MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NoboruWataya | 2025-04-09 22:06:01+00:00
I think a lot of people get the causal relationship the wrong way around when it comes to charity shops and the decline of the high street. It's not (IMO) that charity shops move into otherwise thriving areas and lead to a decline in local business by competing, but rather that they move into spaces that would otherwise lie empty, and therefore are more likely to be found on high streets that were already dying. Where I live we have a few charity shops but it's mainly chicken shops, vape shops and the occasional barber that are cannibalising the local high street.
by api | 2025-04-09 22:07:23+00:00
It’s not rational at all. It’s nostalgia.

I wonder how deeply connected all this politics of nostalgia is to the fact that birth rates have been declining for decades and populations are older.

Given the older population and the country’s history as a bygone empire I bet nostalgia is thicker in England than the US, but US side there sure is a lot of it.

A lot of MAGA is about making the country the way it was when boomers were kids (50s, 60s) to prime age adults (80s to early 90s).

There’s even a hint of genX nostalgia too. A while back I was hearing some IDW type railing about how “woke” killed comedy and it hit me that there’s a strong undercurrent of nostalgia for the 90s when comedy and pop culture were all about being an edgelord. The fact that edgelording is "out" is blamed on "woke" and they lament that "comedy is dead" etc. I'm not sure how much "woke" has to do with it. I think... well... edgelording is just out.

Change reminds people of their mortality and it always generates a backlash. You’re not young anymore.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-09 22:08:16+00:00
I wouldn't, personally, have had any issue with such a scenario. My comment was in response to the pervasive and wrong idea that the Democrats could have "just" re-run the primary when Biden dropped after being elected in that primary.

I think people believe elections are internet-fast or internet-convenient, which is where this skewed idea comes from. They aren't, for reasons that should be obvious with some consideration about how elections are secured.
by rurp | 2025-04-09 22:08:25+00:00
I think the risk isn't just that LLMs won't exist, but that they will fail at certain tasks that need to get done. Someone who is highly dependent on prompt engineering and doesn't understand any of the underlying concepts is going to have a bad time with problems they can't prompt their way out of.

This is something I see with other tools. Some people get highly dependent on things like advanced IDE features and don't care to learn how they actually work. That works fine most of the time but if they hit a subtle edge case they are dead in the water until someone else bails them out. In a complicated domain there are always edge cases out there waiting to throw a wrench in things.
Show HN: We turned a fast build system into a genius AI mobile app developer
by supradeux | 2025-04-09 22:09:02+00:00
Last year, we launched Dashwave 1.0, a fast Android and iOS build platform. It was great for compiling and testing apps, but we quickly saw its potential as an agentic runtime. So, we built a powerful AI agent to take control. The results were astounding.

With Dashwave 2.0, we’ve combined our high-performance build system with an AI-driven code retrieval, contextualization, and generation pipeline. The goal: help anyone build production-grade native mobile apps with minimal friction.

Here’s how Dashwave stands apart from tools like Bolt and Replit:

True Native Support: Dashwave builds real Android and iOS apps, not Expo wrappers. The AI works directly with native systems, unlocking full platform access.

Agentic RAG Code Retrieval & Planned Codegen: The AI understands your app's context, retrieves relevant code, plans, and generates mobile-optimized code based on your needs. This makes development faster, more accurate, and simplifies adding integrations.

End-to-End Dev Flow: The agent hands off generated code to our build system for real-time compilation, testing, and regression—no need for CI, Firebase, or Play/App Store setups. You can also bring your existing codebase, and Dashwave will build/debug on top of it.

We are soon launching a deterministic integrations suite like Firebase, REST, Stripe, that would make it easy to add them to your vibe-coded apps!

Try it out at https://dashwave.io and Get Started. Would love your thoughts!
by anigbrowl | 2025-04-09 22:09:33+00:00
What if (and I realize this is an extremely pessimistic take) their plan is to just default on the debt and rely on military blackmail? Sure, there's a Constitutional prohibition on questioning the validity of USA debt, but the administration shrugs at the Constitution on a weekly basis. The endless whining about how 'unfairly' other nations are treating the US, 'ripping us off', 'laughing at us' etc is a precursor for aggressive action, and I think it's quite likely that at some point they'll come out and say 'we don't have to pay debts to countries that have been scamming us the whole time.' About one quarter of the population will support MAGA no matter what, and if things get bad enough the administration can just announce they've been 'forced' to take over Greenland and Canada.

A flashing negative warning sign of this would be issue of new kinds of Treasury securities with new complex rules.
by matt-p | 2025-04-09 22:09:37+00:00
You'd rather build capacity because you think you're likely to be at war with us one day or we'd stop defending Europe? That would be the only reason to say that surely? If so I simply don't know what to say to that.

So then you won't be wanting our troops there for peace-keeping, something only ourselves and France have even offered. Nor any of our finance, we can stop giving billions a year to Ukraine as the EU want to take over?

Seriously it's ridiculously isolationist to be thinking like this. Not working with us just because we left your club is beyond mad.
by overfeed | 2025-04-09 22:10:00+00:00
This is a fair assessment. However, I think there is propaganda or self-delusion in the west that leads some people to believe that free markets and/or democracy are preconditions for any number of desirable outcomes like creativity, economic success, product innovation, etc. That may have empirically been true against the Eastern Bloc/Soviet Union during the cold war, but is not obvious to me regarding China today. AFAICT, China has produced companies that can go to to toe with the best in the west - occasionally winning outright[1]. We can argue whether that's because of subsidies, espionage, innovation or fundamental research

1. DJI, CATL, BYD, ByteDance, HighFlyer/DeepSeek
by palmotea | 2025-04-09 22:10:01+00:00
> When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today.

And those people are wrong, in a similar way to how it's wrong to say: "There's no point in having very much RAM, as you can just page to disk."

It's the cognitive equivalent of becoming morbidly obese (another popular decision in today's world).
by ViktorRay | 2025-04-09 22:10:16+00:00
I don’t think your comment is accurate.

When rich people get large amounts of money they don’t hoard it like they did in Roman times.

That money either goes into the stock market or to a bank. If it’s in the stock market that money is being used in investments that further economic growth. The portion of the leftover money that’s in the bank is then lent out by the bank to others in the forms of loans and so on for purchasing houses, starting business and so on.

The idea that the pile of wealth is simply hoarded to be slept on is out of date and not representative of modern economics.

Also, as for JK Rowling specifically, she had donated a significant amount of her wealth to charity.
by redcanvas | 2025-04-09 22:10:21+00:00
A feature that would be great is similar to how you can write snippets in all the other tools where you can say "calendar" or "cal" and then it gives you the link. If this is something possible, I think that would make this fantastic.

Another feature that would be great is actually being able to have a conversation with an AI model first and then refine the output iteratively until you're ready and then pipe all that over. The ability to have a chat is very good or do this all through voice.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-04-09 22:10:26+00:00
> Anyone who voted for him should have known these were coming.

Every time I read a comment like this, it tickles my "someone on the internet is wrong" neuron.

In countries whose political systems have devolved into a 2 party system, this isn't true. The two choices will both be a curates egg - some things they want to vote for, and some they want to vote against.

Someone people will agonise over it, trying to weigh every policy. I suspect that strategy is more common among the HN crowd. It's tilting at windmills. It's a huge multidimensional problem, politicians will change their mind or the fine print, and some outright lie. It isn't solvable in any real sense.

At the other end of the scale people will pick the most important issue and vote on that. The issue is nearly always the same, as it how they measure it: it's the economy stupid, do I feel better off now than I did under the previous guy? Because of inflation triggered by the COVID bazooka the answer for Biden was no, so Trump got elected.

Most countries had a COVID bazooka, all them subsequently suffered from the inflation hangover, those that then had elections did the same thing as the US voters - they threw out the incumbents. It had nothing to do with right or left, as nations flipped both ways.

Personally I used to weigh policy. It took me decades to recognise the futility of it. Now I try to gauge the character of the people I vote for, which seems impossibly nebulous but we humans aren't too bad at reading others. The downside is: it seems a lot of other have done the same thing, which is how we got tribal politics - the other kind of voting hell.

If you want to a different outcome, you need a different political system that doesn't yield a barren 2 party choice. MMP does that by giving the voters a range of view to choose from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
by hdkdicnsnjes | 2025-04-09 22:10:31+00:00
Does SQL or regex as a language rot? I’d say the abstraction above using SQL or regex to implement it rots, because it’s not formalised as a language.

Does the implementation leak through things like JSON or a EBNF grammar? Performance can be a concern but the implementation doesn’t leak through the language unlike a library api. If you have access to the compiler you can adjust the implementation to get whatever performance you’d like without affecting the abstraction.

Edit: JSON is a perfect example of resistance to rot and a good abstraction. You will always be able to read it in any given language because it is a language and not some library. Non DSL code should be considered as compiler output and that is what 99.9% of software devs spend their time writing. They mock people who would write assembly then go and create some fucked type hierarchy in Haskell for some business problem and call it a good abstraction. The complexity just multiplies until we end up with the current state of the industry.
by chillipalmer | 2025-04-09 22:10:59+00:00
Google Introduces Firebase Studio: The Natural Language Revolution in App Development

Source: SimonDodson.com

Breaking news from Google's developer ecosystem arrived just two hours ago. Firebase Studio has emerged as their answer to the rising demand for AI-assisted development environments.

This paradigm-shifting platform transforms how applications are built, allowing developers to construct functional apps through natural language instructions rather than traditional coding. The interface accepts plain English commands, converts them to working code, and renders the results in real-time.

What separates Firebase Studio from predecessors is its integration with Google's robust infrastructure. Each application receives immediate access to scalable cloud architecture without additional configuration steps. The platform handles everything from database design to authentication protocols through conversational instructions.

Feature Explainers (Like You're 5)

Talk-To-App Magic Imagine if instead of needing to learn a secret computer language, you could just tell your computer what kind of app you want, like telling a story. "Make me an app where people can share pictures of cats and vote on the cutest one!" And then the computer actually builds it for you! That's what Firebase Studio does - it turns your words into real apps.

No-Setup Superpowers Think about when you want to play with toys. Usually, you need to take them out of the box, put all the pieces together, and read instructions before you can start having fun. Firebase Studio is like having all your toys ready to play with instantly - no boxes, no assembly, no waiting. You just open your web browser and start creating right away.

Fix-It-Fast Tools Remember when you're drawing a picture and make a mistake? You can erase it and try again. Firebase Studio lets you change your app the same way - just tell it what you want different, and it updates everything without breaking what was already working. "Make the buttons blue instead of green" and poof! It's done.

Unlike competitors that operate as standalone applications, Firebase Studio runs directly in standard browsers, eliminating installation requirements and compatibility concerns. The platform provides a unified space where apps can be created, tested, refined, and deployed without switching between disparate tools.

Early access users report significant acceleration in development cycles, with prototypes that previously required weeks now materializing in hours. The technology particularly benefits small teams and individual developers who lack specialized resources but maintain ambitious project goals.

Google has positioned this as their strategic response to emerging players in the AI development space. While similar functionality exists in products like Cursor and v0, Firebase Studio's integration with Google's broader development ecosystem creates an unmatched advantage in simplicity and power.

This release marks a defining moment in software development's evolution, potentially democratizing app creation for the next generation of digital innovators.
by nisa | 2025-04-09 22:11:20+00:00
It's this attitude that is common in Europe, at least in Germany that is the reason we are so behind. Worked for so many companies that just wrapped some open-source and sold it. Never worked well, nobody understood how it worked. No money for competent devs and so on. Both times the product was what made the company money. Say what you want about USA tech companies but at least some actually have technical excellence. I've lost hope that Europe, especially Germany will understand that.
by fckgw | 2025-04-09 22:13:04+00:00
What you're describing is a coincidence.

These phone calls and emails go out to tens of thousands of people every day. A small portion of those people will have just made an Amazon purchase.

The Apple branding is irrelevant. The scammers always use Apple products in their scripts, it denotes "expensive item".

No, Amazon is not "selling your info" to scammers.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-09 22:13:15+00:00
Yup, I 100% agree. This is my worry too. And it goes beyond real estate market and landlords - they are the obvious infinitely deep money sinkholes of society, but even if housing magically became free and available to everyone, I believe the sudden inflation would happen anyway.

I believe this to be a fundamental feature of free market economy in general. It's something I started realizing many years ago, and thought about a lot ever since; in the last year, I distilled that belief into a concise phrase I now use for this:

The market constantly adjusts to keep the average disposable income to zero.

Except now I realized that "average" is the wrong measure here, I should be saying "median", and also I've been mistakenly using the term "disposable income" (which actually means just after-tax income) to refer to "discretionary income" (what you're left with after covering taxes, bills, and essentials). Which leads me to the New and Better, Updated, Version 2.0 of my economic theory:

The market constantly adjusts to keep median discretionary income near zero.

I'd imagine this is an obvious thing that's already been named 100 years ago, but so far my research only pointed me to things like "neutrality of money", and some specific examples of my statement holding, yet nothing that covers it entirely.

(EDIT: in the unlikely case I'm not an idiot, and that this phrasing was not used/named before, I welcome credit; inquiries from the Nobel Foundation should be directed to my e-mail address, which is in my profile.)
by XorNot | 2025-04-09 22:13:46+00:00
It seems apparent that the answer is yes though. The US likes the idea of wars more then fighting them: the guy who talks about the greatest military on the planet is also not subject to the draft and never tried to join.

In so much as generalizing a nation can still leave large exceptions, wars of conquest are useless to America: it hates running occupations, and it's own citizens are not going to move abroad in sufficient numbers to provide a labor force to utilize the conquests.
by rendx | 2025-04-09 22:13:48+00:00
> secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors

I buy up to 10 (mostly non-fiction) books on paper a month, always secondhand if available, via bookfinder. You typically get a very accurate description of their state beforehand; I don't mind most levels of use, I actually like it when they have history to them. Markings, notes of previous owners, etc, are all fine for me. Even if one prefers "clean" books there are usually plenty of copies available. I like how it is both much cheaper than new, and even more the reuse aspect.
by kaonwarb | 2025-04-09 22:13:53+00:00
While recognizing the material downsides of education in the time of AI, I envy serious students who now have access to these systems. As an engineering undergrad at a research-focused institution a couple decades ago, I had a few classes taught by professors who appeared entirely uninterested in whether their students were comprehending the material or not. I would have given a lot for the ability to ask a modern frontier LLM to explain a concept to me in a different way when the original breezed-through, "obvious" approach didn't connect with me.
by zopa | 2025-04-09 22:14:18+00:00
If the goal to drive the yield on T-notes down, then cut spending and raise taxes. Get the budget into something like balance and the Fed will cut rates, and borrowing costs will fall. You don't need some 3D chess with a manufactured financial crisis.

When your rational explanation involves people shooting themselves in the head to cure a headache, something's off. There's nothing to explain here besides a weak and incompetent leader with a deep need for attention, surrounded by lots of enablers.
by phillipcarter | 2025-04-09 22:14:30+00:00
Langchain has long solved (we can argue on if it's done it well, opinions vary) the problem of needing to orchestrate LLM calls into a coherent workflow. Plus it had a first mover advantage.

MCP solves a data and API integration problem.

Both are concrete things that people need to do today. AI agents talking to one another is not a concrete problem that organizations building features that integrate AI have today.
by buu700 | 2025-04-09 22:14:40+00:00
Agreed. It's better than no data, but I don't really see what a study like this can hope to prove one way or another. Giving a handful of people free money isn't UBI any more than the lottery is UBI. It doesn't provide any information about the macroeconomic effects of an actual universal income, or about how a lifetime guarantee of continued payments would impact behavior.

Personally, I think the necessity and viability of UBI will become apparent sooner than most would expect. If AI and related fields continue to advance at their current pace, at some point we'll be able to observe a clear trend toward an eventual government budget surplus paired with a mass unemployment crisis. Implementing a UBI or similar measure during that transitional period will be the only way to avoid a lot of unnecessary pain and societal upheaval.

This won't cause excess inflation because the payments will be backed by real economic output; the payments will only serve to keep demand in line with supply. Eventually, we'll get to the point where a UBI with annual raises and a balanced budget can coexist. A pessimistic outlook would be that this heralds the end of human innovation and ingenuity; I personally predict that it kicks off a renaissance of entrepreneurship, invention, and scientific breakthroughs that at least matches the relative progress of the 20th century.
by wpm | 2025-04-09 22:14:53+00:00
Preview can no longer directly open .ps files.

For shorter man pages, I use the Terminal apps "Man Page" profile which you can get to by right clicking the command name, and selecting "View man page". Then, scroll to the bottom to render the entire thing, and Command+P > Save to PDF.

For long shit, parts will get truncated (overfilling the scrollback? I have no clue), so I have to export the ps with man and convert to PDF with ps2pdf. This puts everything in a basic Times New Roman font and I hate it. Much preferred when I could directly open the output on the Mac.
by jemmyw | 2025-04-09 22:15:02+00:00
The EU quotas didn't impair them from catching fish, it allowed them to catch fish. The problem for British fishermen being that the fish people like to eat in the UK are the ones that tend to hang out in other countries waters, and vice versa.

Feels like they were just taking out their rage on the decline of their industry, which is much more to do with British govt policy and business consolidation than the EU policy. The govt has shown time and again that they don't really care, speak words and take the opposite or no action. I can't say I have much sympathy, the fishing industry in most countries seems out to destroy itself with over-fishing and is highly resistant to regulation designed to save it from itself.
by mppm | 2025-04-09 22:15:34+00:00
I do wonder sometimes how UBP would play out in a developed country... Would it remove the need for bullshit jobs and refocus the market-oriented part of the economy towards real progress? Would it make people happier? Or would it make people spend even more of their lives scrolling, swiping and retweeting? In any case, this is a purely theoretical exercise -- even more so than UBI, the idea of UBP is very much incompatible with neoclassical economics, which thoroughly dominates economic and societal thought in most of the developed world.
by j-krieger | 2025-04-09 22:15:45+00:00
> Any country can solve it, just incentivise families

The point of OP and what people don't get is that it's far easier to shift policies to brace for tough situations when you have a uniparty system and you're willing to make sacrifices. No 4 year administration is in any way incentivised to enact policies that only become effective after the next election. Note that I'm not saying that undemocratic systems are the solution.