MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palata | 2025-04-24 13:42:59+00:00
Agreed. I am a millennial, so most likely older than the author.

Not having envelopes at the ready is one thing, but ordering stamps... on eBay??? And then wasting a few envelopes because writing down the address is unusual? That kind of blew my mind.

I am a software engineer, and I always have a paper notebook and a pen next to my keyboard to write down stuff.

I guess this all tells me I'm getting old :-).
by bradley13 | 2025-04-24 13:43:25+00:00
Honestly, sending letters is increasingly alien: I rarely send one letter per year. This year I have sent two, only because I am trying to contact an incredibly old-fashioned directorate of the German government that doesn't seem to have an email address.

The stamps I have, I bought years ago - by now, they don't cover current letter prices. I wind up putting too much postage on the letters, because I'm not going to go buy even more stamps that I probably won't need...
Show HN: Chat with AI copies of all HN users, like sama, dang, and even yourself
by sync | 2025-04-24 13:43:34+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Chris. I've been working on creating personalized AI chatbots by grounding them in real conversations.

Feeling inspired by antirez's recent post ("Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705632), I wondered: could I use the HN comment data referenced in that post to create virtual versions of... every user on Hacker News?

A ~week later, here we are: https://lexikon.ai/dataset/hn

The database contains every user who has commented at least 200 words, and when you search for a user, we'll process their history in realtime to create a personalized AI chatbot of them on-the-fly (it'll take a few minutes).

There's no login required, and conversations aren't recorded or stored anywhere, nor are they trained on.

It surprised me at how fun it actually is. Give it a shot, would love to know what y'all think--
by stego-tech | 2025-04-24 13:43:39+00:00
Just like the first critique of mine above, the how of communication is just as important as the vocabulary used. Consider your description above with this reworked (organic, AI-free) example:

"Core contributor to mid-size successful startup"

Based on the limited information you gave me in your line, I rewrote it to give off a different tone and vibe. Now, instead of standing atop trophies ("FAANG") and leaderboards ("multi-billion dollar", "1,500 people"), the same description sounds more grounded in reality - a contributor as part of a larger whole, someone who seeks to do the same through their blog as opposed to someone commanding attention based on past glories alone.

This is what I mean when I say you may have chosen your words with specificity, but the way you string them together can have a more outsized impact than the words themselves. It's the same myth that a meal is just the sum of its ingredients, rather than the steps taken, the chaos managed, and the personal touches from experience or wisdom added into it that the recipe didn't cover.
Show HN: Docker registry running natively on iPhone (as part of RepoFlow)
by Jamey100 | 2025-04-24 13:44:19+00:00
We built something unusual during a weekend hackathon: a fully working Docker registry that runs directly on iOS. No servers, no external setup, and no cloud required. Just install the app and your iPhone becomes a portable registry.

You can push, pull, and manage Docker images locally. It's part of a broader project called RepoFlow, focused on making package management simple and self-hosted.

Would love to hear your thoughts or feedback.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/repoflow/id6744822121 Project: https://www.repoflow.io
by andraaspar | 2025-04-24 13:44:20+00:00
I would not necessarily. It depends.

They are pretty close in mindset (how state works), but Svelte is more established, better polished, has better docs, with a larger community, and of course, great animation / transition support. Svelte 5 does not have dev tools at the time of this writing, just like Solid. SFC is great, Solid has no comparable offering. It also has robust error handling, better than Solid.

That said, Solid has a way better Tanstack Query implementation. (No idea why we still don't have a proper Svelte 5 version today.) It is reasonably close to React that you may feel it should be easy to switch – though that is deceptive. Most of the work is not in the templates but in how the state works, and for this reason it is easier to port Solid code to Svelte or Vue than to React. Developing in Solid is smoother, because it is not a custom template, but just TypeScript. Less concepts to learn, if you are well versed in React.

Both can be good choices for different use cases. And then sometimes React is the right choice.
by madphilosopher | 2025-04-24 13:44:49+00:00
Vulnerabilities like this lead to car thefts. Some models of cars are more susceptible than others, and the manufacturers seem unwilling to fix the problem. The insurance companies know which models are more trouble for them, and so they set higher rates for these, which punishes the driver/owner for something outside of their control.

My solution? Require the manufacturers of vulnerable models to pay the insurance on behalf of the driver/owner as long as the vulnerabilities go unfixed.
by dvdhnt | 2025-04-24 13:45:11+00:00
America is a free market who uses its military to keep shipping and global trade free from interference. We deport some illegal immigrants.

China is a communist country with real life re-education camps. They manipulate markets and steal intellectual property. They’ve been cozied up to authoritarian and oppressive regimes, like Russia, for a long time.

That’s worse for stability in my opinion.
by throwaway290 | 2025-04-24 13:45:11+00:00
I wouldn't. I use a throwaway for multiple years myself lol. And he or she could just use some friend's anonymous account.

And I like how you request good faith review of a guy who is part of the team busy dismantling US government from the inside. Like who would even think to review that if not because of it. What matters is is it correct or not.
by hattmall | 2025-04-24 13:45:41+00:00
China is an apartheid state with actual concentration camps. Hundreds of millions of people in forced labor, several hundred million more in deplorable living conditions, the world's largest polluter, and has ambitions of invading their neighbor. They are also the main supporter of Russian occupation of Ukraine while ignoring sanctions to conduct business with Iran supplying them with materials to make drones and bombs.

The average non-party Chinese family lives in a less 60 SQ meters home. Works 60 hours a week, has no assets, and is marketed cigarettes by the government.

People bitching about the US and praising China are ridiculous.
by jeffbee | 2025-04-24 13:45:44+00:00
Quick reminder that when alarmists talk about "data center energy use" they are almost always quoting aggregate statistics that encompass mobile networks. The mobile networks are actually using half of the aggregate power[1]. So how do these regulations address that aspect of the problem. This press release claims to save 2.2TWh/a by 2030 which is less than one percent of the energy used by transmission networks today.

1: https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and...
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-24 13:45:44+00:00
The best way to combat this now is to probably not talk about it. Just like vulnerabilities in white hat scenarios, let the developers know and then have a lead time before releasing the information publicly.

Ironically this study comes from two safety oriented organizations, so I question their reasoning for running to make it public that you can use SOTA models right now to do the knowledge legwork for creating deadly bioweapons.
by mppm | 2025-04-24 13:45:55+00:00
Key distribution is (as always) an important, but solvable problem. There are some tradeoffs involving centralization vs cost of replacement, but those apply generally, not just in this particular case.

As for replay attacks, that's where the button press comes in (like on a hardware security token) -- the key only responds to challenges within a second or so of a button press and the car sets a similar timeout for validity.
by Gnuke | 2025-04-24 13:46:00+00:00
I wrote a letter to a friend last year. It was the first time in probably well over a decade I had used a pen for more than just scribbled notes or doodling. I made a ton of mistakes and I wasted at least a dozen sheets of paper rewriting it. Seems it's one of those skills that deteriorates without frequent practice, at least for me.
by Arainach | 2025-04-24 13:46:27+00:00
Bias disclaimer: I've worked at multiple FAANGs and Meta isn't one of them, but as with anyone in the industry I've had friends at all of them.

Meta feels very different - both at the top, with Zuckerberg's immunity from the board, full control, and personality "quirks" on public display - but also at the lower levels. Every company has a stable of people who will do what they're told to collect a paycheck but Meta had a much higher ratio of people - including people I know, respect, and consider very smart in other aspects - who bought in to the vision that what the company was doing was good for the world even in a post-2016 world when all of the consequences of social media and Meta's specific actions were fully evident.

My Amazon friends won't defend the bad things Amazon does, my Alphabet friends love to gripe, my Microsoft friends....you get the idea. But my friends at Meta would repeatedly try to defend bad things in a way the others don't.
by os2warpman | 2025-04-24 13:46:34+00:00
You are misunderstanding me.

I am on two embryonic programs that are not viable without starship or an equivalent.

If starship exists I will be able to cash out, buy a 54-foot catamaran and spend the rest of my life sailing around the world scuba diving and spear fishing.

I want starship to exist and do not care who builds it.

It does not exist and I know this because I am currently on the third floor of a boring cookie cutter business park building right now staring at computer screens and not off the coast of Gili T doing mushrooms after a dive.
by nottorp | 2025-04-24 13:46:45+00:00
Not even China will switch overnight. I'm asking if China is better at EV incentives.

I'm driving a 15 year old car :) I want to replace it some time in the next 2-3 years. Right now I wouldn't consider an EV or PHEV because I don't think I can charge one regularly and the price premium is not worth it to me, especially compared to the hassle.
by myrmidon | 2025-04-24 13:46:49+00:00
Estimates for the numbers are right there (which I really appreciated).

I think the main expected gains here are less from the estimated 0.2% electricity savings and more about longer average product lifetimes (thanks to better repairability).

If a manufacturer gets his phone to last for a day of heavy use, there is little motivation to improve efficiency past that benchmark I think (and this labeling provides that).
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-24 13:47:25+00:00
That’s not a common reaction with humans. When people are the best, there’s a huge serotonin rush. Like literally this is measurable in humans.

Serotonin regulates dominance hierarchies and is associated with happiness. It’s so biological in nature that the same effect can be witnessed in lobsters. People or lobsters high in dominance have more serotonin and are generally happier.

Your story is not only anomalous. But it’s anomalous to the point where it’s unrealistic too. I can’t comment on this but if you did not feel the associated come down of serotonin I’m more inclined to say you’re not being honest with yourself more then you’re a biological anomaly. There’s likely enough variation in genetics to produce people like you so I’m not ruling it out.
by lr4444lr | 2025-04-24 13:47:35+00:00
The loss of work for its centering, routine, mental challenges, socialization across the generations, and sense of accomplishment is harmful to mental and even physical health.

Sure, a construction worker can't be climbing the rafters at 80 years old, but this idea that we just transition to leisure and getting together with friends at a certain point is both fairly novel and of dubious value.
by RHSeeger | 2025-04-24 13:47:49+00:00
> So if someone generates their music with AI to get their idea to music you don’t look down on it?

It depends entirely on how they're using it. AI is a tool, and it can be used to help produce some wonderful things.

- I don't look down on a photographer because they use a tool to take a beautiful picture (that would have taken a painter longer to paint)

- I don't look down on someone using digital art tools to blur/blend/manipulate their work in interesting ways

- I don't look down on musicians that feed their output through a board to change the way it sounds

AI (and lots of other tools) can be used to replace the creative process, which is not great. But it can also be used to enhance the creative process, which _is_ great.
by globular-toast | 2025-04-24 13:48:04+00:00
In the UK at school in the 90s we were taught how to write a letter including addressing and stamping the envelope. It's quite strange to see it done "wrong" like in the OP. You're supposed to have the first line of the address centred vertically, leaving the top half for stamps. At least they got the stamps on the correct (right) side, though. I've seen a lot worse.
by redczar | 2025-04-24 13:48:17+00:00
In 2008 the country had gone so far to the right that the Republicans didn’t support their own healthcare plan. Obamacare was essentially the same plan Mitt Romney enacted and the one crafted by the Heritage Foundation. When you go far enough in either direction you end up in crazy land and that’s where we are. We need a new system and collapsing the current one is likely needed to be done before that can happen.
by redbar0n | 2025-04-24 13:48:19+00:00
Unbundled won over bundled approach, even for RedwoodJS itself (which is now renamed Redwood GraphQL):

"Unbundled Integrations: Over the coming months, we'll progressively unbundle third-party integrations—such as the authentication providers, Storybook, and others. These integrations will then be independently maintained by their original teams or the community, giving you greater flexibility, faster updates, and control over which integrations you adopt and support."

https://web.archive.org/web/20250407165256/https://redwoodjs...
by alias_neo | 2025-04-24 13:48:34+00:00
> but ordering stamps... on eBay

OP was ordering US stamps to include _in_ the letter, on an SAE (self-addressed envelope) they were sending _from_ the UK, so that the FSF could reply (from the US) using said stamps.

As a millennial myself, I have no idea where else I'd look for <recipient country> stamps should I want to include them on a SAE I was sending to said country, so that they recipient wouldn't incur the cost of replying to me.

I don't find looking on eBay particularly strange, though I'd do a quick search for alternatives first.
by janandonly | 2025-04-24 13:48:56+00:00
The find of an almost complete canine skeleton form the last ice age era is very intriguing.

I don’t get why the speculation is so dumb with this question: Cared for like a companion, or killed like prey?

What if the dog/wolf was cared for by one group of people and used as a guard dog, and in that capacity was attacked by other people?

Afterwards the owners of the dog beried it because it was their beloved pet and guard?

This explains why its bones would both show signs of human care and human damage simultaneously.
by VikingCoder | 2025-04-24 13:49:00+00:00
I think these licenses are incredibly useful.

I have a really, really dumb question.

Why don't we have more licenses and contracts like this? Do we just need to set up a foundation that drafts them and makes them freely available to use?

Like, for instance, "Hi, Mark - we'd like to offer you a job here at our daycare, but first we need you to look over this contract and sign it."

This contract says, roughly, that if there's an accusation of sexual abuse against children that it will go to a mediator who has final say, and if they say it was a credible accusation, that Mark immediately loses his job, and can never work anywhere that uses this same contract, ever again. Sorry, you lost your chance to work with kids. It sucks that it might have been a false accusation, but our kids are just far too important to trust to the existing systems.

Guess what? Churches should follow a similar license. Letting priests or pastors move from town to town, abusing kids? That was completely bonkers insane. And I feel like a contract like this (and a registry, and etc.) could have helped. If people forced their daycares and churches to accept a license like this.

Another one, "Hi, Greg. We understand we'd like your endorsement from our political party? Sounds good, here's a contract for you..."

It says, among other things, that if Greg switches political parties that he must resign from office. Sorry. He's welcome to run again, but he can't stay in office on our votes.

Like, shouldn't we have more contracts like this?
by Jnr | 2025-04-24 13:49:28+00:00
And yet, only US has right-to-repair laws for cars. When is EU going to fix that?

I can't get manuals and software access to fix a new car made in EU.

I don't really care that I can't fix my all-glued-up phone for <1000 EUR but I do care that I have to spend thousands on car repairs that I could do myself.
by int_19h | 2025-04-24 13:49:28+00:00
All abstract property rights are legal fiction. The notion that you can own, say, a piece of land that you have never even came close to, simply by virtue of a record in some registry somewhere; and, based on that ownership, then restrict the ability of others who actually do live next to it to enter it or otherwise use it, is rather absurd from a "natural right" perspective.

I should note that this isn't even some kind of hot new take. Here's what Thomas Jefferson had to say on the subject:

"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."

"A right of property in moveable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands, not till after that establishment. The right to moveables is acknowledged by all the hordes of Indians surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property in lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field keeps possession till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it. Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately appropriated, and their owner protected in his possession. Till then, the property is in the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as trustee, must grant them to individuals, and determine the conditions of the grant."
by magnetometer | 2025-04-24 13:49:45+00:00
Yes,measuring the energy consumption and efficiency of the conversion from electricity to light is part of the label. The light bulb example is not as unsuitable as you seem to assume. Incandescent light bulbs only convert about 5 percent of the energy consumed to light, the rest is converted to heat. LEDs, in contrast, are 6 to 8 times more efficient.

Your "does image processing..." part is also important. Different processors consume vastly different amounts of energy. A hobbyist example would be trying to run something on a battery powered ESP32 with or without deep sleep.
by thatjoeoverthr | 2025-04-24 13:50:12+00:00
"Tell me about the Marathon crater."

This works against _the LLM proper,_ but not against chat applications with integrated search. For ChatGPT, you can write, "Without looking it up, tell me about the Marathon crater."

This tests self awareness. A two-year-old will answer it correctly, as will the dumbest person you know. The correct answer is "I don't know".

This works because:

1. Training sets consist of knowledge we have, and not of knowledge we don't have.

2. Commitment bias. Complaint chat models will be trained to start with "Certainly! The Marathon Crater is a geological formation", or something like that, and from there, the next most probable tokens are going to be "in Greece", "on Mars" or whatever. At this point, all tokens that are probable are also incorrect.

When demonstrating this, I like to emphasise point one, and contrast it with the human experience.

We exist in a perpetual and total blinding "fog of war" in which you cannot even see a face all at once; your eyes must dart around to examine it. Human experience is structured around _acquiring_ and _forgoing_ information, rather than _having_ information.
by palata | 2025-04-24 13:50:13+00:00
I find it interesting that the US reputation in South America seems pretty good.

Pretty sure that the US reputation dropped during Trump's first term, but this time he surely has broken his personal record. Also I think this time it's not only Trump: his oligarchs probably had an influence on that (starting with Musk and his Nazi salutes).

Of course, the threats to invade Canada and EU territories (amongst others) had an impact, too. As for the tariffs, I really feel like it's helping China's reputation: they stay strong against the bully who seems to be about to lose that battle.
Ask HN: Can AI agents build full-stack apps from scratch?
by jatingarg230 | 2025-04-24 13:50:19+00:00
Over the past few months, we’ve been tinkering with a question that wouldn’t leave us alone:

What if AI could actually build apps — not just generate code snippets, but scaffold an entire working product from scratch?

So we built saas-builder, an open-source CLI that lets you describe your app idea and generates a full-stack scaffold using Next.js and Supabase.

You run: saas-builder init

…and five AI agents take over: > UI Agent → builds a responsive frontend > Auth Agent → wires up Supabase Auth > DB Agent → creates schema, migrations, and types > Terminal Agent → installs dependencies & folders > Browser Agent → launches the app locally

What you get is a clean, typed, ready-to-deploy app. It’s still early days — very much a side project. But it’s already saved us hours of boilerplate setup.

More importantly, it gave us a glimpse of what agentic development might actually feel like.

We’re releasing it under MIT, installable via pip, and would genuinely love your thoughts:

GitHub: https://github.com/jatingarg619/saas-builder

Appreciate you reading. We’re around to answer questions, chat about ideas or hear whatever feedback you’ve got.
by lr4444lr | 2025-04-24 13:50:22+00:00
> Do not buy into the bullshit hype of “hustle” to appease your employer

I completely disagree here. Hustling under the right leadership is as good for you as for the business. You learn the industry, hone your skills, network, and improve your understanding of the interactions between different business functions. IME, people who go above and beyond and produce value beyond just doing what their immediate supervisor tells them - even challenging them in the right ways for a better outcome - tend to survive through layoffs too. You can make work a reasonable part of your life, but still try your damndest during those hours.