MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dave4420 | 2025-04-07 09:59:30+00:00
There’s a difference between management knowing that it’s worth paying off tech debt in general, and management knowing that now is the right time to pay off this piece of tech debt in particular.

Why pay off tech debt A and not tech debt B? Is this really more urgent than implementing feature C?

I have some financial debts, but I prioritise paying off some over others, and even allow myself to buy myself nice things instead of paying off the mortgage early. The same principle applies with tech debt, except I have to justify my choices to my bosses instead of to my girlfriend.
by bryanhogan | 2025-04-07 09:59:56+00:00
Not sure which one the original comment is talking about, but look into "Gründerstipendium" / "EXIST Stipendium".

Then there are also more scholarships based on other criteria, e.g. your state or if you are at an university, many universities also have some sort of entrepreneurial scholarship which will then also help you get the larger scholarships afterwards.
by wongarsu | 2025-04-07 10:01:15+00:00
Most models do pretty well with keeping state in XML if you ask them to. You could extend it to <secret><content>[...]</content><secret_from>P1</secret_from><shared_with>P2, P3</shared_with></secret>. Or tell the model that it can use <secret> tags with xml content and just let it develop a schema on the fly.

At that point, I would love to also see sub-benchmarks how each models's score is affected by being given a schema vs having it make one up, and if the model does better with state in text vs xml vs json. Those don't tell you which model is best, but they are very useful to know for actually using them.
by lazide | 2025-04-07 10:01:31+00:00
1) I never said ‘far left’. I just said left.

2) That’s just fantasy near as I can tell. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_Sta...] has many, many references of folks calling themselves and their own party ‘left’ or ‘center-left’.

It’s very common. As is ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’.

3) I’ve never seen anyone on that side of the aisle calling themselves ‘right’, ‘conservative’, etc.

So who is just imagining things?

And the underlying problem is that - like is typical when dealing with effective narcissists - the reason this is the case is because of the reality distortion and manipulation being done by the guilty party.

They pre-poison the well, so in order to respond effectively the opposition has to be ‘the bad guy’, which exposes them to attack, because now the narcissist has ‘proof’ that the opposition is the actual bad guys. It’s evil genius really.

It’s why the only actually effective way to deal with narcissists is either 1) ignoring them (can’t do that and survive when the narcissist has power - which is why they tend to be power seeking), or 2) applied consequences, aka usually violence.
by toxik | 2025-04-07 10:01:34+00:00
Like all things RL, it is 99.9% about engineering the environment and rewards. As one of the authors stated elsewhere here, there is a reward for completing each of 12 steps necessary to find diamonds.

Mostly I'm tired of RL work being oversold by its authors and proponents by anthropomorphizing its behaviors. All while this "agent" cannot reliably learn to hold down a button, literally the most basic interaction of the game.
by eesmith | 2025-04-07 10:01:41+00:00
Could be, but the game play doesn't encourage me to continue.

Again, the first time I went to the store I could max out with everything, so there wasn't the accumulative build-up, or decision to prioritize one purchase strategy over another.

There wasn't any sign there would be new things to buy which I couldn't yet afford.

There was no hint that future game play would be anything other than clicking madly, with no need to conserve or focus resource use.

Part of Missile Command is to wait until just the right point so a single missile can do a chain reaction to take out several incoming warheads; to watch if your strategy was effective, not simply twitch-fire; and even the slow dread of watching an incoming warhead come towards a city after you've depleted your missile supply.

Here's an example from the novelization of WarGames, from https://archive.org/details/wargames00davi/page/n45/mode/2up... :

> David Lightman hovered over the controls of the Atari Missile Command tucked neatly between the Frogger machine and the Zaxxon game. ...

> Goddamned Smart Bombs! he thought as a white buzzing blip snuck through his latest volley of shots and headed for one of his six cities at the bottom of the screen. He spun the control ball, stitched a neat three-X line just below the descending bomb with the cursor, and watched with immense satisfaction as his missiles streaked white lines to their targets, blowing the bomb right out of the phosphor-dot sky.

I didn't get the same sense of satisfaction playing this version.
by fastball | 2025-04-07 10:03:33+00:00
> Government workers can take far more pride in being public servants than they would peeing in a bottle for amazon. It's no surprise there is less turnover.

See, this is where you're losing me. One the one hand you are arguing that part of what makes working for the government desirable is the job itself / the work being done (which sounds good to me), but then you are immediately conflating that with a reputation for being a "stable employer" (read: not firing people when maybe you should), which is not how I want my tax dollars to be used.

I don't want the federal government to be a jobs program that keeps people on payroll just because it "isn't worried about profits". Profits aren't my concern, spending is, and the federal government should absolutely be worried about spending, because money doesn't grow on trees. I want the federal government to be exactly as big as it needs to be in order to deliver on the democratically decided goals of the American people.

If we can't attract the right talent to run the government, we should either scale back our federal ambitions or we should pay more up front.
by barriteau | 2025-04-07 10:04:28+00:00
In "keyboard" mode, you need something to tap on, but it can be the mousepad on your desk, your opposite arm, the underside of your dining room table, the side of your thigh while walking, the handlebars of your bike, etc.

There are also "air gestures" (Smart TV control, air mouse, and media control modes) that don't require a surface. (By the way, there are recent updates in this department that leave out the Tap Strap).

I'm not into gaming, VR sets or the like at all, so I can't say how good or bad these are for that sort of thing, but that market seems to be the main focus and direction the company is taking these days.
by tuetuopay | 2025-04-07 10:04:29+00:00
Everything is a balance. IMHO, the "identifiers should be short" "functions should be short" and such are knee-jerk reactions to overly long things that are common in some other languages (looking at you, Java). Like the practice of indicating the type, pointer, etc. Stuff ike `pWcharInputBuffer` and such.

There is a balance between `*p` and `inputPointerToMiddleOfBufferThatFrobnicates`.
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-07 10:04:39+00:00
> The backlog there is pretty insane even while finishing upwards of 150 ebooks per month

Isn't the backlog there mostly in the post-processing step, though? To the point where they're taking finished texts and running them again through the page-by-page proofreading in hope of fishing out more OCR typos and improving the format markup?

You can also contribute at Wikisource if you prefer, that doesn't really have a post-processing step and has much less of a fixed pipeline. (There are explicit "proofreading" and "verification" steps per page, but not much beyond that.)
by mapcars | 2025-04-07 10:04:57+00:00
These ideas are great, but I don't understand how the whole Smalltalk approach can fit into modern development environments of multiple engineers working on a project, client-server architectures, or even large codebases - TDD helps, but high level of dynamism without typechecking can't be reliable in my experience.

The ability to fix things on the fly and have the whole system as your ide/debugger is nice, but that's not very practical for the end user.
by senko | 2025-04-07 10:06:22+00:00
I do like the idea in general and feel there's a lot of room for improvement between the (VC / bootstrapping) extremes.

However, the middle path from the article presumes the existence of VCs willing to join you on that path. The article waves this away with:

> angel investors are generally more open to a 2-3x ROI

For a $1M round you'd need to find 10-20 such angels (assuming $50k-$100k average check size) willing to accept small upside, for which you'll have convince them there's commensurately smaller risk. This will probably mean you have some revenue and some sense of where PMF might lay or some kind of brand/pedigree.

Do not underestimate the value of YC brand and being able to present on Demo Day gives you. A random Jane from Ohio building her tech company would have a lot harder time finding those 10-20 angels, to put it mildly. I'd be more careful when extrapolating path-dependent success into a general strategy.

That said, my gut feeling is there's room for the next Paul Graham to fill that space - somehow.
by muzani | 2025-04-07 10:06:22+00:00
These things do work and created a few unicorns here in Malaysia.

The catch is that they're usually very bureaucratic as it's public funds, and the more corruption, the more rules there are. Someone might say, come in from New Zealand to get a grant, then the condition becomes "must be 51% locally owned". A conglomerate creates a sister company to get the grant and then it becomes, "parent company must be less than 3 years old and have under $500k revenue". The rules just keep stacking on until agile is basically banned lol

Companies funded this way were actually one of my income sources when I was freelancing, but sadly most don't continue on unless there's a Series B later on.
by impossiblefork | 2025-04-07 10:09:17+00:00
We can more limited variants of the dark mirror ideology though. For example, we can imagine someone who believes all the tenets of Marxian Communism and uses the analysis to maximize his own advantage, so that he if he is a large property owner ends up doing all the things that Marxists expect large property owners to do-- perhaps he even pushes a liberal ideology in public, but this kind of limited-dark-Marxism in private.

I think the dark liberalism of this essay is a real ideology commonly held by marginal dictators, think Lukashenko. I also don't think this kind of limited-dark-Marxism is unusual.
by daneel_w | 2025-04-07 10:10:46+00:00
Over the past 15-20 years I've used both Sonys, Canons and Nikons, and I absolutely feel that Nikon puts a lot more effort, with much better results, into the usability of their pro/prosumer cameras - and, really, even their $500-$1000 consumer range - both in terms of the on-display UI and the ergonomics and handling of the actual camera.

What always stood out most for me compared to Canon was Nikon's larger viewfinders, letting you commit to actual photography rather than being stuck with a feeling of peeping through a keyhole, and placement of buttons on the camera body allowing for maintained control of the most necessary functions (shutter speed, aperture and even ISO) without having to change your grip or move the camera away from your face.
by timonoko | 2025-04-07 10:11:03+00:00
They dont have alternate sources of heat now. 80% comes from national grid. When that fails in midwinter, folks die.

Says Grok:

Based on the most recent available data and Helen’s stated plans, here’s an estimate of Helsinki’s current energy sources as of April 7, 2025, expressed in approximate percentages:

Nuclear Power: Around 30-35%. Helen relies heavily on nuclear energy procured from external sources like the Olkiluoto power plant. Nuclear power forms a significant part of Finland’s electricity mix (38.1% nationally in 2024), and Helsinki’s supply reflects this stable, carbon-free source.

Wind Power: Approximately 20-25%. Wind has surged in Finland, contributing 23.9% to national electricity in 2024, and Helen has emphasized replacing coal with wind energy. Helsinki benefits from this growing capacity through purchases and partnerships.

Hydropower: Roughly 15-20%. Hydropower, contributing 16.6% nationally in 2024, is another key source for Helen, sourced from rivers like Kemijoki and Kymijoki outside Helsinki.

Biofuels and Biomass: About 15-20%. Wood-based fuels and biomass are critical for district heating, which serves over 90% of Helsinki’s homes. In 2017, wood and residues made up 30% of district heating nationally, and Helsinki continues to use these renewable sources, though exact local percentages have shifted with coal’s exit.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-07 10:12:08+00:00
It's an upgrade for us, yes. But not for the companies that want to pretend they're doing FOSS. Like Apple these days.

They had a good run where they really were open, like when they created OpenCL and Darwin was kept up to date. However these days most of their APIs are closed and Darwin is always lagging behind. Not that anyone actually uses that anyway, but still..
by summarity | 2025-04-07 10:12:08+00:00
No that's for a full GmbH. You can start with an "UG", which realistically needs maybe 1500 EUR to get registered and up and running. Then, a certain percentage of the profit is contributed towards the 25k (of which in turn only 12.5k have to be deposited in cash) each financial year. If the threshold is met, you can convert from UG to GmbH.
by j4coh | 2025-04-07 10:12:37+00:00
I was curious, so checked - $500,000 in VOO 5 years ago would have been 1.18 million today - already accounting for the crash so far. The market would need to crash an additional 60% starting with the next open to get you back to your $500,000 break even. Maybe this will happen, but that's quite a fall.
by piva00 | 2025-04-07 10:13:02+00:00
Entrepreneurial success they definitely have, it's just not in-your-face tech/digital stuff, it's lots of Mittelstand companies focusing on niches, like in high-precision machines that are then used for precision manufacturing (optical lenses, chemistry reactors, etc.).

What gives is that it isn't a primarily marketing-driven consumer-facing entrepreneurship so you don't hear about Peter Huber Kältemaschinenbau, or Rational AG-like companies[0].

[0] https://www.chargeurs.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/The-Bes...
by codingdave | 2025-04-07 10:13:11+00:00
Yeah, and that was not the only odd limit. 64K limit on fieldnames in the entire app was my favorite weird one. At one point there were docs online of all the various limits in Domino, and you had to work around them all.

This is also why I say there are few people who know Domino well enough to run it today - even in its heydey there was some mad science to do large apps on it, knowing not only all the quirks but how to work around them.
by fastball | 2025-04-07 10:13:40+00:00
Presumably you'd want to see that such initiatives are increasing the number of sustainable businesses created, per capita. Is that the case?

---

EDIT: Some quick searching indicates that the startup rate (per capita) in Germany is about 1.1%, while the USA is 1.5%. Not a huge difference, but the USA doesn't have any of those initiatives afaik.

Just wondering what actually moves the needle and how to better create a society that is entrepreneurial, and not just in a "billion dollar social media unicorn" kinda way, but businesses that provide actual tangible value. Definitely recognize that the "quality" of businesses being started in Germany could be higher, but I think you actually need to measure these things and understand what interventions actually make a difference. It is a similar issue with UBI in general: while it sounds nice and might be necessary if our "AI is the future" overlords get their way, you do actually need to back up the promise of "UBI will unlock human creativity" with some amount of hard data, imo.
by p0w3n3d | 2025-04-07 10:13:52+00:00
> they’re more free to lock down macOS from running your own code on it in the future, without worrying about having to rip out all the gpl3 code when it happens. Better to just not build on it in the first place.

That's actually quite scary what you wrote there.

That's also even more scary to me, as I am really watchful for such restrictions which can IMO happen in current OSes any time now ...
by red75prime | 2025-04-07 10:15:33+00:00
The "no free lunch" theorem. You can't start from scratch and expect your program to repeat 4 billion years of evolution collecting inductive biases useful in our corner of our Universe in a matter of hours[1].

While it's possible to bake in this particular inductive bias (repetitive actions might be useful), they decided not to (it's just not that interesting).

[1] And you certainly can't reproduce the observation selection effect in a laboratory. That is the thing that makes it possible to overcome the "no free lunch" theorem: our existence and intelligence are conditional on evolution being possible and finding the right biases.

We have to bake in inductive biases to get results. We have to incentivize behaviors useful (or interesting) to us to get useful results instead of generic exploration.
Show HN: SQL Noir – A detective game where you learn SQL by solving crimes
by chrisBHappy | 2025-04-07 10:16:36+00:00
I posted about SQL Noir a while ago — it’s an open-source game that teaches SQL through narrative-driven investigations. You act as a detective solving crimes by writing real SQL queries against actual databases.

Since then, I’ve added 2 new cases (now 6 in total), improved the UX, and fixed a bunch of early issues thanks to community feedback.

It’s still 100% free and open source. Would love feedback on the new cases, or ideas for future mysteries.
by pornel | 2025-04-07 10:16:36+00:00
> Could such bugs be avoided in C using the right tools and strategies

"right tools and strategies" is very open-ended, almost tautological — if you didn't catch the bug, then obviously you haven't used the right tools and the right strategies! In reality, the tools and strategies have flaws and limitations that turn such problem into "yes but actually no".

Static analysis of C code has fundamental limits, so there are bugs it can't find, and there are non-trivial bugs that it can't find without also finding false positives. False positives make developers needlessly tweak code that was correct, and leads to fatigue that makes them downplay and ignore the reports. The more reliable tools require catching problems at run-time, but problems like double-free often happen only in rare code paths that are hard to test for, and fuzzers can't reach all code either.
by muzani | 2025-04-07 10:16:53+00:00
Have you heard of Rocket Internet? It's one of the most successful models in the world. They may avoid the US market and such, but most of the unicorns in Malaysia are backed by Rocket. And most of the people who stay and start their own, backed by YC or whoever, are usually ex-Rocket. They hit 10% growth per week, even at unicorn sizes.

I would anecdotally put Germany at #3 globally just for Rocket alone, with US and China ahead of them.

There's lots of successful non-Rocket startups from Germany too, but most are boring stuff like agriculture, grocery delivery, pet stuff, etc. We normally don't take note of startups until they're Stripe-sized or something.
by defrost | 2025-04-07 10:17:30+00:00
Says the article, which perhaps "Grok" failed to read:

* Helsinki is now building the world’s largest heat pump, which will send heat to 30,000 homes when it starts running in 2026.

* At the site of one of the closed coal plants, the city is also building a new facility that will capture heat from the Baltic Sea.

* Helsinki also uses some hydro and nuclear power, and as much waste heat as possible. That includes capturing heat from local data centers and wastewater.
by arcastroe | 2025-04-07 10:17:44+00:00
> Reallocate portfolios if that makes sense

Yes. This is one of the reasons 80 stocks / 20 bonds is a common strategy. The rebalancing "forces" you to buy low and sell high.

When stocks dip, your portfolio might become unbalanced at 70/30, so you reallocate funds to buy stock bringing you back to 80/20. Conversely, if stock market soars, you might get to 90/10, and selling stocks would bring you back to 80/20. Performing this balancing is, in effect, "buying the dip"
Show HN: I made an AI chatbot to help challenge anxious thoughts
by pcoenen | 2025-04-07 10:17:55+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a solo founder who has struggled with anxiety myself.

I found that once anxious thoughts start spiraling, it’s really hard to interrupt them — especially in the moment. So I built Anxiety Breaker, a chatbot that helps you challenge those thoughts using evidence-based techniques from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

It also includes quick 3-minute daily lessons to help you understand how anxiety works and how to manage it long-term.

My goal was to make something simple, private, and accessible for anyone who might not have access to therapy.

I hope it can help anyone!

Would love any feedback!

Thanks for checking it out
by Zambyte | 2025-04-07 10:17:57+00:00
I have been playing around a lot with Zig lately, and though it's still in beta, it really feels like it has the best chance at being a true C successor. While Rust feels like they started with C++ and worked on making it harder to write incorrectly, Zig feels like they started with C and worked on making it easier to write correctly.

They also have a few pillars that they call the "Zen" of Zig[0], of which three out of the first five are directly related to readability.

[0] https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.14.0/#Zen
by busyant | 2025-04-07 10:18:13+00:00
> They get to punish woke science.

Imagine how all the chemists who study cis/trans isomerization feel right now ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cis%E2%80%93trans_isomerism

As someone who studied an cis/trans isomerase decades ago in grad school, I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but not completely.
by MrMcCall | 2025-04-07 10:18:29+00:00
> C lacks mechanisms to do this apart from using its incredibly brittle macro facility.

We programmers are the ultimate abstraction mechanism, and refining our techniques in pattern design and implementation in a codebase is our highest form of art. The list of patterns in the Gang-of-Four's "Design Patterns" are not as interesting as its first 50 pages, which are seminal.

From the organization of files in a project, to organization of projects, to class structure and use, to function design, to debug output, to variable naming as per scope, to commandline argument specification, to parsing, it's nothing but patterns upon patterns.

You're either doing patterns or you're doing one-offs, and one-offs are more brittle than C macros, are hard to comprehend later, and when you fix a bug in one, you've only fixed one bug, not an entire class of bugs.

Abstraction is the essense of programming, and abstraction is just pattern design and implementation in a codebase, the design of a functional block and how it's consumed over time.

The layering of abstractions is the most fundamental perspective on a codebase. They not only handle scale, they make or break correctness, ease of malleability, bug triage, performance, and comprehendability -- I'm sure I could find more.

The design of the layering of abstractions is the everything of a codebase.

The success of C's ability to let programmers create layers of abstractions is why C is the foundational language of the OS I'm using, as well as the browser I'm typing this message in. I'm guessing you are, too, and, while I could be wrong, it's not likely. And not a segfault in sight. The scale of Unix is unmatched.