MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hedora | 2025-04-15 14:51:06+00:00
Lol. I used to work at an IIS shop. 100% of engineering thought using it was a bad idea. Any one of us could configure apache correctly in a few minutes, but we ultimately had to hire a full time Microsoft guru to keep IIS (and the rest of the ecosystem that implies) running. He was a pleasure to work with, but it wasn’t clear why his job existed.

Anyway, Web UI != easy to administer.
by killerstorm | 2025-04-15 14:51:31+00:00
No, there's a fundamental limitation of Transformer architecture:

* information from the entire context has to be squeezed into an information channel of a fixed size; the more information you try to squeeze the more noise you get * selection of what information passes through is done using just dot-product

Training data isn't the problem.

In principle, as you scale transformer you get more heads and more dimensions in each vector, so bandwidth of attention data bus goes up and thus precision of recall goes up too.
by margorczynski | 2025-04-15 14:51:44+00:00
I think a lot of you guys from the US don't really get how high the taxes are here that pay for this stuff, especially for people that make more than the average.

If you would work non-contract here in Poland for an equivalent of ~$120k you would pay around $1k USD. If your wife is working she will also pay, of course this also covers all you kids.

So lets say both of you make around $120k here - so you would pay $2k monthly for "free" healthcare and its quality is atrocious. Even for serious stuff you many times need to wait 1-2 years for something, all hospitals are understaffed, the care quality is abysmal.

If you are ambitious and make good money the US is better. Europe in general is better for people that don't aim too high and want the state to enforce some minimum of QoL for them at the expense of the rest.
Show HN: Rocal.dev – Build Web Apps That Work Offline First
by picolt | 2025-04-15 14:51:56+00:00
Hey HN, I’m building Rocal — a Rust + WASM web framework that helps you build offline-first apps without needing a server at all. Think of it like the backend and frontend merged into one local experience—everything runs in the browser.

Here’s the post that kicked this off: “Ditch the Server: Build Offline-Ready Apps with Local-First Architecture” (https://dev.to/picolt/ditch-the-server-build-offline-ready-a...)

A bit of backstory: I was building a POS (point-of-sale) system for small businesses where internet connection is unreliable. I realized that even basic actions—like adding items to a cart or saving a transaction—depended too much on network requests. That’s when I decided to flip the model and build an architecture that’s local-first by default.

Here’s how it works:

WASM + SQLite in the Browser – The app is compiled to WebAssembly and runs completely client-side, including a local embedded SQLite database. No server round trips needed to store or query data.

No External API Needed – The "backend" logic is written in Rust and compiled to run in the browser. You can think of it as a monolith that's shipped to the client.

Works Offline by Default – Everything from data storage to routing and rendering happens locally. Even if the user loses connection mid-session, the app doesn’t break.

Optional Syncing – If you want cloud sync later (for backup, multi-device, or analytics), that can be layered on top after your core app works offline.

There’s no "server" in the traditional sense. You write your UI, logic, and data models in Rust. The Rocal framework handles rendering, routing, persistence, and local execution via WASM.

I know it sounds wild, but it’s working well for POS systems, form-heavy apps, and other use cases where latency or connectivity is a problem. Think kiosk apps, field tools, or apps meant for remote areas.

Here’s a quick demo and explanation of the architecture (more demos coming soon): https://demo1.rocal.app

Rocal is fully open-source and still in early stages. I’m actively building the CLI, versioning system, and dev workflow to make it easier to ship apps like this. Long-term, I want to make it as simple to build and deploy local-first web apps as it is to spin up a typical full-stack app. GitHub: https://github.com/rocal-dev/rocal

If you’re curious about building apps that feel instant, resilient, and fully private, I’d love your thoughts and feedback.

Thanks!
Ask HN: How to acquire professional experience in the age of AI as junior dev?
by stefanos82 | 2025-04-15 14:52:16+00:00
For quite a while now I read all these disheartening articles about newcomers to programming field feeling completely incompetent for being unable to acquire professional experience.

If it helps to make things a bit more comforting for them, I feel the same and I am a person with some form of experience.

How can anyone acquire professional experience nowadays, even if it means to start from near zero?

Any suggestions or thoughts on this topic?
by ipdashc | 2025-04-15 14:52:25+00:00
> Life was "easier" for many people.

It's definitely less of a factor compared to money, but I can't help wonder if in addition to being able to afford stuff, it's the idea that there used to be a "default" path that carried some sort of dignity. Dirty jobs have never been outright glamorous, but there's still a kind of respect that American society confers upon "traditional" industrial work - think the classic image of the humble American coal miner, factory worker, or farmer. "It ain't much, but it's honest work." I think the thought is that however you did in school and in the upper-class-employment rat race, anyone could find a stable, respectable, long-term job - probably even get trained on the job - in an industry that really matters, that does useful stuff for the country.

Now? If you fail to jump through all the office-job hoops of picking a fancy field, getting a degree, finding internships, dressing up nice, keeping a clean record, acing job interviews, etc. Or if those fancy jobs just aren't hiring near you. What are the "default" job options most people are left with? Working retail at Walmart? Putting fries in the bag at McDonalds? Janitorial? Driving a truck? Doordashing burritos?

Obviously the main thing the lack of stability and decent pay in these jobs, but when it comes to public perception and fantasizing, like you said, I wonder if a part of it is just that these service sector jobs feel... shittier. Less important for society.
by craigkerstiens | 2025-04-15 14:52:31+00:00
Pgquery was created by the pganalyze team for their own purposes I believe initially for features like index recommendation tooling, but immediately planned as open source. It is indeed a very high quality project with the underlying C implementation having several wrappers that exist for a number of languages[1].

[1] https://github.com/pganalyze/libpg_query/blob/15-latest/READ...
by pc86 | 2025-04-15 14:52:42+00:00
You are correct - and I was wrong - that it wasn't a no-knock raid. Malinowski's widow said they heard the knocking but no announcements that they were law enforcement. 28 seconds later their door was knocked in with a battering ram. That anyone announced they were law enforcement is disputed; we'd know what really happened but for want of a single body cam (which IMO makes it much more likely there was no announcement whatsoever).

> Search warrants almost always begin at 6am - and when weapons are involved, they almost always execute them soon after.

I'm not making any comment on whether or not this itself is standard practice, but it seems pretty obvious to me that if this raid was conducted 4 hours later Malinowski would be alive today.
by colonial | 2025-04-15 14:53:10+00:00
Server management has gotten vastly easier over time as well, especially if you're just looking to host stuff "for fun."

Even without fancy orchestration tools, it's very easy to put together a few containers on your dev machine (something like Caddy for easy TLS and routing + hand rolled images for your projects) and just shotgun them onto the cheapest server you can find. At that point the host is just a bootloader for Podman and can be made maximally idiot-proof (see Fedora CoreOS.)
by tux3 | 2025-04-15 14:53:11+00:00
To play devil's advocate, I wonder how well they handle more annoying things.

When a CMOS switches, it essentially creates a very brief short circuit between VCC and GND. That's part of normal dynamic power consumption, it's expected and entirely accounted for.

But I don't know how these cloud FPGAs could enforce that you don't violate setup and hold times all over the place. When you screw up your crossings and accidentally have a little bit of metastability, that CMOS will switch back and forth a little bit, burn some power, and settle one way or the other.

Now if you intentionally go out of your way to keep one cell metastable as long as possible while the neighbors are cold, that's going to be one hell of a localized hotspot. I wouldn't be surprised if thermal protection can't kick in fast enough.

It's just kibitzing though, I'm not particularly inclined to try with my own hardware
by orangebread | 2025-04-15 14:53:45+00:00
If you want to get ahead of the curve, look into the Agent-to-Agent protocol Google just introduced. I'm currently using my own custom AI agent assistant to perform life tasks. If I could integrate a better tooling/agents into my own assistant system like your's that'd be awesome.

It's kind of like sure, I could manage my own emails, or I could offset this to someone who does it better. If you do it better and it's affordable, I'm in.

We are on that starship to the future right now and I love it.
by pama | 2025-04-15 14:54:10+00:00
If its any consolation, having diagnosed a malignant papilary or follicular thyroid tumor (surprizingly) is correlated with equal or slightly increased lifespan compared to the population that did not have this tumor—maybe it is because of having more frequent or better access to healthcare, which is harder to control in such epidemiological studies. It is one of the few positive known relationships with cancer.
by presto8 | 2025-04-15 14:54:31+00:00
Because VAT is collected at the border on imports, some people (wrongly) consider VATs a tariff. Considering that VAT is rebated on exports, VATs are trade neutral.

Sales tax as implemented in the US is not as tax efficient as VAT due to the impact of sales taxation on intermediate transactions during manufacturing. VAT only taxes the incrementally the value added at each transaction) whereas sales tax applies to the entire value at each stage.
by mapt | 2025-04-15 14:55:03+00:00
When I visited China, the expats told me that recreational drug supplychains were strictly compartmentalized. There was the supply of illicit drugs for Westerners (imported by the sons of Nigerian businessmen, the cliche went), the supply of illicit drugs for Chinese people (who only dealt with Chinese people), and then there were the vast array of drugs that are completely legal to get over the counter in China without a prescription (at a pharmacy or CTM shop) that would be controlled substances in a US pharmacy.

That the official line from the CCP was that China had no drug problems, no prostitution, a variety of other things†, and that there were no gay people in China; That these were all Western ailments.

Urban China is a panopticon state not only digitally, but culturally. Housing is much tighter than the US, walls thinner. Your underwear is hung out to dry in clear view. "Privacy" in terms of politeness norms mostly consists of pretending you don't see or hear a thing. Neighbors generally know a lot about what each other are doing. 7% of the population are Party members, and in Marxist-Leninist systems this connotes something closer to earning a military officer commission; The Party is not trivial to apply to, the Party is strictly regimented, Party rules are held above and before the civil law, Party members are expected to be informers and have a strict lawful-good orientation from the perspective of the regime. Penalties for commerce in illicit drugs are even more extreme than the US, and due process is not bound by the same presumptions.

There are lots of factors conspiring against the sort of informal US inner city street drug distribution being as big of a deal in China.

Disclaimer: All my information is more than a decade out of date, and was only ever a thin slice of opinions from mostly Westerners in some first tier cities.

† From an academic paper: "2 The Six Evils are prostitution, drugs, selling women and children, pornography, gambling, and feudal superstition. Criminal gangs, or triads, are often counted as a seventh evil. These vices represent impediments to modernization and throwbacks to social problems that were present prior to the Communist takeover. Elevation of a problem to an "evil" symbolizes that the Beijing regime will mount a "campaign" or "struggle" against it."
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-04-15 14:55:05+00:00
IIRC correctly, the previous administration did try to do some of the slow, steady imperfect work of planning to gradually bring back key industries.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act and https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/11/24195811/biden-ev-factory...

Of course, the voters wanted something else.
by chneu | 2025-04-15 14:55:13+00:00
Nearly everything you use on a daily basis came from university research. Heck, most of what we know about the universe comes from university research.

Every piece of technology is because of collaboration between taxpayer funding and universities. It is relatively rare nowadays for a private business to create anything truly new without some form of university support. Or it's built on top of university research.

If you like new knowledge you like these types of programs. They make modern life possible.

Universities provide staff, equipment and expertise while the government(and often private enterprise) provide the funding.
by pomarie | 2025-04-15 14:55:26+00:00
These are all amazing ideas. We actually already see a lot of solo devs using mrge precisely because they want something to catch bugs before code goes live—they simply don't have another pair of eyes.

And I absolutely love your idea of having multiple AI models review PRs simultaneously. Benchmarking LLMs can be notoriously tricky, so a "wisdom of the crowds" approach across a large user base could genuinely help identify which models perform best for specific codebases or even languages. We could even imagine certain models emerging as specialists for particular types of issues.

Really appreciate these suggestions!
by seanhunter | 2025-04-15 14:55:29+00:00
Of your list I've been to France, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, France (you seem to have it twice for some reason), Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore.

They all most definitely did not stop existing.

Also I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about when you say the United Kingdom came really close to not existing.
by like_any_other | 2025-04-15 14:55:42+00:00
> because vibes, basically

This may be more accurate than you realize. Both Democrat and old Republican party rhetoric and policies were pro-globalization/offshoring, with the occasional exception such as CHIPS (and corn subsidies). It's not surprising nobody believed they were changing direction, if for every "we're bringing semiconductors back", they heard ten "your car is German your phone is Chinese your tacos are Mexican, how dare you interfere with glorious Free Trade!"
by bilbo0s | 2025-04-15 14:55:53+00:00
By acting against China that means I applaud moving manufacturing to Vietnam

and

last time I brought up Africa someone from there said their country was an exception

Making what are essentially strategic decisions in this "shoot from the hip" fashion is what lands us repeatedly in these situations. By way of illustration, let me try one from the 1980's out on you:

"By acting against Iran that means I applaud men like Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden"

(In fairness to the americans who made that colossal blunder, I'll assume that, to them, it seemed a good idea at the time. They were simply not long term thinkers. So no one ever asked, "Hmm, what comes next though?")

We, as a people, need to start thinking a bit further ahead than the ends of our noses.
by q3k | 2025-04-15 14:55:58+00:00
> Error Handling

I've yet to see anyone demonstrate the elegance Rust error handling for anything but the simplest of cases. It's all fun and games and question marks... until you hit this:

$ ./app called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: no such file or directory

And then you start investigating and it turns out that the error value comes from somewhere deep in an unknown callstack that got discard by the authors using '?' everywhere.

Yes, I know about anyhow and thiserror and eyre and ... ; point is none of this is ever shown in these 'look how elegant error handling is' posts. Come on, let's be a bit more honest with ourselves about Result<T, E> and '?' - it's not a full solution to error handling. After two years I'm sure you've hit this.
by Applejinx | 2025-04-15 14:56:24+00:00
The trouble with that is that they're all fronting Russia's efforts to control the US government. This is why prosperity isn't exactly in the cards: that's the promise, but all the actions lead directly the other direction in conclusive ways.

Because that's the background, it explains Trump's prominence. He is trusted by Russia in ways a Musk or Thiel can never be, so if we're talking mysterious falls from balconies, it would be Musk, Thiel et al who are more in danger. They have to work with Trump, because Trump is the one Russia trusts, and that's because Russia made him. His wealth has never been real: he's an op from way back.

The Kremlin absolutely will not trust Elon Musk, nor should they. He's more capable, but he is most certainly scheming against them or even looking to supplant/eject Putin and replace him. Thiel is on less drugs and has the sense to stay out of the spotlight, so he will be trying to offer eternal life to Putin or something like that. Whether there's any truth to that is moot: it's whether Putin believes there is.

None of them are safe replacements for Trump, because they all hold power of their own. Trump stays so long as he lives, because he doesn't hold power of his own, and is therefore safe to use as the puppet.
by duxup | 2025-04-15 14:56:31+00:00
You can't effect efficient change with zero knowledge.

But I don't think that's the point anyway, the point is to trash everything that operates interdependently in government, and enable the administration to become the one gateway to solve anything and then capture that income via corruption and etc.

You want cancer research? You want weather data? You gotta pay the toll... otherwise they don't care. Everything they trash is potential income.
by hotfist | 2025-04-15 14:56:33+00:00
This absolutely was the case for a long time. It was the cultural center of the internet where nearly all memes sprang from or gained traction and context before leaving orbit for the greater internet.

That has not been the case for years though. I'd say it shifted to twitter as things shifted to inseparably political on almost all of 4chan maybe 6-8 years back and then shifted away from twitter a while after elon bought it and a lot of people started to bail. and I honestly don't know where exactly it's shifted to now, but I'd have to guess tiktok and similar new platforms.

But regardless I do think 4chan has lost nearly all of it's cultural influence, but still maintains it's notoriety.
by rfoo | 2025-04-15 14:56:49+00:00
Before this change, 1000 512KB GET requests cost $0.0002 ($2e-4).

After this change, 1000 512KB GET requests cost $0.00003 + $0.0006 / 1024*3 * 512 * 1024 * 1000 = $0.00003 ($3e-5) + $0.00029296875 (2.93e-4, dominates the cost) = $0.00032296875, so roughly $0.0003 ($3e-4).

It's because before this change all data transfer charge was waived as long as requests are smaller than 512KB.

The announcement did mention it explicitly, but it tried to downplay it, by starting the sentence with a price reduction:

> In addition, S3 Express One Zone has reduced the per-GB charges for data uploads and retrievals by 60 percent, and these charges now apply to all bytes transferred rather than just portions of requests greater than 512 KB.

This "and" should be a "BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT".
by bavell | 2025-04-15 14:56:53+00:00
> First of all, BitTorrent clients do not download in random order or wait 5 minutes. They usually download the rarest block first, but can do whatever they want, whenever they want.

The problem here is that BT works so well because the clients default to "good behavior" (prioritize rare pieces first) and discourages "bad behavior" (leeching/no upload).

This tilts the balance on the whole enough to maintain the health of the network. If you change these, you'd need to introduce other mechanisms to preserve the network incentives.
by throw0101b | 2025-04-15 14:57:06+00:00
> When Facebook acquired it, Instagram was a photo sharing app that had 13 employees.

And growing quickly, so:

> In his opening remarks, Mr. Matheson mentioned documents, including what he described as a “smoking gun” February 2012 email in which Mr. Zuckerberg discussed the rise of Instagram and the importance of “neutralizing a potential competitor.” In another email, in November 2012 to Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer at the time, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote, “Messenger isn’t beating WhatsApp, Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion.”

> The F.T.C. showed Mr. Zuckerberg a 2011 email in which he wrote, “We really need to get our act together quickly on this since Instagram is growing so fast.”

* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/techno...

> It’s a combination of neutralizing a competitor and improving Facebook, Zuckerberg said in a reply. “There are network effects around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different.”

> Zuckerberg continued: “One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.”

> Forty-five minutes later, Zuckerberg sent a carefully worded clarification to his earlier, looser remarks.

> “I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying them to prevent them from competing with us in any way,” he wrote.

* https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagr...
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-15 14:57:45+00:00
The best part I think is "pg_query is special. It doesn’t actually implement parsing SQL. It works by extracting C source code directly from Postgres and wraps it with a nice Rust interface. This allows PgDog to understand all queries that Postgres can."

One of the things that puts metaprogramming on wheels is being able to pull in grammars, schemas and such for external systems. Think how many cool tools we could have if we could do this in a more general way.