MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-15 10:53:23+00:00
>I think both those cases are easy to decide

Many people disagree with you and describe what these people do as theft, so it's not as easy as you think.

>which Medjedovic rejected

I made no points at all about what he did afterward. This is all irrelevant to my point.

>I don't think it does, but you don't explain why

I did explain why further up in the thread. It's not just a badly coded computer program; it's a badly coded computer program that acts as a contract intended to circumvent government control of money. That's the context.

People agree to adhere to the smart contract instead of putting their money into a financial institution that uses contracts backed by laws enforced by governments. This guy adhered to the smart contract, and when the crypto company didn't like the outcome, they decided that none of the crypto stuff mattered and that the laws enforced by governments mattered after all.

But this makes cryptocurrencies entirely pointless. If you can use legal means to circumvent undesired smart contract outcomes, then you can just do that in the first place and not have the smart contract.

>Can you explain to me in simple english how that is using the contract as intended?

Yes, of course. Smart contracts are self-executing contracts. The agreement you make is written in the code of the contract. That is the intention behind a smart contract. It makes no sense to say that you did not adhere to the contract if it allowed you to do something. So by definition, anything you do that the contract enables you to do is using the contract as intended.

>Note that "it's what the smart contract said" is not sufficient, for the same reason that "the web server allowed me to make that request" is not a defence against a charge of computer hacking

Again, this argument ignores the context of smart contracts. Web servers don't claim that their code is a contract.

>why should I be rooting for this guy

It doesn't matter. I'm not rooting for this guy. I'm not arguing emotionally in favor of some guy who did something. In fact, I think he's a shithead.
by rtp4me | 2025-04-15 10:55:07+00:00
Please, this thread is about the average wage-grade worker (money earned via the "sweat of one's brow"), not an "accredited investor". In this example, almost anyone in the US can open up a Robin Hood, Vanguard, Schwab, Fidelity, etc account with probably $25. You don't need access to the most lucrative investment opportunities to make money; simply buy a standard S&P 500 ETF and call it a day. Over time, the chances of you making money with your investments are high, and the tax burden is lower, meaning you get to make and keep more money in your pocket. That is a win for everyone - not just the magical "billionaire".

The average worker in the US needs these sorts of opportunities to be self reliant. You don't need to be a billionaire to make money on the market, you just need a few dollars, some time, and the will to take a little risk. Stop hating on the average worker...
by triceratops | 2025-04-15 10:56:04+00:00
> They're the same as far as this discussion is concerned, as the amount that the beneficiary gets is (roughly) the same.

The estate's value is reduced by what it owes.

> if your business tries to classify borrowed money as "income"

sigh C'mon man, engage in good faith here. Stop saying things I didn't say.

If you can borrow cash against assets, don't have to pay principle until you die, and only pay low interest payments then it's functionally the same as selling those assets at a low tax rate. That's the principle.

And if you can use trusts to avoid estate taxes then there are no (or very low) taxes due ever.

> I rely on my CPA for tax advice

Ok ask your CPA what they know about using trusts to avoid estate taxes. Maybe it's BS but maybe it's true. Without some curiosity, how will you ever know?

> not the internet

More reputable sources than Reddit indicate it may be possible to use trusts to greatly reduce or eliminate estate tax:

https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/nam/en/insights/wealth-plan...

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/grat.asp

https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/personal-finance/wh...
by nickfromseattle | 2025-04-15 10:56:54+00:00
An extended family member worked on using lasers to launch payloads to orbits. [0]

Here's a quick video demonstrating the technology, using lasers to lift a small prototype several meters, back in, what I believe is the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i81f3LifpWY

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leik_Myrabo
by 8-prime | 2025-04-15 10:57:57+00:00
Cool, I didn't know that.

I agree that this is, at least often, a case of where your roots lie. Whats most shocking to me is that the likes of Apple and Mircosoft don't seem to be interested in/capable of building an actually good framework.

I feel like Microsoft tried with .NET Maui, but that really isn't a viable choice if you go by developer sentiment.
by einsteinx2 | 2025-04-15 10:58:05+00:00
See also the entire job of “AWS Cloud Engineer” aka “I want to spend years learning how to manage proprietary infrastructure instead of just learning Linux server management” and the companies that hire them aka “we don’t have money to hire sysadmins to run servers, that’s crazy! Instead let’s pay the same salaries for a team of cloud engineers and be locked in to a single vendor paying 10x the price for infra!” It’s honestly mind boggling to me.
by Timon3 | 2025-04-15 10:59:00+00:00
I've long been wishing for the same! With service workers etc. this would be a perfect approach for many small utilities. I've started building things as single HTML files using vite-plugin-singlefile[0], but users either have to manually block network requests, or they have to trust me. It would be awesome if they could be sure that nothing will be uploaded anywhere.

The pledge would have to be persistent, which would make e.g. service worker updates difficult - ideally the browser should show you that an update is available, and offer to delete all stored information so nothing can be saved to localStorage etc. to be uploaded afterwards.

[0]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/vite-plugin-singlefile
by cyanydeez | 2025-04-15 10:59:27+00:00
So I understand how these prompts work for tooling, etc, but they tend to be specific to specific models. Is it possible you could actually supply say 10 prompts for the same tool and determine which one gets the correct output? It wouldn't be much harder than having some test cases and running each prompt through the user selected model to see which worked.

Otherwise you're at the mercy of whatever model the user has selected or downloaded or whatever. And whenever you need to tweak it to improve something.

This would be akin to how we used to calibrate stylus or touch screens.
by marcusb | 2025-04-15 10:59:27+00:00
I've never (to my knowledge) had a review on Amazon rejected, and I've left very some negative reviews, including when I received counterfeit items.

I always thought the review scams on Amazon were more driven by the third-party sellers doing stuff like listing takeover, astroturfing reviews, bribing customers for good reviews, etc., but maybe I'm wrong. I have personally received multiple offers from third-party sellers of incentives to leave good reviews.
by angusturner | 2025-04-15 10:59:36+00:00
The thing this really hits home for me is how Apple is totally asleep at the wheel.

Today I asked Siri “call the last person that texted me”, to try and respond to someone while driving.

Am I surprised it couldn’t do it? Not really at this point, but it is disappointing that there’s such a wide gulf between Siri and even the least capable LLMs.
Show HN: Zaturn – AI Data Copilot via MCP
by kdqed | 2025-04-15 10:59:57+00:00
I built Zaturn, a local-first, AI-powered data analysis tool that runs as an MCP server (Model Context Protocol). Plug it into clients like Cursor, Claude, or your own MCP setup, and start querying your data sources using natural language.

- Connects to Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, DuckDB, CSV, and Parquet - Does not feed your whole dataset to LLMs; rather, it generates & runs SQL via LLMs - Generates plots/visualizations

Still early. Would love feedback from devs, data folks, and anyone hacking on AI-native tools.

Repo: https://github.com/kdqed/zaturn
Ask HN: How do I jump from Senior PM –> Senior Product Engineer?
by KomradeKeeks | 2025-04-15 11:00:42+00:00
I've spent the last 5 years as a PM working closely with engineering teams, architecting solutions and speaking fluent tech - but I'm tired of being the person who draws on the whiteboard without writing the actual code. My background:

- 5 years as a PM - CS fundamentals are solid - Have built various hackathon projects (both frontend and backend) - Can sketch out system architecture in my sleep (co-invented a software patent) - Regularly contribute to technical discussions and decision-making - BUT: Haven't shipped production code professionally

I'm particularly interested in full-stack development and AI integrations. I know the product side cold, I understand what makes for good UX, and I can bridge the business-technical gap. Now I want to be the one building, not just specifying. The job market isn't great right now, which makes this transition harder. I'm looking for environments that value Respect, Integrity, operate with a Sense of Urgency, and (crucially) have Funding.

For those who've made this transition successfully:

1. What's your recommended path? 2. How did you overcome the "no professional engineering experience" hurdle? 3. Any specific companies known for supporting this kind of transition? 4. Should I target smaller companies where I can wear multiple hats?

Thanks HN!
by ringeryless | 2025-04-15 11:01:06+00:00
I finally found a real human on this website! The default pose here on HN can be rather eye rollingly bad: "oh, you will FALL BEHIND, everyone is using LLMs and they provide advantages you cannot conceive of, it's an arms race, not a bubble" etc ad nauseum.

I do not expect LLMs to take over even junior developer roles, let alone lead a coding revolution.

Pattern ripoff machines likely have their uses, but the grandiose delusions and the FOMO and the aggressive posturing by the LLM makers and their shrill shill army gets really old.

We are not all entirely stupid ya know
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-15 11:01:51+00:00
Yeah. I mean, back in 2019 when Raspberry Pi ran into that very same issue [1], it was excusable, but it's six years later and people still have zero idea what the fuck they are doing?

[1] https://hackaday.com/2019/07/16/exploring-the-raspberry-pi-4...
by 8-prime | 2025-04-15 11:02:35+00:00
I have thought about this and I'm not sure that Electron really is to blame here. It makes building an application accessibile, which means that there will be lots of apps built with it, many of which won't be any good.

Just like many native apps will also be horrible in terms of UX. Good apps are good. And I believe that it's entire possible to build an amazing app with Electron.

Although not everyone might agree, IMO VSCode is a great example of that.
by ringeryless | 2025-04-15 11:04:17+00:00
Anyway, i enjoyed reading a sane human expressing sane views, for a change.

The ycombinator sponsorship thing seems to put an insanely large thumb on all scales always, around here, so much so that rules sort of allude to one being prohibited from biting any hands that may be feeding anyone up high...

I used to enjoy HN before it became nonstop LLM "news"

Who's hiring seems to only involve LLM related enterprises, which seems rather short-sighted, IMO
by youssefabdelm | 2025-04-15 11:04:27+00:00
Disagree. It's really not complicated at all to me. Not sure why people make a big fuss over this. I don't want an AI automating which AI it chooses for me. I already know through lots of testing intuitively which one I want.

If they abstract all this away into one interface I won't know which model I'm getting. I prefer reliability.
by dxdm | 2025-04-15 11:04:30+00:00
> Nobody is evil, they just have different interests and viewpoints.

If you're arguing a fairy-tale definition of "evil" as an inherent property were people do evil for evil's sake, or simply can't help it, sure - almost nobody is "evil", if having actual, realistic motivations automatically disqualifies "evil".

I think evil can still be a useful, moral concept, if you give up the need for it to be absolute and objective, while accepting the ambiguity that comes with it. Still, it's likely possible for a lot of people to agree what constitutes evil, especially when seeing examples.

I would certainly like to keep considering things, actions and sometimes even people, to be "evil", _especially_ after considering their motivations, views and justifications.
by hk1337 | 2025-04-15 11:04:33+00:00
I’m rather surprised anyone would want a battery operated lamp at their bedside anyways, unless it was a backup battery for when the power goes out. There’s no battery indicator to know when it is low so you would just have to guess or pay attention when it looks like it needs to be charged. Most people would probably just plug it in and leave it plugged in all the time.
by ben_w | 2025-04-15 11:05:19+00:00
About 20 years ago, I briefly considered what it would take to use heliostats focussed on a heat exchanger to the same effect.

The mistake I made then was thinking fuel was expensive, so I assumed similar performance to existing rockets as if I was using it to superheat cheap water to the combustion temperature of hydrogen-oxygen — the problem with this being that it's pumping the equivalent of the entire electrical power demand of the United Kingdom into an engine the size of a truck for 6 minutes without it exploding.

(Similarly, it's possible to push against Earth's magnetic field but if you use copper the resistive losses will vaporise you launch vehicle. And you can make a much stronger artificial field on the ground, but the way magnetic fields reduce with distance means the current loop on the ground has to be significantly larger than CERN's LHC).
by chrismorgan | 2025-04-15 11:06:22+00:00
You’re counting completely the wrong thing. Shallow versus deep is about the items inside, but we care about the costs of creating the collection itself. As far as structured clones are concerned, none of the operations we’re talking about are deep. At best, it’s just the wrong word to use. (Example: if you were going to call it anything, you’d call .map(x => x) shallow.)

Array:

• Array.prototype.slice may be expensive (it creates a collection, but it may be able to be done in such a way that you can’t tell).

• Array.prototype.filter is expensive (it creates a collection).

• Array.prototype.map is expensive (it creates a collection).

So you have two or three expensive operations, going through as much as the entire list (depends on how much you trim out with slice and filter) two or three times, creating an intermediate list at each step.

Iterator:

• Array.prototype.values is cheap, creating a lightweight iterator object.

• Iterator.prototype.drop is cheap, creating a lightweight iterator helper object.

• Iterator.prototype.take is cheap, creating a lightweight iterator helper object.

• Iterator.prototype.filter is cheap, creating a lightweight iterator helper object.

• Iterator.prototype.map is cheap, creating a lightweight iterator helper object.

• Iterator.prototype.toArray is the thing that actually drives everything. Now you drive the iterator chain through, going through the list only once, applying each filter or transformation as you go, and only doing one expensive allocation of a new array.

In the end, in terms of time complexity, both are O(n), but the array version has a much higher coefficient on that n. For small inputs, array may be faster. For large values, iterators will be faster.
by stavros | 2025-04-15 11:07:37+00:00
> The ESP32 has its own charging circuit.

What?

_reads on_

Turns out, he uses a specific ESP32 breakout board (AFAIK a Lolin one) that includes a charging circuit for a 1S battery. It's a really nice board, but to say that ESP32 includes a charging circuit is wrong, for anyone else curious.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-15 11:09:53+00:00
you can do high end audio dsp on dspic lol.

lookup sigmastudio dsp, dsp is insanely cheap todo, there is absolutely no need for fpga, what that guy was doing was either nonsense or it was in 1995. which are both irrelevant points, or rather you provided examples that show fpga are irrelevant, no growth market.

(how many audio devices were using TMS320 dsps even before and after ipod was a thing...)
by vitus | 2025-04-15 11:11:57+00:00
(note: I am going to be imprecise here by describing the volume of the unit hypersphere, when such a concept does not exist, as the hypersphere only describes the surface of such a construct. It is more correct to call it the volume of the n-ball, or the volume enclosed by the unit hypersphere, but I'm not going to use that terminology throughout, in the interest of expediency.)

> What is the ratio B/A is 1/100 and you'd say that the methodology is very inefficient here, and I tell you that actually we're estimating the ratio A/B. Does it become very efficient? Surely it can't change as the two ratios arent independent.

That's exactly it, though. Rejection sampling is not primarily used to estimate ratios, but rather to draw points from a distribution by sampling a broader distribution and then rejecting points that don't satisfy some criteria. If you're attempting to sample the unit hypersphere by picking N points between 0 and 1, and rejecting any sets where sum(x_i^2) > 1, then you're going to be throwing away most of your data points in the process.

Going back to the topic of volume ratio estimation, though: both of you are underestimating quite how quickly the volume drops off. The unit hypersphere's volume decreases super-exponentially (there's a factorial in the denominator!), so if you're dealing with a mere 50 dimensions, you're looking at a ratio of 10^-13 [0]. In that regime, adding an extra dimension shrinks that volume by a factor of about 3; by the time you get to 100, that factor increases to 4.

If you're still only sampling a million points, chances are very good that you're going to decide that the ratio is 0. In order to accurately estimate the ratio, you need progressively more and more samples just to compensate for a slight increase in dimension.

I'd expect it to be much more efficient to use the change-of-coordinates approach the article also mentions, although I have personally never thought about a coordinate system well-suited to the 50-dimensional hypersphere. Probably 49 angles and a radius that's basically almost always 1, and a weird Jacobian that I don't want to compute by hand?

Also, as I mentioned, using rejection sampling to estimate the value of pi is a cute exercise but quite useless in practice compared to any of the more direct methods. If you sample a million points in the unit square, you'll end up with 3.142 +/- 0.0016. Meanwhile, if you use the fourth continued fraction for pi (355/113), you already have 3.141592(9)... for far less computation.

[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=volume+of+unit+49-ball
by systemtest | 2025-04-15 11:14:36+00:00
The result of this process is that the air purifier boosts when the air quality inside drops.

I feel like that is something that doesn’t or at least shouldn’t require a string of IoT devices, apps, wireless communication and hubs. Why not leave all of that out and just attach an air quality sensor to the air purifier and a small LCD to adjust the settings?

The light in my hallway turns on automatically when I walk past. No cloud, no HomeAssist, no WiFi, no Zigbee, no apps, no batteries to change. Just a motion sensor hardwired to the light fixture. Hasn’t failed me once in the past ten years. Works great even if the network goes down.
by ammo1662 | 2025-04-15 11:15:04+00:00
I've come across some other comments on Chinese forums. Some importers buy products for 10 RMB from China and then sell them in the U.S. for 10 USD. Later, they use tariffs as an excuse to raise prices to 15-20 USD. They couldn't care less whether you impose 100% or even 200% tariffs – they'd still profit unless the tariffs reach 1000%.

Also, check out this link[0] some people actually don't have many alternatives either.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCS-LS4LUXk
by jmpman | 2025-04-15 11:16:01+00:00
On a side note, Life of Brian used to be listed on the Apple iTunes Store as rated “PG” - it’s actually “R”. Great fun when I let my 11 and 13 year old boys watch it. Luckily their mother wasn’t home. Appears Apple eventually rectified that issue, but I tried to report it and man does Apple make it difficult.
by jannw | 2025-04-15 11:16:21+00:00
Lots of technical discussions - but the real answer is that bittorrent/P2P was displaced by Netflix for all but a small number of hard-core users. That, combined with legal threats, and that p2p required volume/scale to work well, meant that the critical mass died. It was a sad day that we, the users of the internet, en-mass exchanged bittorrent for streaming companies.
by rklaehn | 2025-04-15 11:16:40+00:00
OK, thanks for the clarification.

I have nothing against crypto in principle, but I really don't want Iroh to be associated with crypto scams.

Iroh is just a library for p2p connections. You can use it for crypto, but I would say that the majority of our users are non-crypto(currency).

We will try to make the wasm version easier to use, but if nostr works well for you, go for it! Not the right place if you want to avoid crypto bros though :-)
by rsynnott | 2025-04-15 11:17:01+00:00
Though, y'know, also consistent with Stalinist Russia.

Generally, those sorts of approval ratings for an executive leader (you do see them sometimes for non-executive heads of state, though in that case they can be seen as less alarming) are a serious red flag; they're generally a dictatorship signal. No-one is _that_ popular.