MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-15 07:28:34+00:00
>I just find it very easy to distinguish between a case where someone followed reasonable rules and got an outcome they didn't like, versus a case where someone found absurd rules - clearly not intended by anyone - and exploited them for an undeserved gain

I think you overestimate how easy it is to distinguish between these two. A reasonable common example is people like Bernard Marantelli exploiting lotteries. The lottery does not intend for people to play as Marantelli does. You can (and people do) argue that he's stealing money, but should he go to jail for playing the lottery in a way "not intended by anyone"? I don't think so.

It's the same with card counters at a casino. The casino can throw card counters out because they can decide who plays at their establishment, but it would be unreasonable to jail card counters for playing blackjack in a way casinos don't intend.

>If you see a case where someone exploits a badly-coded computer program to take a hundred million dollars from someone

This phrasing removes relevant context to the point where it no longer represents what actually happened.

>refuses to return any of it (...)

I did not comment on any of this at all.

>I don't see how to actually reason with you

This is dismissive and denies my ability to be convinced by reasonable arguments. It is insulting, even if it's not intended that way.
by nodesocket | 2025-04-15 07:28:39+00:00
I use python for serving my local static site development with this custom little bash wrapper script I wrote:

#!/usr/bin/env bash set -e; [[ $TRACE ]] && set -x port=8080 dir="." if [[ "$1" == "-h" || "$1" == "--help" ]]; then echo "usage: http-server [PORT] [DIRECTORY]" echo " PORT Port to listen on (default: 8080)" echo " DIRECTORY Directory to serve (default: .)" exit 0 fi if [ -n "$1" ]; then port=$1 fi if [[ -n "$2" ]]; then dir=$2 fi python3 -m http.server --directory "$dir" --protocol HTTP/1.1 "$port"
by stakhanov | 2025-04-15 07:29:24+00:00
What jumps out at me is the paragraph: "Governance and leadership reforms." in the original letter sent by the government to the university.

The other stuff is hard to make sense of, but this part is crystal clear: The authoritarian government is asking the university to restructure itself along more authoritarian lines. ...essentially Trump wants continuity of reporting lines ultimately leading up to him, and going down to the individual faculty member, student, and foreign collaborating partner. That sort of thing could come in handy for all kinds of things in the future, not just the silly demands of the present.
by dureuill | 2025-04-15 07:29:38+00:00
hello, I implemented hybrid search in Meilisearch.

Whether it uses re-ranking or not depends on how you want to stretch the definition. Meilisearch does not use the rank of the documents in each list of results to compute the final list of results.

Rather, Meilisearch attributes a relevancy score to each result and then orders the results in the final list by comparing the relevancy score of the documents in each list of results.

This is usually much better than any method that uses the rank of the documents, because the rank of a document doesn't tell you if the document is relevant, only that it is more relevant than documents that ranked after it in that list of hits. As a result, these methods tend to mix good and bad results. As semantic and full-text search are complementary, one method is best for some queries and the other for different queries, and taking results by only considering their rank in their respective list of results is really bizarre to me.

I gather other search engines might be doing it that way because they cannot produce a comparable relevancy score for both the full-text search results and the semantic search results.

I'm not sure why the website mentions Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) (I'm just a dev, not in charge of this particular blog article), but it doesn't sound right to me. Maybe something got lost in translation. I'll try and have it fixed. EDIT: Reported, this is being fixed.

By the way, this way of comparing scores from multiple lists of results generalizes very well, which is how Meilisearch is able to provide its "federated search" feature, which is quite unique across search engines, I believe.

Federated search allows comparing the results of multiple queries against possibly multiple indexes or embedders.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-04-15 07:30:18+00:00
The 10 average devs can produce hundreds of thousands of lines of buggy, poor performance code that implement thousands of features poorly in the same amount of time the senior developers could implement tens of thousands of lines of great code that implement hundreds of features perfectly.

But what if the three senior devs could produce thousands of lines of great code that implement thousands of features perfectly. I don't think this is the case but I believe this is what the OP means.

the interest is of course because what "the business" wants is thousands of features, perfectly or imperfectly is a secondary consideration.

on edit: changed senior devs hundreds of thousands to thousands because one benefit is that much of the code the average make is not really needed.
by close04 | 2025-04-15 07:30:36+00:00
Every review I left for Amazon products (Amazon EU) got rejected until it was diluted into nothing. The explanation was always vague, listing a dozen possible reasons, none of which fit what I wrote.

On non-Amazon products it's a coin toss for negative reviews. Many are published, some are not. Can't explain why.

Google is not better, negative reviews I leave on Maps are published very selectively. Maybe big-tech found a way to monetize this too. I know sites like Yelp are more or less an extortion business where you pay to get negative reviews wiped.
by piaste | 2025-04-15 07:30:45+00:00
A public facing web server, I doubt it. But for a private one it can make a lot of sense - you are probably only using N services at a time, where N is the number of users.

As for what can be so resource intensive that it's worth to wait for startup time instead of running everything at the same time - a bunch of specialized LLMs is the obvious example. Or maybe you're a hobbyist cramming a hundred services into a tiny computer.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-04-15 07:31:11+00:00
Yeah I guess this is what happens to censored viewpoints. Most people have only heard a caricature of it.

The world is really a lot more interesting if you try to understand everyone’s actual perspective. It also becomes much more coherent. Nobody is evil, they just have different interests and viewpoints.

In what I’ve seen of “race realist” writings online, they tend to be very anti Israel. So to associate the admin with “race realists” for cracking down on anti Israel protests strikes me as lacking an understanding of either the admin or of the “race realists” perspective.
by Freak_NL | 2025-04-15 07:31:21+00:00
It's not fast-fashion they are competing with — they invented ultra-fast-fashion. Their platforms (Shein and Temu) are fully geared towards allowing manufacturers to jump on board the latest hypes and trends and have a saleable product on there within a week or so, to sell for a few weeks until it is no longer trending.

You want a 'My tariffs did that' T-shirt? Temu.

https://www.temu.com/search_result.html?search_key=tariffs%2...

Local store chains can't match that velocity.
by ilyabez | 2025-04-15 07:31:23+00:00
Hi, I'm the author of the blog (though I didn't post it on HN).

1) Our biggest issue right now is unidentified crawlers with user agents resembling regular users. We get hundreds of thousands of requests from those daily and I'm not sure how to block them on Vercel.

I'd love them to be challenged. If a bot doesn't identify itself, we don't want to let it in.

2) While we fixed the Image Optimization part and optimized caching, we're now struggling with ISR Write costs. We deploy often and the ISR cache is reset on each deploy.

We are about to put Cloudflare in front of the site, so that we can set Cache-Control headers and cache SSR pages (rather than using ISR) independently.
by 8-prime | 2025-04-15 07:31:29+00:00
I like and understand the paradigm of using web technologies to build GUI apps. I have yet to find any desktop framework that even comes close to the DX of using web tech.

I recently explored both Tauri [1] and Wails [2]. Especially Wails is lots of fun. The simplicity of go paired with the fast iteration I get from using React just feels awesome. And the final application is ~10 MB in size!

[1] https://v2.tauri.app/ [2] https://wails.io/
by boramalper | 2025-04-15 07:31:56+00:00
Tweet by Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of Sci-Hub:

> There is a new platform, Sci-Net (http://sci-net.xyz) where researchers can help each other by providing paywalled papers. The platform builds upon Sci-Hub meme token $scihub to reward active members.

https://x.com/ringo_ring/status/1911992243734393079
by Symbiote | 2025-04-15 07:32:33+00:00
That's certainly how it worked out in Europe, where the processing fee was much less (€5-10 usually).

Since 2021 foreign merchants can send the goods tax paid, they collect the VAT and send it to to EU country, so there's no fees at customs. It works perfectly fine, but many people don't realize it or don't trust this.
by spiderfarmer | 2025-04-15 07:32:41+00:00
A large part of the population struggles to even entertain a hypothetical scenario. I’m active in several agricultural forums, and it’s clear that many participants lack fundamental knowledge across the board. They’re generally incapable of engaging in meaningful discussion. Almost every comment they post seems aimed at shutting down the conversation rather than continuing it. There is no curiosity. The world is already way too complex.
by ericd | 2025-04-15 07:33:15+00:00
Do they? I think exactly the opposite is true - if you ask any sufficiently wealthy person, they’d need a team of people working for a bit to arrive at a very hazy net worth number. Private stock is extremely illiquid and doesn’t usually have a good mark to market, ditto most artwork. My impression is that even most public stock doesn’t generally have the depth of liquidity to absorb a founder selling any significant fraction in a short timeframe without cratering in value.
by InDubioProRubio | 2025-04-15 07:33:16+00:00
But this is also, what makes tolkiens lore so deep. The iceberg tips of the past, tipping out of the ground as the ruins of angmar, the sunken lands in the west, numenor - run down kings of fallen empires walking the wild as striders. The great-great-servants barely holding once great kingdoms together, fallen citys that are the background of battles.
by oliwarner | 2025-04-15 07:33:18+00:00
Do you buy anything based on reviews there? They're obviously silly and exchanged for discounts and "coins" so I just ignore them in a way I don't elsewhere.

I quite like AE because you can avoid the app and returns on DOAs often just involve a refund without returning anything. There are silly annoyances, and sometimes buying locally is inexplicably cheaper, but for little electronics, they're hard to beat.
Show HN: MatrixSwarm – Agent OS using only the filesystem
by matrixswarm | 2025-04-15 07:33:42+00:00
MatrixSwarm is a fully file-driven agent orchestration system.

It launches autonomous agents using nothing but the filesystem — no containers, no daemons, no sockets.

Agents communicate by writing folders. Control flows using a tree structure. Everything is coordinated using simple file drops (like `/comm/agent/incoming`), making the whole system portable and inspectable.

Features: - Spawns agents by writing folders - Tree-based delegation - Fault-tolerant slice propagation - Reaper system with kill switch - No Docker, no orchestrators, no message queues - Comes with a live GUI and deploy interface

GitHub: https://github.com/matrixswarm/matrixswarm Site: https://matrixswarm.com

Would love feedback from the HN community.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-15 07:35:39+00:00
Why do you not read the article? What you are saying is just total nonsense if you had actually read the article.

>If you gave this project to experienced software developers it would be heavy on process and light on impact, take forever to make, and stupid expensive.

No, it wouldn't. Every single software developer knows how to make programs which "work well enough". This claim is totally ridiculous, it also is not a "product" in any meaningful sense.

What the article is pointing out is that you can not sell software like this. It is not a "product" at all, it is a hobby project. And you can not develop a hobby project like you would develop a commercial product.

Just think for a second what it would take to sell this.
by ilyabez | 2025-04-15 07:35:42+00:00
Hi, I'm the author of the blog (though I didn't post it on HN).

The site was originally secondary to our business and was built by a contractor. It was secondary to our business and we didn't pay much attention until we actually added the episode pages and the bots discovered them.

I saw a lot of disparaging comments here. It's definitely our fault for not understanding the implications of what the code was doing. We didn't mention the contractor in the post, because we didn't want to throw them under the bus. The accountability is all ours.
by bawolff | 2025-04-15 07:35:56+00:00
> what about having something reasonable for lag, like 30-60 seconds would that make a big difference or you think it would just eventually degrade too?

I think you would probably need something more in the neighbourhood of 10 minutes to really make a difference. If you could make a stable p2p live streaming app with the number of peers all watching the same stream in the hundreds and only 30 seconds latency, i'd consider that pretty amazing.

> Also do you think there's any way you can prioritize seeders in such a protocol? like some kind of algorithm that the more you share the more you're prioritized in getting the most up to date packets.

If we are talking about a livestream (and not "netflix" type streaming) then i don't think seeders are a thing. You can't seed a file that isn't finished being created yet.

If you mean more generally punishing free-riders, i think that is difficult in a live stream as generally data would be coming in from a different set of peers than the peers you are sending data out to, so its difficult (maybe not impossible) to know who is misbehaving.
by lucb1e | 2025-04-15 07:35:59+00:00
> > storing that random number is similar to storing a plain-text password

> you could still store an expiration time, and limit the number of attempts to use the code

Storing plain-text passwords is bad because:

1. Users re-use passwords

2. An attacker can read the access token from the database (as with SQL injection) or capture it in transit (as on insecure connections) and log in directly (if that is still useful when having, e.g., SQL-injection-based database access)

I do not understand what threat limiting the number of attempts protects against. Even if you have that limit implemented on a hardware level, the attacker either knows the right code or can crack the hash if it's a hash of just a few digits. With something like PAKE you can protect against capturing in transit but on secure channels (e.g., if you already use TLS) that's typically overkill

(Of course, you absolutely need to have rate limiting on OTPs, but that is not to protect against the correct code being read straight from disk by the attacker; it's to protect from guessing the digits, a surprisingly common flaw)

> you're probably sending it to the user insecurely anyway (via email or text message)

(I kind of want to remark about this assumed insecurity: the user needs to be targeted for these to not be adequate. Attackers very rarely go after people to the point where they first compromise an email inbox and then look for your specific service, or drive up to the person with cell tower spoofing equipment. It surely happens in red teaming exercises, spy scenarios, if you have a stalker, and probably more, but it's not the common case. Anyway...)

I don't see how rate limiting and expiration helps against sending it via moderately-secure media either. This is necessarily plain text for random codes because the user would otherwise need a decryption key and then you're basically back at the TOTP scenario makes a difference for at-rest storage security. So with them being plain text, if someone is intercepting your SMSes or sitting in your inbox, they'll either manually trigger the code sending or wait for the legitimate user to do this and then log in. Similar to the previous bit: sure, the security of the transport method is relevant, but not for the security of token storage on the server
by ratorx | 2025-04-15 07:36:38+00:00
systemd just provides the feature to use a custom external application to configure a service based on a declarative spec, which podman uses to create actual systemd services from a declarative container spec.

From the podman docs:

> Podman supports building and starting containers (and creating volumes) via systemd by using a systemd generator.

Putting aside all the other issues one may have with systemd, this feels like a decent feature for a service manager to have (custom generation of service specifications).

> bright idea to add “Docker compose substitute”

Why is this so revolutionary? Docker-compose is just a service manager for containers. Systemd is a service manager. Systemd allowing podman to give it “container” features seems pretty reasonable.
by cess11 | 2025-04-15 07:37:17+00:00
As I understand it, P2P requires information sharing so when your distribution network grows this eventually turns into a performance bottleneck. You'll also need rather sophisticated mitigations against bad actors in the distribution network, like nodes that forward bad packets instead of distributing the good packets they receive and got requests for.

You might want to look into the tradeoffs Discord decided to go with, https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-handles-two-and-half-mi....

Here's some boilerplate for rolling your own, https://blog.swmansion.com/building-a-globally-distributed-w....

In theory you could gain resilience from a P2P architecture but you're going to have to sacrifice some degree of live-ness, i.e. have rendering clients hold relatively large buffers, to handle jitters, network problems, hostile nodes and so on.
by stefanbabic | 2025-04-15 07:38:11+00:00
Hey HN!

I built NovaCal, a meeting scheduling platform for individuals and teams.

What makes NovaCal different is that it lets you charge for meetings based on their duration. Instead of flat rates, you can set a time-based rate, so people only pay for the time they need. Great for freelancers, consultants, coaches — or anyone offering paid time.

Other key points:

- Offer meeting packages - Group meetings - Custom booking fields - Calendar view - Free for the first 100 users

...and more.

I’d love to hear what you think.

Try it here: https://novacal.io

Thanks for checking it out
by imposterr | 2025-04-15 07:39:01+00:00
Some Chinese exporters are definitely splitting the cost of these tariffs with their American importer counterparts. While this isn't as significant as "China pays all the tariffs", it's also not "Americans pay all the tariffs".

Though, I haven't seen any analysis on how common this is, so the effect might be negligible in terms of how much "the Chinese" are paying for these tariffs.
by senko | 2025-04-15 07:39:44+00:00
> AI is about right 1% of the time

I have an app where people scan their retail/restaurant/cafe receipts and store them. I use Gemini 2.0 for OCR.

It is right more than 99% of the time. I would be making many more errors transcribing the receipts manually.

AIs are a different kind of tools, for a different kind of problems, with a different kind of failure cases.
by philjohn | 2025-04-15 07:39:53+00:00
Not entirely.

For cycling there are now a group of trusted companies that many people purchase from - WinSpace, Magene, iGPSport, that stand behind their products.

I have a Magene p505 crank-based power meter - £250 delivered. It's as accurate as ones costing 4X as much, and has not shown any signs of issues in the year+ I've been using it.

The idea that AliExpress is just for cheap tat is less and less true, and products in certain sectors coming out of China are just much better value for money (and often, as good as, or better quality) than you'd find from homegrown companies. For cycling, especially Carbon Fibre parts, this isn't surprising - the sheer depth and breadth of composites knowledge from years of making bikes for western brands has paid off handsomely.
by ilyabez | 2025-04-15 07:40:14+00:00
Hi, I'm the author of the blog (though I didn't post it on HN).

If you want to have a cross-platform experience (mobile + web), you'd have to have a server component.

We do transcript, chapter and summary extraction on the server (they are reused across customers), RSS fetching is optimized (so we don't hit the hosts from all the clients independently), our playlists are server-side (so they can be shared across platforms). As we build out the app, features like push notifications will require a server component too.

I agree with you that a podcast app can be built entirely client-side, but that will be limiting for more advanced and/or expensive use cases (like using LLMs).
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-15 07:41:07+00:00
I wish people would stop making predictions about LLMs so confidently. Some people confidently predict that LLMs will never be able to replace capable engineers, and other people equally confidently predict that we'll all be out of a job in five years.

The reality is that we don't know.

We don't know what the ceiling is for LLM programming ability. We don't know how much better they can get without scaling up the hardware. We don't know how well we'll be able to scale up the hardware. We don't know how many more billions we'll allow companies to spend building better and better models until the market loses confidence in them.

We can make educated guesses, but that's all they are. We just don't know.
by thaanpaa | 2025-04-15 07:41:09+00:00
I think it's already happening. I've been using Claude a lot since 3.5. For a while, I barely bothered to check what it was doing because the code it generated tended to be fairly straightforward and usually worked on the first try. But in the last few weeks, I've started reading everything line by line again, because now it's not only often incorrect but also written in a goofy, convoluted way. AI-generated code being constantly fed back to it in a feedback loop would explain a lot, I think.