MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dcminter | 2025-04-28 18:34:10+00:00
As is so often the case, the late great Douglas Adams had a relevant quote:

"And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.

And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-04-28 18:34:31+00:00
Excellent analysis.

> Something about the side hustle continues to lure people into thinking it’s a way out, until they burn themselves out and sabotage their day job while doing it.

Side projects are a way to assert control. The siren song is that you can build your own way out of corporate hell and have a shot at growth (be that financial/personal/etc) without needing 10 randos and 3 committee meetings from your company to sign off on a promotion. In that light, I think it is a very reasonable response.

I think it's a symptom of how crappy and ambiguous leveling feels over the long-term. You're told that nothing's definite, just work hard and deliver results, and you'll make it.
by slibhb | 2025-04-28 18:34:31+00:00
I don't dispute that these are "efforts to do good stuff in the real world". It's just very obvious that they are having the opposite effect. I don't kow what that has to do with an "echo chamber".

> People can be wrong and not "woke" (which you're clearly using to connote "evil" or "enemy").

Of course they can. The Trump administration is wrong and unwoke. I did not use "woke" to connote "evil" or "enemy". Where are you getting that? I mentioned specific cases where "wokeness" has led to bad policy.
by mrandish | 2025-04-28 18:34:37+00:00
> So, you can yell "fire" falsely and cause a stampede?

As the article I linked points out, that trope was (and still is) a hypothetical that tells us nothing useful about first amendment speech rights. The reason the article is so valuable and often cited is when one of those first amendment tropes is tossed into a discussion, it's usually to imply some specific speech which is protected - is not protected. They are often deployed either in error by those who don't understand how very narrow and incredibly rare first amendment exceptions actually are, or as a bad faith rhetorical device by those who already know the first amendment protects speech they wish it didn't.

As a student and fan of first amendment jurisprudence, the fascinating thing about the tropes is that most of them come from old, exceptional cases where the court got it wrong. Cases which were either reversed by later courts or so thoroughly disavowed they've never come back before the court. A long time ago, various eras of SCOTUS courts wobbled around in the long process of figuring out first amendment exceptions and some bad decisions were made - then later corrected. After decades of trying (and failing) to work out a set of rules permitting "good speech" while stopping "bad speech", it became obvious it was impossible.

Over the past 50 years or so, SCOTUS narrowed in on a detailed set of precedents which are as consistent and crystal clear as they are radically extreme - always protecting almost ALL speech - including the worst, most vile, offensive and hateful speech that has no redeeming value whatsoever. Speech I personally despise and wish no one ever said. While I hate the speech (and, often, the speaker), I fiercely defend the first amendment which protects it. Tolerating the awful things people I dislike do with their rights is the price of still having those rights when we need them most. After all those decades of trial and error, in the end, I think SCOTUS finally got it just about perfect.

So the next time you feel like hauling out the "fire... crowded theater" thing, consider instead just saying "The goddamn first amendment fully and absolutely protects this offensive, vile, bullshit speech - and I hate that these assholes said this shit because it's wrong - and here's why..." This would have the benefit of very likely being correct regarding the first amendment and I'd totally respect your feelings and even probably agree with you.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-28 18:35:07+00:00
2021 would have been a non-event if people in Texas weren't propagandized about some nonsensical "Independence" bullshit.

A few more interconnects with the rest of the country and it wouldn't have even made the news.

this is after decades of Texans bragging about their independent power supply. Many Texans still believe outright lies about the blackout, like it being "caused" by green energy sources, which was false.

It was caused by free market participants not spending capital to harden their network. Solar panels and Wind Turbines work great in the cold climate of Canada.

The storm that caused such a problem is a once every ten years storm. The grid companies all should have foreseen this with even minimal investment in planning. They didn't, because that's less profitable, and the "regulator" in Texas has no ability to punish them for pinching pennies on reliability and resilience.

Free Market at work baby!
by praptak | 2025-04-28 18:35:39+00:00
A million monkeys with a million typewrites will statistically have one lucky monkey who creates an extremely successful product which also looks very dumb and very unconvincing ("Srsly? You want to make money from random people hosting strangers in their own rooms?" Bang, AirBnB)

The problem is selection bias. A startup is 3 monkeys tops, so the chances of that are appropriately low and if the product looks dumb and unconvincing, it probably is ("...but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.")
Show HN: Zotero-MCP – Connect Your Research Library with Your AI Assistant
by Steven_Y | 2025-04-28 18:36:00+00:00
Hi all! I forgot to share my project here, but since it just got over 1.2k calls on smithery, I figured that people here may be interested in giving it a try! Essentially it allows you to easily connect your zotero library to any LLMs through a MCP client, enabling the LLMs to read the papers that you collected, your notes, and the annotations - and it works both on your local and cloud library. Check this out! I would love to hear your feedback. :)
by const_cast | 2025-04-28 18:36:09+00:00
When it comes to motor vehicles we're CONSTANTLY paying for other people's mistakes. The unfortunate reality is that driving is the number 1 cause of death for most demographics.

We cannot treat it like we treat other things, simply due to the extreme risk. That means we have to prevent accidents any way we can and put safety nets where we can.

Yes, it sucks that now you're going to have to pay marginally more for your vehicle. If it's any consolation, you're already paying 10x more than you should for the variety of safety structures in place, research, testing, regulations, policing, etc. The fruits of this are real, though. Please look into vehicle fatality statistics.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-28 18:36:14+00:00
My impression was that if you had a problem with Python and then added Docker now you have two problems. I worked at one place where the data sci's had an amazing ability to find defective Pythons.

Python is going in the right directions in terms of all the deployability and big issues but it should have been where it is now 7 years ago. Specifically, I sketched out a system that worked like uv but was written in pure Python, I didn't start on it for two reasons: (a) the bootstrapping problem that I couldn't ever stop devs from trashing the Python that it runs in, and (b) from lots of trying it didn't seem possible to convince most Pythoners that pip was broken or that it mattered... uv solved (a) by removing Python from the bootstrap and (b) by being crazy fast.
by huhkerrf | 2025-04-28 18:36:54+00:00
I've got the misfortune of being connected to former sales colleagues on LinkedIn, so I see the kind of posts they are liking.

And I can't tell you how many of them are complaining when people complain about cold calling and mass sales emails. I've got a fairly even take on sales, but the absolute entitlement they feel about your time...

Outbound can't die soon enough.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-04-28 18:37:11+00:00
Google is notoriously unreliable these days. I can tell you concretely that by default my iPhone does that. 5 clicks, passcode forced.

Note that there are 5 side buttons now (if you include the 2 volume button) on current iPhones. So “side button” doesn’t mean much. The top right side button is the default lock button on all iPhones and AFAIK always has been. That’s what you use to trigger it.
by joenot443 | 2025-04-28 18:37:43+00:00
Sometimes I wonder if we as internet people are special in that it seems we can pretty immediately spot vanilla-LLM generated text. I'm sure others have noticed the same, but maybe 20% of my inbound recruiter pings on LinkedIn are straight from GPT and subsequently are immediately dismissed.

I posted a job on UpWork last month and probably 60% of the replies were LLM, some of them seemingly automated as they came in moments after I posted. Obviously these were immediately rejected.

Is this something we'll have to get used to?

I got my first internship in 2015 by cold-emailing the CEO of a Waterloo startup that I thought was really cool. At the time, reaching out directly over email with a thoughtful and earnest introduction was a good way to set yourself apart. I'm not sure that's the case anymore.
by axwaters | 2025-04-28 18:37:48+00:00
I know its been done before but im building/tinkering on a window manager for windows called "Doors". https://github.com/A-Waters/doors

Ive got a MVP right now, but i'm reworking the region build system and potentially reworking the underlying designing to follow a more tree based approach for managing the windows

I've just tried other windows managers on windows and felt that have either been slow or buggy and wanted something that looks nice. My inspiration is based on Hyperland, as im currently dual booting and when I work on windows, all i want is a nice window manager.

still very early in development but im excited for its potential.

This also goes in line with my current studying of the windows OS, so its a bit of learning and then working. :)
by FredPret | 2025-04-28 18:37:55+00:00
There will always be a number of loons willing to support any fringe idea you might mention.

The key is: will the bulk of the people, who are in the center, go for it?

And the answer is: if they perceive the idea as being cynical, or purposely deceptive, then no. Even if politicians temporarily get away with lies, every lie does long-term damage to a movement.

The truth will out.
by toss1 | 2025-04-28 18:39:17+00:00
That is also making a lot of assumptions that all cars will soon be mandatory internet-connected.

I expect there will be a LOT of push-back on that one, and there are still also many areas without cell coverage. Would you expect all cars would stop running without cell coverage?

Here's at least one entirely new car, with Bezos' backing, that AFAICT will have zero internet connection. [0] Considering the cost trajectory of cars, and the general distaste for surveillance, a low-cost car without those add-ons may be very popular.

And, AGAIN, the point was entirely about the GP post's massive exaggerations, not about a general implementation which I strongly oppose. You and GP evidently think it is OK to exaggerate and speak like every bad thing related to the topic has already happened; I think at least some adherence to the facts makes sense. It seems we'll have to agree to disagree. Particularly since we do seem to agree on the broader topic that general implementation of speed limiters is awful and to be avoided

[0] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a64564869/2027-slate-truck...
by kypro | 2025-04-28 18:39:33+00:00
Yep, this is definitely the last generation of developers.

People here massively underestimate the technological curve we're on and how quickly tech jobs are, and will continue to be replaced in the coming years.

I think I commented a couple of years back how it won't be long before you can give AI a github issue and it will raise a PR for it automatically within minutes. Those types of tools are now available and pretty damn good. With the latest models they're now easily as good or better than developers with < 5 years experience. And for smaller more simple projects you probably don't need to hire devs anymore.

For now the latest tools still struggle a bit to compete with expert developers – e.g. developers with 10+ years experience. But in many ways they're already better at a large chunk of their job because an expert developer will still spend a good amount of their time on minor refactoring which AI can do much faster. But for now AI + an expert is still the optimal productivity mix for performance-optimised companies.

I suspect in a 2-3 years 95+% of expert development work will be doable with AI agents. Obviously there will be niches where you need will need human picking up the last bits, but the percentage for which human experts are required will exponentially decrease with every passing year.

I guess the good news is like how outsourcing massively reduced the cost of physical goods, AI will massively reduce the cost of digital goods. There will of course be those who complain that "foreigners are taking our jobs!" or "robots are taking our jobs!" but there will probably still be service jobs like waiting tables or serving coffee that AI can't replace.
by czhu12 | 2025-04-28 18:39:38+00:00
Been building HelloCSV - an open source FlatFile alternative. I've been building this for work and the folks at work were cool enough to let me just build it in open source.

https://hellocsv.github.io/HelloCSV/

It basically runs 100% on your / your users browser, and I'm adding localstorage support so the user can refresh their page without losing their progress.

Love flatfile but it sends your data to remote servers, and we're a healthcare company, so we need to have full control over our data storage

Hoping someone on here will find this useful!
by const_cast | 2025-04-28 18:39:39+00:00
I think you're just out of touch with reality. Maybe the fact you're a parent has tainted your view - some type of bias against admitting things might suck.

When I was a kid, the amount of kids outside was easily orders of magnitude more. Things I did as a kid are pretty much unthinkable now. I mean, as young as 7 I was riding my bike miles away.

It's not that things are worse now, it's that enough kids died that newer parents are much more cautious.
by martinald | 2025-04-28 18:40:06+00:00
Youre missing my point. I know that; I mean if you are restarting the grid and say you have a segment you think has 5MW of load that will come online, but you connect it and a minute or two later suddenly 2MW of grid tied solar detects the grid and starts exporting and you now have 3MW of load it is going to make it much more tricky to balance the restart. I'm not sure how much of a problem this is in reality but it seems to me restarting a grid is made much more tricky when you have millions of generation assets with no control over.
by genewitch | 2025-04-28 18:40:33+00:00
I'm sure the constituent atoms of the monkey survived.

I saw a video the other day of some human running and jumping on a transformer after hopping a fence, dancing on the transformer in a distribution site.

It ended as you'd expect, a bright light, a lot of curse words from the camera operator who was probably blinded temporarily.

Electricity does not care.
by Juliate | 2025-04-28 18:40:47+00:00
The pivot of the article is this, at the end: "There are no other hypergrowth markets left in tech."

That's the key.

Tech is, at the moment, the only growth engine for capitalism at this time, that sustains the whole world economy (before, it used to be "just" IT [2015], credit [2008], oil [1973], coal, which all have demonstrated their limits to sustain a continuous growth).

AI is the only growth engine left within tech at this moment, supported by GPU/TPU/parallelization hardware.

Given what's at stake, if/when the AI bubble bursts, if there's no alternative growth engine to jump to, the dominos effect will not be pretty.

EDIT: clarified.
by vel0city | 2025-04-28 18:41:08+00:00
Doing some math on that $10k for an example of lost opportunity costs, today you can get a 10yr CD at 5.5% APY. Over a decade that's a hair over $17k, practically guaranteed return. So, to properly break even you're going to need to not just save $10k worth of electricity, you'll need to save something more like $17k. You'll need to arbitrage at least $141.67/mo on average for that entire 10-year period to break even compared to what you could have had just investing that into pretty safe savings.

Personally, I'd rather toss that $10k into my kids' education funds and sign up for a fixed rate electricity plan. Hopefully that'll be better ROI.

Grid-scale batteries have pretty different economics than some batteries in my garage. Their real-estate cost is probably significantly lower than the cost for halfway decent residential. They're buying a much larger order of batteries, so their per-kWh cost is probably a good bit lower. Also, their installation cost per-kWh is also a good bit cheaper. They're probably completely fine buying/selling purely on open spot markets, meanwhile in the end I'm going to need to run my pool pump and I'm going to want to do dishes and laundry and charge my car and all the other things on some reasonable schedule so I'd like some amount of price protection on whatever time-of-use plan I get (a day of $9/kWh electricity prices will surely wipe out whatever gains you might have made). They're probably able to get cheaper loans than me, so it's easier for them to arrange the big capital investment instead of high interest loans or having to invest existing capital.

I'm not arguing the economics of batteries don't make sense in today's power markets. Far from it, I've been toying with getting into it in North Texas. But buying a few kWh of batteries and putting them in my garage probably isn't going to break even and almost certainly isn't going to make me money.
by Jensson | 2025-04-28 18:41:13+00:00
> Collectively, HN has long been extremely comfortable with authoritarianism and far right ideologies, as long as those opinions are expressed in a framing that conveys intellectualism and "civility".

HN also does the same for far left authoritarian ideologies, those are also here and upvoted. I don't see how this pushes out anyone.
by LeonM | 2025-04-28 18:41:38+00:00
That's really cool! Looks like you found the same resources as I did on the AVC-LAN inner workings.

It's also fun to see how each Toyota product uses the same modules and buttons, just different layouts and front panel designs. Your solution (sans the custom display that will only fit your model) should work on just about every Toyota and Lexus model from the AVC-LAN era (2000~2010)

Not sure if you'd be willing to share your code or diagrams, but anything would help me tremendously. My contact info is in my bio.
by Saline9515 | 2025-04-28 18:41:50+00:00
> Maurice Barrès wasn't a Nazi, and was a famous novelist of the XIXth century. He was part of the Académie Française, which is the most respected cultural body of the country. In this quote, he isn't against intellectualism, but against intellectuals thinking that they form a second society above the plebs, and who think better than them. Your ad hominem arguments are ignorant here, sorry.

> You seem to lack media litteracy. Pritti Patel did nothing and the UK witnessed its largest immigration flow during the last conservative rule. Saying things is worthless if not followed by actions.

> I talked about Robinson because you brought it up, and now it's my fault? lmao

> I agree that free speech is decreasing in America. However, it's still much better in the US than in UK.

> "I dont, the law was brought up by conservatives who had their feelings hurt." -> You just said that you wanted to jail neo-nazis in the previous post.

> "authoritarian right wingers" - very good example of the overton window theory. UK conservatives are centrists at best.

> Barrès is not my "friend", I'm citing him for the historical perspective on what an "intellectual" is, in the concept of "anti-intellectuallism". Sorry for you if you have a hard time thinking with abstract objects that don't involve qualifiying anyone you don't agree with of being a "nazi".

As a side note, quite revealing that of this flurry of comments, lacks the one regarding the working-class whites being the category that benefits the less from the school system. Maybe UK could have invested more in schools, and less in gender-affirming transitions?
by th0ma5 | 2025-04-28 18:41:54+00:00
It's a good question because I also hastily wrote that. You'll come to defer to the model on average when it comes to otherwise coin flip judgements you have make when you yourself are unsure. The model may not have any more information but you don't have any indication that it wouldn't and even suspect that it secretly does and this bias makes you trust the model and accept things that are ultimately bad in possibly ways that you'll not discover for a very long time because it is deep within a specific context.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-04-28 18:42:16+00:00
In the Canadian system doctors are still on the whole private practices. They just bill the government (the "single payer") instead of an insurance company. And they bill based on standardized payment formula decided by the government.

Basically, government funded and regulated doesn't mean government run.

There is no standardized EHR system here, despite provincial governments (which are who runs the systems) wasting millions over the last two decades trying to make that happen.
Show HN: Heart Rate Zones Plus – The first iOS app I developed
by tobias5 | 2025-04-28 18:42:18+00:00
I built this iOS app because I wanted to get an overview of my time in zones per week without checking zones after every workout manually - Now I'm looking for feedback.

Description: Track time in heart rate zones. Track per day, week, month, 7 days and 30 days time period and how much time you spend in each zone. Set goals & visualize progress. Get details about heart rates zones of your workouts.

Features: Custom time periods, Workout to zone attribution to get a feeling which sport attributed most to each zone, Multiple zone calculation methods, Set personal time goals for any zone, Workout breakdown

Pricing: Free

Privacy: Nothing is tracked or send somewhere. Data is just on your device.

Any feedback and features request is appreciated.

Download: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/heart-rate-zones-plus/id674474...

Video of the app in action: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-qtHxEdMEv0
by const_cast | 2025-04-28 18:42:33+00:00
Texas checking in here - yes, it's Texas, and no, it's not hyperbole.

Don't know what rinky dink town you're from, but here most roads are 6-8 lanes across. Yes, that includes in our small cities. They're essentially highways but with signal lights. Go to Arlington, Grand Prairie, Richardson, Fort Worth, Roanoke, Southlake, you name it, and it's just roads after roads like this. Trying to cross them is extremely dangerous.

Stroads is a correct description.