MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yndoendo | 2025-04-11 14:27:41+00:00
The original designer for my most active product I work on choose EntityFramework. Used it for about 1.5 years before looking at the SQL statements it produced. It was a excessive UNION mess. Things that should be simple where 10x more complex.

Slowly replaced it with Dapper and handwritten SQL, a simple migration versioning system, and database seeding with validation. Once that was done, startup time was cut by more than 10 seconds on a standard SSD and about 30 on CFast. Even finally replacing the database connection with SQLite standard libraries shaved off 2 seconds.

EntityFramework maybe useful but it lacks performance when time to start using the software is important.
by CloudNetPro | 2025-04-11 14:28:14+00:00
It depends.

Would you like to protect yourself against the dollar tanking down? or would you like to take advantage of a potential dollar recovery?

Either way, in salary negotiations: Ask as much as you can get away with.

If you just want stability then negotiate your salary in your local currency (but if it gets too expensive you may be let go anyway)

Anyway, more than anything take into account all the taxes you'll have to pay locally.
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-11 14:28:20+00:00
I see the problem not as VC money, but the ridiculous idea of the optimised one-size mass-marketable product. The myth of "what people want" (which is art entirely pulled out of the air of marketing, public opinion, focus groups in the 1980s) goes against the impetus that consumer digital technology originally emerged from... namely that the microprocessor revolution replaced giant fixed-function pieces of iron with agile, modular, user-definable, technology. We've gone full circle on that. We're back to a world where 5 giant monopolies make stuff offering two choices; take it or leave it. Life happens at the margins, and the only thing in the middle of the road, is roadkill.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-04-11 14:28:23+00:00
> Then VC funding comes in, and the product has to appeal to a broader audience. Things get smoothed out and the metrics rule decisions.

> Eventually, the original enthusiasts feel left out. The product’s no longer for them.

I am immediately reminded of when Slack got rid of markdown-style inline formatting, in favor of a WYSIWYG interface, and the internet (or at least, the corner I live in) collectively (and, imo, correctly) lost its shit at them.
by ameister14 | 2025-04-11 14:28:27+00:00
>I'm aware that Khalil's case involves the McCarthyesque Immigration and Nationality Act because he's a lawful permanent resident where non-citizens are being processed under things like the Alien Enemies Act. Let's not get lost in the weeds here

That's not why. Both are non-citizens. The reason the different laws are being applied matters, because they are totally different legal fights, taking place for different social and political reasons.

>All persons on American soil are entitled to constitutional protections [1]

Some, but not to the same extent as citizens where speech is concerned. For example, foreign nationals are not allowed to spend money to directly support a candidate for elected office, though they may spend to influence an issue. Cf Bluman v. FEC with Citizens United.

It's a matter of degrees, and certainly is impacted by immigrant status and ties to the United States. From a free speech issue and where concerning the speech I have heard from him, I think it's clear that Khalil should not be subject to any kind of government restriction or punishment. That said, it seems likely that he may be deported for other reasons.

I don't disagree with you re due process at all.
by tzs | 2025-04-11 14:28:36+00:00
I assume that jump starting an EV takes a lot less current than jump starting an ICE due to no need to crank an engine. I'd guess it just needs enough to power the control electronics and close the solenoids to the traction battery?

That raises an interesting question: is the power requirement low enough that you could make a hand cranked EV jump starter?
by johnnyjeans | 2025-04-11 14:29:10+00:00
As others have said, a pure program is a useless program. The only place stuff like that has in this world is as a proof assistant.

What I will add is look up how the GHC runtime works, and the STGM. You may find it extremely interesting. I didn't "get" functional programming until I found out about how exotic efficient execution of functional programs ends up being.
by axismotorcorp | 2025-04-11 14:29:16+00:00
Hydrogen engines that have been modified to use hydrogen, based on 149-year-old technology simply aren’t viable today, hence the lack of implementation, globally.

VC's have been hesitant to invest in hydrogen for this reason…Axis Power has designed (and is now building), a new clean sheet design, hydrogen engine, that’s different in every way - for the commercialization of hydrogen combustion to power everything that fossil fuel internal combustion engines, did.

Zero emission, clean energy, Made in USA.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-11 14:30:09+00:00
Though these are minor complaints, there is a couple things I'd like to change about a Lisp language.

One is its the implicit function calls. For example, you'll usually see calls like this: `(+ 1 2)` which translates to 1 + 2, but I would find it more clear if it was `(+(1,2))` where you have a certain explicitness to it.

It doesn't stop me from using Lisp languages (Racket is fun, and I been investigating Clojure) but it took way too long for the implicit function stuff to grok in my brain.

My other complain is how the character `'` can have overloaded meaning, though I'm not entirely sure if this is implementation dependent or not
by snapplebobapple | 2025-04-11 14:31:32+00:00
Is this true though? Salaries are generally fully deductible from income at time of payment. This article ia about amortizing it, which delays deductibility. Would be more magic loss of money, no?

personally, i think amortization is generally stupid and all expenses should come off income at time of accrual with the exception of a matching amount to net debt change over the year, but i am a dreamer.
by TheGrognardling | 2025-04-11 14:31:36+00:00
It's encouraging to me that as AI becomes more lifelike, people are becoming more and more resistant to humanlike AI 'avatars' and the like - echoing Kevin Kelly's sentiments that widespread societal adoption of new technologies is usually slow, or even nonexistent in some cases. It seems like we're heading towards a crypto bubble scenario in many cases - and we'll find where AI is genuinely useful and where it's just bullshit.
by pragma_x | 2025-04-11 14:31:41+00:00
I'm starting to see a pattern here. This describes a technology that rapidly deploys "VM" instances in the cloud which support things like Lambda and single-process containers. At what point do we scale this all back to a more rudimentary OS that provides security and process management across multiple physical machines? Or is there already a Linux distro that does this?

I ask because watching cloud providers like AWS slowly reinvent mainframes just seems like the painful way around.
by sepositus | 2025-04-11 14:31:42+00:00
A surprising downside to Nix containers is that a majority of packages are not optimized for containers. For example, trying adding a dependency to `git` and see how big the container grows. Granted, the good packages (like git) allow customization, but it requires really digging into the code. Some packages just straight up ship with a ton of bloat and the only thing you can do is basically fork and maintain it yourself.
by powvans | 2025-04-11 14:32:29+00:00
Spot on. There's something instinctual about this. My kids (13,10,8) all love making art. When I show them AI tools that they could use to generate art or riff on existing art, they are actively opposed. They tell me that AI art is not real art, that AI tools for doing this sort of thing are gross, and they want nothing to do with it.

As a technologist I think "omg this is so cool" and it has been genuinely surprising to see how they actively rebuff it.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-11 14:32:29+00:00
>On Feb. 16, customs officials detained her at Logan International Airport in Boston for failing to declare samples of frog embryos she had carried from France at the request of her boss at Harvard.

Big fuck up on her boss here. You don't send your immigrant workers on a visa (especially from countries currently involved in a war) to be mules for you, since their visas can always be cancelled for any reason, so why are you putting them in situations where they can give authorities a reason?

How do they not know this? What were they thinking? Either go yourself or send someone else who's a citizen. The lack of thought in this just boggles my mind.

Also, where's the self preservation on her part, especially given her via situation and the situation in her country? When I as an immigrant traveled for work with hardware prototypes , I always made sure my boss had them in his luggage since he's a citizen with a more powerful passport and I don't want to be flagged by border controls on what's a foreigner doing with strange hardware in his luggage.

You don't just accept to be a mule for your employer when you're an immigrant on a visa since then you're just playing Russian roulette(pun not intended). If I were a Russian citizen on a visa abroad right now, I'd do everything in my power to lay low, fly under the radar and avoid all unnecessary travel, or travel with only pajamas and a toothbrush, not with animal embryos. I guess biology scientists are so used to travelling with weird shit all the time, they just forget to declare it.

Edit: @downvoters, do you have any arguments to add?
by nelblu | 2025-04-11 14:33:00+00:00
> It has 4 GB of memory, and reviewers say that its specs are pretty outdated.

In my imaginary world, I wish someone stood up to this type of insanity. This would be a good time to force Apple / Google to revive old devices and allow the supply chains to adjust manufacturing things outside of China while the rest of the world pauses and lives with some outdated hardware technology. I know this is probably not feasible because Apple and Google probably survive on selling of new phones, but hey I can at least dream!
by _kush | 2025-04-11 14:34:12+00:00
Porsche is easy to replace only if you bought it as just another fast car. If you bought it for the design, the legacy, or what the brand means to you, it’s not so easy.

Netflix has their content as their moat. Even if someone today builds a better version of what Netflix used to be, it wouldn't matter. They won’t have the rights and licenses to the shows and movies. That’s what keeps people from switching.

Porsche has to keep earning you as a customer with every new model. Netflix just needs to keep you watching.
by midnightblue | 2025-04-11 14:34:29+00:00
> On the other hand these tools do allow individuals to connect and share.

Ok, Mark. That's enough.

Any coder can build a tool that allows individuals to connect and share. It's not a unique feature of Meta tools.

The unique property of Meta is that they have a hegemony. Which is ok.

They went further than that, though, and built the infrastructure for influencing the decisions of individuals. That's no longer ok.
by whatnow37373 | 2025-04-11 14:34:52+00:00
A general "web app"'s germane parts are:

- The part that receives the connection

- The part that sends back a response

- Interacting with other unspecified systems through IPC, RPC or whatever (databases mainly)

The shit in between, calculating a derivative or setting up a fancy data structure of some kind or something, is interesting but how much of that do we actually do as programmers? I'm not being obtuse - intentionally anyway - I'm actually curious what interesting things functional programmers do because I'm not seeing much of it.

Edit: my point is, you say "Anything else is logic." to which I respond "What's left?"
by filoeleven | 2025-04-11 14:34:56+00:00
> it feels like the lack of humanity is not because of technology, but because the world of the show is populated by monsters.

But...that's always been the case. Technology is a tool, and a tool is neither good nor evil; it's how you choose to use it. That gets repeated here all the time. Tech grants powers to people that we didn't have before, so people with a propensity to perpetrate evil can do it at efficiently at scale. The same goes for people who want to do good but aren't aware of the consequences of their actions. We can learn a lot more from the failure cases than the happy path, and it makes for more entertaining stories.
Show HN: Nimagna, AI-powered video-making companion
by xvallspl | 2025-04-11 14:34:59+00:00
We have been working on this presentation software for a while and are excited for the features to come.

We transport you into a virtual environment for you and your story to take the center stage. Bring your presentations, content cameras, screenshares, and images into the storyboard, and we will bring your presence and special touch to your audience. Just hook the nimagna camera up into your favourite videoconferencing software for your next presentation and make an impact.
by horsawlarway | 2025-04-11 14:35:00+00:00
I also produce almost exclusively IP, and I agree with your take.

Modern copyright is abusive and evil - we are already at the spot where large corporations entirely control the content, and pretending that copyright is somehow helping indie publishers is a pure fantasy.

Copyright can exist in a way that I would not find so egregious (and historically - it was much closer to that form when originally proposed). But the modern IP rules are explicitly designed so that large corporations reap all the profit while they pay artists as little as possible.

If AI cracks that apart.... eh - I don't see it as much of a loss.

At least for now - plenty of AI models are open weight and publicly available for general use. As long as that trend continues, I don't see the problem.
by epistasis | 2025-04-11 14:35:24+00:00
Honestly it's very weird to have data/AI be outside of the scientific context! They both used to be a subset of scientific Python.

The code will be updated over five years, but there's no need to be on continual version churn on the underlying language. And frankly I'm surprised that it's tolerated so widely in the community. Trying to run a Node project from 5 years ago is often an exercise in futility, and it will be a big shame when/if that happens to Python.
by slightwinder | 2025-04-11 14:35:38+00:00
> Is this what idiomatic Python has become?

What do you mean? Python has always been that way. "Explicit is better than implicit. [..] Readability counts." from the Zen of python.

> By contrast, here's the equivalent Ruby:

Which is awful to read. And of course you could write it similar short in python. But it is not the purpose of a documentation to write short, cryptic code.
by dspillett | 2025-04-11 14:35:39+00:00
> I'm curious when it crossed the line into "fraud" here.

Fraud is often defined as gaining something (or depriving someone else from something, or both) via false pretences. Here the something is money (this is most commonly the case) and the gaining/depriving is gaining money and depriving investors of it. It is more complicated than that, with many things that fit this simple description not legally being considered fraud (though perhaps being considered another crime), and can vary a fair bit between legal jurisdictions.

A cynical thought is that the key line being crossed here is that the victims are well-off investors, if you or I were conned similarly the law might give less of a stuff because we can't afford the legal team that these investors have. This is why cases like this one are successful, but companies feel safe conning their customers (i.e. selling an “unlimited” service that has, or developers five minutes after signing up, significant limits). Most investors wouldn't agree to the forced arbitration clauses and other crap that we routinely agree to by not reading and subsequently not accepting the Ts & Cs, etc, and anyway can afford large, capable, legal resources where our only hope would be a class-action from which only the lawyers really benefit.

Another cynical thought is that the line crosses was the act of not being successful. I'm sure the investors wouldn't have cared about the fraud if the returns had been very good.
by benterix | 2025-04-11 14:36:13+00:00
> And to what end, aren't many of these people already extremely wealthy?

I don't know, I really don't know. To this day I can't imagine the day I become a president of a big country I tell my citizens "BUY MY COINS AND THOSE OF MY WIFE!". It's difficult to imagine on so many levels. But yet this guy is doing it. So no conspiracy theory is too weird to at this point.
by karaterobot | 2025-04-11 14:36:18+00:00
> Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok

You have given every product team a set of parameters and asked them to optimize the product around those parameters. Namely, how much time and attention the user spends staring at your app. Is anyone surprised that convergence has taken place, when everyone is after the same thing, with the same tools, in the same environment?

The only question is: who is "you" in this scenario? Instinctively, it's the leadership team. But in one of my least popular takes, I tend to think the responsibility is ultimately "you", the user who refuses to stop scrolling. Tech leadership doesn't have vision or a moral compass, they take their direction from the metrics which ultimately measure your choices.
by n4r9 | 2025-04-11 14:37:00+00:00
Not sure if it will help me saying this, but that's a disappointingly dismissive and avoidant response well below HN standards. I'm very willing to engage with any counter-arguments in good faith. I don't use Twitter (or Mastodon, or BlueSky, or TikTok, or Facebook, or Threads etc...), but I do enjoy discussing sci fi of different periods on Goodreads groups.
by lxgr | 2025-04-11 14:37:18+00:00
That's something I also wish existed: A credit card insurance comparison tool.

Essentially all "travel cards" offer some kind of trip cancellation or interruption insurance, but covered events vary wildly.

In some, thinks like illness of anybody on the trip is enough (not just the cardholder or immediate family members); in others, the cardholder basically needs to die in a very specific way to be eligible for any type of compensation.

Proper travel insurance is worth way more than half a percent more in points on domestic rental cars in shades of red to yellow (but not orange!) and grocery stores in states starting with "O" to me.
by burkaman | 2025-04-11 14:37:32+00:00
> Such an infraction is normally considered minor, punishable with a fine of up to $500.

I'm also wondering how you are supposed to declare something like this. They don't pass out those customs forms on flights from Europe anymore, you just go through immigration and the officer asks whatever questions they feel like. In my case the only question was "did you buy anything".
by dimal | 2025-04-11 14:37:38+00:00
Ok, maybe a more accurate statement would be that the ratio of goofy shit to angst-generating bullshit was much higher in 2008. Maybe it was 70/30 in favor of goofy shit and now it's 1/99 in favor of bullshit. We had Facebook and Twitter back then, but neither had been weaponized against us yet. Both had a very different flavor than they have today.
by sync13298 | 2025-04-11 14:37:45+00:00
> Every useful program ever written takes inputs and produces outputs. The interesting part is what you actually do in the middle to transforms inputs -> outputs. And that can be entirely functional.

My work needs pseudorandom numbers throughout the big middle, for example, drawing samples from probability distributions and running randomized algorithms. That's pretty messy in a FP setting, particularly when the PRNGs get generated within deeply nested libraries.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-11 14:38:01+00:00
What you are describing is explained beautifully in "The Tyranny of the Marginal User" essay that got a lot of commentary on HN previously, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507.

My favorite quote ("Marl" is the hypothetical name for the marginal user):

> Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero. As far as you can tell he only has one working thumb, and the only thing that thumb can do is flick upwards in a repetitive, zombielike scrolling motion.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-04-11 14:38:14+00:00
How about some A.I. news that's not neural networks and is also useful to businesses? Or just something different?

Planning software is a classic use of A.I. to solve problems. They come up with improvements to both the tools and benchmarks every year. This article summarizes recent improvements.

Far as useful for business, I'd like to see a survey of those, especially open source. The last one I read about was Optaplanner:

https://www.optaplanner.org/
by muzani | 2025-04-11 14:38:22+00:00
They didn't shut down Parse though. You just had to self-host it. But somehow when Big Tech drops support for anything, people just migrate out of it for no reason and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like Flutter careers are completely dead in the water now. One of my businesses has been running on Parse Server for half a decade and there's still updates on Parse. And despite being "dead", I still find Parse easier to code with than Firebase, though Supabase is now the favored option.
by palmotea | 2025-04-11 14:38:34+00:00
> Another factor is how these logos are created. Important corporate decisions involve many stakeholders. The result is often the safest, most inoffensive option, the average of everyone's opinions. In design meetings at AI companies, conversations probably sound like:

> ...

> No single person suggests making a logo that resembles an anus, but when everyone's feedback gets incorporated, that's what often emerges. Risk aversion in corporate environments naturally pushes designs toward familiar, "safe" territory, which apparently means anatomical openings.

There's hope! If you're a stakeholder in a logo design meeting, be sure point out the circular proposals look like anuses.

Also I hate all those "bold, sans-seif" logos. What they hell are they thinking? Those companies should just all change their name to "Company," too.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-04-11 14:39:14+00:00
Me too.

There is another side to this, which is maybe we don’t need to know a lot of things.

It was true with search engines already, but maybe truer with LLMs. That thing you’re querying probably doesn’t actually matter. It’s neurotic digging and searching for an object you will never use or benefit from. The urge to seek is strong but you won’t find the thing you’re searching for this way.

You might learn more by just going for a walk.
Ask HN: Is Online Tribalism an American Anathema?
by ataridreams | 2025-04-11 14:39:23+00:00
I get that tech power has saved America and can save the world. But what has set America apart if not that fact that it is a place where the free exchange of of ideas between multiple cultures can take place, as one big, bold, and beautiful tribe? Has that not been a key source of our power? I get that it feels good to be part of a tribe that is closely aligned with ones experience and instincts. But has it gone to far? By enabling anonymous tribalism, is tech not now ripping America apart and destroying a key component of American competitiveness? I've been kicked out of a lot of online communities for asking tough questions. Is the tech community any different because everyone is smart? Or is it another self-absorbed tribe that could care less what any other tribe thinks? A place where its members can cancel anyone who thinks different with the click of a mouse? To be clear I'm from SV and have deep respect, gratitude, and admiration for what it has accomplished. But I am also a patriot and a very concerned citizen and feel compelled to speak. Thanks!