MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by frontbackgeek | 2025-04-20 08:52:34+00:00
The tech industry is experiencing significant layoffs in 2025, continuing the trend from previous years. According to Layoffs.fyi, over 22,000 tech workers have been laid off this year, with 16,084 in February alone. In 2024, more than 150,000 employees were affected across 549 companies. These reductions are largely due to companies focusing on AI, automation, and cost-cutting measures.
by afiodorov | 2025-04-20 08:52:54+00:00
Running AI itself is not low effort though, far from it at current efficiency levels it burns way more energy to produce outputs than humans. Setting latest advanced models to think about the problem on your behalf doesn't necessarily make it low effort overall.

Vibe coding is first and foremost moving some of your problems to the AI and that can be suffice even in professional setting where there's a lot of mundane requests, e.g. setting up slack alerts, running simple data transforms or figuring out one-off data analysis. Maintainability is less of an issue on tasks where it can be done from scratch if need be.

If your situation is result-driven and easily verifiable AI-driven solutions are absolutely appropriate.
by _usr_bin_env | 2025-04-20 08:52:56+00:00
I came across this idea here on Hacker News a while ago – a small weather display using an ESP32 and an e-ink screen to show a daily weather landscape. I loved it and shared the idea with a friend of mine. He went all in and rebuilt the whole thing in Rust – from the image rendering server to the embedded code on the ESP32.

It's a clean, minimal two-part project:

A Rust server fetches weather data from MET Norway and renders it as a landscape image.

An ESP32 downloads and displays the image on a 2.9" e-ink screen.

Here’s the repo: https://github.com/martinohmann/weather-landscape Would love to hear what you think!
by pngeez | 2025-04-20 08:54:04+00:00
Thanks! This is all super helpful. I’m hoping to have something like Chronophoto’s zoom working by tomorrow’s game, and a freeplay-style mode is in the works too.

Do you think it's more satisfying to guess based on clues like tech, clothing, and photo quality, or when you recognize the historical event or era (assuming it’s something a little less recognizable than that subway photo)?
by Jensson | 2025-04-20 08:54:22+00:00
> I would have said I expect it to be as intuitive as talking, almost no friction

There is so much friction when you try to do anything technical by talking to someone that don't know you, you have to know each other extremely well for there to be no friction.

This is why people prefer communicating in pseudo code rather than natural language when discussing programming, its really hard to describe what you want in words.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-04-20 08:54:44+00:00
Making a fringe counter out of a Michelson interferometer is a classic project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-u3IEgcTiQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucuVsReDze0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson_interferometer

Note those 532nm green DPSS lasers are repeatable within +-1nm across their normal operating temperature. Adding a 20nm wide OD6 narrow band-pass filter to a $5 5mW DPSS laser module is the cheapest precision money can buy these days.

Really depends what one can get away with in the mechanism being built. Note, many machines will fall under export restriction, and as a company people have to decide whether that encumbrance is worth the hassle.

Best of luck =3
Ask HN: What's your workflow for finding project names with available domains?
by mmdhrumil | 2025-04-20 08:54:57+00:00
When building side projects, I constantly hit this snag: brainstorm a good name -> check domain availability (ideally .com/ai/io) -> find it's taken -> repeat. This iteration loop is frustrating and slows down the start of a project.

I'm considering building a tool to streamline the process and I am curious to evaluate external interest for something like this.

Is this a common pain point for others here? What's your current workflow for naming projects and checking domain availability, and how often does this issue disrupt you?
by ggm | 2025-04-20 08:56:41+00:00
I think like a lot of BSD people I felt lua inside the machine was bloat. More a religious perspective than reality, given it meant a kernel could do things like manipulate variant data without having to be hard coded. And eBPF has shown in Linux kernels the power of scripting inside the os.

This is the first user space lua code in BSD I could imagine actually using. I suppose I deserve to be told what other things use flua I haven't realised.
by gonzobonzo | 2025-04-20 08:57:07+00:00
> Western societies basically don’t have extended families as an important social unit at all

Like with low birth rates, this appears to stem more from modernity than anything else. Both Western and non-Western societies placed more of an emphasis on extended families in the past, and both have placed less of an emphasis on them as they've modernized. Western societies have been at the forefront of a lot of modern changes, so these changes were more noticeable in them.
by dkersten | 2025-04-20 08:58:08+00:00
I strongly believe it also applies to the AI itself.

If the AI wrote the code to the top of its ability, it doesn’t have the capability to debug said code, because its ability to detect and correct issues has already been factored in.

You end up with a constant stream of “I see the issue, it’s: <not the actual issue>”, which is consistent with my experience of trying to have LLM’s debug their own code without basically doing the work myself and pointing them to the specific actual issue.
by trinix912 | 2025-04-20 08:58:50+00:00
> In Australia at least this whole problem was perfectly adequately solved by mandating bulk price labeling on all items in the supermarket. Products in comparable categories have per volume/weight prices listed alongside item prices.

Same in Europe. Mandatory labeling per volume/weight, pre-discount, after-VAT in addition to the discounted item prices. Then you glance at the shelves and make up your mind.
by DrBenCarson | 2025-04-20 08:59:54+00:00
I think it’s not uncommon for a drug treating some condition with some symptom to have a potential side effect that worsens that symptom. When you start playing with some set of receptors, it’s possible something goes too far or, for whatever reason, not far enough and now we’re worse off

See: antidepressants can increase suicidal ideation, cannabis (used for nausea) can cause nausea at higher doses, etc.
by mftrhu | 2025-04-20 09:01:59+00:00
They would just move to calling the procedure a violation of the "natural order" - "Lovecraftian horror", "Frankenstein arrangement", "something Mengele would do" - argue that it is akin to rape, create conspiracy theories about uteri being stolen, and/or invoke "Think of the children!"

I saw all of that already. Some of it in this very thread, some of it on the defunct /r/GenderCritical: I remember someone proposing committing suicide by volcano to keep her uterus out of "male [sic] hands".
by ohgr | 2025-04-20 09:02:04+00:00
Sample size 3 here and they are all adults and all STEM grads.

You have to push them, but push them right. That's a combination of coercion and encouragement and helping them avoid procrastination. There are hills to climb and they need helping over them to where the good stuff is.

I remember my eldest crying over ratios at the dining table. Then algebra at the kitchen table. Then crying again at real analysis in the pub with me. She graduated with a first in the end.
by borski | 2025-04-20 09:04:37+00:00
Nobody is threatening violence against you for playing your guitar sharp. I have no idea where violence even came into play here.

It’s a registered trademark. A registered trademark is a legal designation that provides exclusive rights to a brand name, logo, or other distinctive symbol used to identify a specific product or service; they registered Spice Sound or whatever as a trademark.

They did not patent 100Hz.

You would only be liable if you walked around playing your sharp guitar with a sign that said “Get your Spice Sound here” heh

I’m not defending it, and it reminds me of that woman in Baltimore who pissed everyone off by trademarking “Hon”, causing the whole city to revolt against her.

But it’s far from “threatening violence,” and they’re not patenting the sound.
by addicted | 2025-04-20 09:04:38+00:00
This is true but this analysis fails to consider why hydrogen receives so much interest, because similar reasoning could indicate we should be spending more on every other potential fuel source, including biofuels, and maybe running engines on cellulose.

And the fact that hydrogen is most popular in Germany and Japan should provide a clue.

These are countries with well established ICE car industries and therefore shifting to hydrogen provides the least disruption when it comes to their car manufacturing as well as infrastructure.

The disproportionately high interest in hydrogen is likely not being driven because of a belief in its future success, but likely more as a hope to continuing the status quo.
by 2mlWQbCK | 2025-04-20 09:06:05+00:00
Is that really true? It is true for me, but I always assumed that is just because I were younger last century. In 1990 I could easily tell if someone was looking like 1980, but today I could never guess if someone looked like 2015 or 2025. I would be happy to learn that this is because fashion actually slowed down, but until proven wrong I will just assume it is because I am older and not paying attention.
by helpfulContrib | 2025-04-20 09:08:41+00:00
> Learning projects like this is about to get a lot less accessible due to the extreme tariffs and elimination of the de minimis exemption.

Only for Americans, though.

Plenty of kids in third world countries can benefit from the technology involved in this project - and will.

That is a net gain for the world, in spite of what America is doing to itself.
by hilbert42 | 2025-04-20 09:08:57+00:00
I'm damed sure I'd be much worse at math if I'd not been pushed in a formal environment such as a school classroom.

I liked math—especially calculus as it made sense to me—but parts became a drudgery when I could see no reason for studying them.

Right, there's always the kid in class who excels at math like a mini Euler and gets bored because the rest can't keep up but the majority of us aren't like that—doing Bessel functions and Fourier stuff as abstract mathematics without any seeming purpose can seem pointless and our only interest in them was to pass exams. (Teaching may be better these days but my textbooks never discussed the value of learning these aspects of mathematics.)

Later whilst studying elec eng/electronics it became very obvious to me how important these aspects of mathematics were. If I'd been given some practical examples of why this math was useful then I'd have been much more enthusiastic.

Same goes for the history of mathematics, I'm old enough to have had a small textbook full of log and trig tables yet if someone had asked me at highschool who John Napier was I wouldn't have had a clue. In hindsight, that was terrible.

Mathematics is often taught as if the student was going to become a mathematician à la Hardy or Ramanujan and I'm firmly of the belief this is not the best approach for the average student let alone those with few math skills.

Mathematics ought to be taught with the real world in mind for ease of understanding. For example, it's dead easy to represent AC power as a sine wave and from there use that mathematical fact to solve power problems. (Perhaps maths and physics texts should be written in tandem and synced to show relevance.)

Teachers need to take time to explain that math isn't just abstract concepts but that it's very relevant to everyday life and that tying up mathematical functions to things in the real world is actually interesting and enjoyable.
by afro88 | 2025-04-20 09:10:18+00:00
> You didn't "build an AI".

True

> It's more like you wrote a prompt.

False

> I wonder why all examples are from projects with great docs already so it doesn't even need to read the actual code.

False.

This: https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use/tree/main/browser...

Became this: https://the-pocket.github.io/Tutorial-Codebase-Knowledge/Bro...
by kleene_op | 2025-04-20 09:10:19+00:00
That was exactly my sentiment.

My parents pushed me hard to do piano when I was around 10-12. After a year that went pretty well I was starting to get lazy and put very little work and investment into preparing for the next lesson. They still had me play piano a full year until they eventually gave up and bitterly told me what a waste my resignation felt to them.

20 years later, I got back to playing piano, and I can't thank my parent enough for having me to continue playing in my teenage years. Because it only took me a few month to be able to play pretty advanced piano sheets compared to some of my relatives who are struggling with the basics starting it in their adulthood.

Same for maths. I feel that a lot of people like the author of this blog post are being extremely misdirected thinking math can and should be taught in a fun or amusing manner every time.

Sure, a lot of topics in Maths can be made more digestible by "gameification" to help younglings develop an intuition. But a very big part of Maths actually requires you to sit down and painstakingly crunch down the numbers/equations, memorize and learn when to apply the correct methods to solve some problems. And even though this part can feel fun and engaging after a while, you can't expect children to exhibit such interest right of the bat without having them first struggle with the classics.

Kids don't know better. Your role as a parent is to navigate along the fine line of forcing your kid to get good exposure to the (boring) activities we adults value and letting him enjoy what he enjoys. Only in doing that will your kid open up to the world and grow up into a functional human being.
by jll29 | 2025-04-20 09:10:31+00:00
As a slight tangent, a re-write in another language is also an opportunity for the human engineer to re-design parts of the software that was clunky before or so that in the new target language idioms can be used.

Using automatic tools - whether AI-based or transpilers - leaves that opportunity unused, and both approaches are likely to create some additional technical debt (errors in translation, odd, non-idiomatic ways of doing things introduced by the automatism etc.).
by pjmlp | 2025-04-20 09:10:54+00:00
I was luckly unaware of this, when I clicked the link I was expecting HLA to be some description of how good macro Assemblers used to be for writing Assembly, where it can almost feel like using an high level language, with proper use of macros and Assembler directives.

Exactly, HLA is not what people expect to be learning when mentioning Assembly.
by raincole | 2025-04-20 09:12:16+00:00
> intuitive as talking

Except talking is not intuitive. It's an unbelievably hard skill. How many years have you spent on talking until you can communicate like an adult? To convey complicated political, philosophical, or technical ideas? To express your feelings honestly without offending others?

For most people it takes from 20 years to a lifetime. Personally I can't even describe a simple (but not commonly known) algorithm to another programmer without a whitboard.
by 2b3a51 | 2025-04-20 09:12:20+00:00
Derive 2 for Dos. Green Screen 286 I think or 386 computers in a small side room. Later Windows version was better. Then there was the DOS version of Minitab 5 I think that came as floppy disks in the back of a spiral bound book which I used to generate data sets for students to process for homework so everyone got a slightly different sample.

You can do a lot of numerical maths just with a noddy spreadsheet of course.
by luckylion | 2025-04-20 09:13:14+00:00
I've seen a few attacks where the operators placed malicious code on high-traffic sites (e.g. some government thing, larger newspapers), and then just let browsers load your site as an img. Did you see images, css, js being loaded from these IPs? If they were expecting images, they wouldn't parse the HTML and not load other resources.

It's a pretty effective attack because you get large numbers of individual browsers to contribute. Hosters don't care, so unless the site owners are technical enough, they can stay online quite a bit.

If they work with Referrer Policy, they should be able to mask themselves fairly well - the ones I saw back then did not.
by wqaatwt | 2025-04-20 09:15:31+00:00
Overwhelming majority of soldiers (at least non US/UK) deployed to Afghanistan had very few chances to engage in combat. You’d have to be in special forces to get a chance to shot people on a regular basis, and yeah that’s likely a very small and self-selected subset.

I just don’t see the point of equating this with the lack of “higher moral standards” (compared to UN peace keepers at least) I don’t think that many Norwegian (or most other Western/NATO soldiers) were implicated in that many incidents related to rape or looting.
by xnzakg | 2025-04-20 09:16:53+00:00
It also depends on how popular the place is, and the customer demographic. Continuing with that example, if it's a small grocery store in a town with a population of a few thousand people, sure, there's definitely no point in having 24 different types of jam. However, if it's a store specializing in jam, in a large city, then having a larger selection makes sense, especially when you have someone working there who you can ask to recommend something. Sadly that usually also implies higher prices.
by Galanwe | 2025-04-20 09:17:04+00:00
> When was the last time you had to bypass a cert warning because of "CA store wars" (whatever that means)?

Essentially all the time for the last 10 years...

Did you ever try to deploy a website with a certificate from a non public CA? Like, say, your company CA?

If you want it to be valid for Java users, you will have to store your CA cert on the Java trust store.

Want it available for users of Firefox ? Store it in the OS certificate store.

Want it available for Chrome users? Store it in the Chrome certificate store.

Want it available for Python users? Add it to certifi.

And so on.

No single piece of software validating certificates agree on a single CA certificate store.

So, essentially, no company out there supports all these stores, and you just train users to bypass these warnings.

> What examples can you give for public CAs giving certs to "whatever"?

There have been dozens of CAs removed from widespread trust stores for failing to do proper diligence or reporting leaked keys.

Not only that, but essentially I never myself to do any kind of diligence for whatever certificate I requested from public CAs beyond proving I had TXT records update powers at some point in time.

I'm not even mentioning fortune 500 websites running with expired certs.
My Squaring Algo Beats Karatsuba and FFT for Real-World Cryptography
by KrishilSheth | 2025-04-20 09:18:51+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Krishil Rohit Sheth, and over the last 4 years I’ve developed a new algorithm (RPF) for squaring large numbers — and it outperforms Karatsuba, and even FFT-based methods for numbers under 800 digits.

Raw performance: RPF beats Karatsuba in execution time and scales better with input size. With GMP enhancements: Even after both are optimized with GMP, RPF still maintains a performance edge. Better than FFT for mid-size inputs: Up to 800 digits, RPF is also faster than FFT-based multiplication, which usually kicks in beyond this range.

I’ve attached benchmark charts and comparisons here: -https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aZ-JR0Oq5KnY4xKd2tAPEvr1wFPowhSt/view?usp=drive_link

This has applications in:

Cryptography (modular exponentiation)

Blockchain & ZK systems

Financial simulations

Any compute-heavy big-number operations

I’ve filed a provisional patent and I’m looking to either license the algorithm, collaborate, or sell the IP outright.

Would love feedback from devs, researchers, and cryptographers here! Also happy to talk if you work on libraries like GMP, OpenSSL, Java BigInteger, Libgcrypt, etc.

Thanks! —Krishil Sheth -krishilsheth@gmail.com -+91 9372677245
by 0manrho | 2025-04-20 09:19:47+00:00
> So what are potential solutions?

It won't fully solve the problem, but with the problem relatively identified, you must then ask why people are engaging in this behavior. Answer: money, for the most part. Therefore, follow the money and identify the financial incentives driving this behavior. This leads you pretty quickly to a solution most people would reject out-of-hand: turn off the financial incentive that is driving the enshittification of the web. Which is to say, kill the ad-economy.

Or at least better regulate it while also levying punitive damages that are significant enough to both disuade bad-actors and encourage entities to view data-breaches (or the potential therein) and "leakage[0]" as something that should actually be effectively secured against. Afterall, there are some upsides to the ad-economy that, without it, would present some hard challenges (eg, how many people are willing to pay for search? what happens to the vibrant sphere of creators of all stripes that are incentivized by the ad-economy? etc).

Personally, I can't imagine this would actually happen. Pushback from monied interests aside, most people have given up on the idea of data-privacy or personal-ownership of their data, if they ever even cared in the first place. So, in the absence of willing to do do something about the incentive for this maligned behavior, we're left with few good options.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716704 (see comments on all the various ways people's data is being leaked/leached/tracked/etc)
by troupo | 2025-04-20 09:20:52+00:00
> Neovim is comparable to VS Code in only the most superficial terms.

Oh no. It can be compared in more than superficial terms. E.g. their team struggled to create a performant terminal in VS Code. Because the tech they chose (and the tech a lot of the world is using) is incapable of outputting text to the screen fast enough. Where "fast enough" is "with minimal acceptable speed which is still hundreds of times slower than a modern machine is capable of": https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-rend...
by lwo32k | 2025-04-20 09:21:50+00:00
Google is not run or influenced by tech workers or engineers.

Its run by financial engineers, as are all multi-national corporations these days, as survival and scale doesn't depend purely on tech or its quality, but on leverage of cross border differences in interest rates/tax rates/forex rates/regulations/subsidies/energy costs/labor costs/property costs/rent and now tariffs. Plus market capture games through sheer money power.

What influence do tech workers have on any of these things? Zero.

So if you want influence on how modern large corps behave, you need the majority of the finance dept on your side or own the majority of the companies shares.

All other strategies and tactics are superficial and unsustainable, as the last 2-3 decades have already demonstrated.
by maccard | 2025-04-20 09:22:58+00:00
I don’t recall the exact age, but when I was doing math in primary school (somewhere around age 9/10) we were absolutely using symbols - “Paul has two apples, and the basket can hold 10 apples. How many more apples can Paul put in the basket” is the same as 2 + x = 10

We did these sorts of problems for a long time, with addition/multiplication/fractions, and even when we started doing actual algebra the problems were introduced the same way “let’s look at a problem we’ve solved already, and write it in a different way”.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-20 09:23:59+00:00
Indeed and an aircraft never really 'brakes' like a car does, except for 20 second on the ground (including thrust reversers). Even in a descent you would have significant forward thrust. The drag does all the braking. And you can't regenerate that.

PS I'm a hobby pilot so please correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think even an airliner would idle their engines during descent.