players that were _packed_ with features. The players of current streaming services are so basic. And as long as I can't find a replacement that fits my needs I don't really want to bother switching.