MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gmiller123456 | 2025-04-29 17:10:53+00:00
Have to say my experience differs from what most here have had. Mostly I just saw no improvement over using Google.

It still returned lots of results that were paywalled, lots of results with more ads than content, results that didn't contain words I put in quotes. Apparently there's options to filter out certain sites, but it's pretty pointless if there are so many that the task is impossible to do manually.

I've been using Duck Duck Go for a while. Can't say it's better, I even have the occasional search where ddg doesn't return results and revert to Google which does.
by yongjik | 2025-04-29 17:11:00+00:00
If White House enacted a different tax to, say, fund more highways, and Amazon decided to display that, then that might be a different matter.

But this is tariffs. Tariffs work by making imported goods more expensive, which makes them less attractive to consumers, which makes domestic goods more attractive in comparison. That's the whole fucking point of tariffs. To make imported goods more expensive.

Amazon is essentially running a free advertisement for White House, showing off how Trump's tariffs are doing their job!

Exactly what else did Trump supporters expect to happen? Ponies and rainbows? Well, probably not rainbows - it's gay.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-04-29 17:11:06+00:00
As someone who somewhat does the same thing, I'd recommend just adding the youtube videos to playlists so that you can just close out the youtube tab and only keep the one with your playlist up. Like I slap all my interesting podcasts, tech videos, hobby related videos, conference talks etc in a "currently watching" playlist and it greatly cuts down on decision fatigue to just have it all thrown into a queue that you can just sit down and consume (with occasional reordering).
by 2mlWQbCK | 2025-04-29 17:11:23+00:00
I used to have 200+ tabs open all the time, but it's just noise. Now I close tabs asap. If the page contents are of any interest I save the contents first using the Single File extension. If the page address is for some reason interesting (that is far less common) I save a bookmark. I started having the bookmarks bar enabled again and it pretty much serves the purpose that the tabs used to serve for me, but in a more organized way.
by znpy | 2025-04-29 17:11:54+00:00
Hey, i use homebrew everyday on my work laptop. I don’t have strong opinions, but here’s my honest feedback:

- documentation could be improved a lot. I know my way around unix systems but the terminology around brewing makes everything more confusing than it should be (i’m not a native speaker of English)

- maybe add some option to avoid installing optional dependencies (similar to what apt can do?)

- authoring packages could use some love. I’d like to create and contribute some packages but there’s too much ruby magic going around (I don’t write ruby for a living)

Regarding slowness… meh, it’s ruby, i don’t expect that to get any faster ever.

Overall, i’m not happy but not because of homebrew but because of mac os (shitty os) homebrew makes mac os a bit more bearable, so thank you for your work :)
by codethief | 2025-04-29 17:12:00+00:00
I used to be the same and it drove me nuts. Eventually I looked for a solution and ended up installing Limit Tabs[0] to limit the number of my tabs[1] to 10-15. I couldn't be happier!

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rudolf-fernan...

[1]: On my desktop. Unfortunately, the extension is not available for Firefox for Android, so on mobile I tell Firefox to discard tabs that I haven't used for a day.
Field-Based Pathfinding: A Quantum-Inspired Alternative to A*
by polymetron | 2025-04-29 17:12:10+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with a lightweight algebraic system for quantum-like transformations and built a pathfinding engine out of it. Instead of using traditional heuristics like in A*, it uses a quantum equality (XY = X/Y) as the initializer to navigate grids.

The result is a pathfinder that feels "intelligent" without needing heavy heuristic design, and scales surprisingly well on large grids.

The full repo includes the quantum algebra system (Qualge) behind it and some visualizations for sorting and grid transformations.

Repo: https://github.com/ElSolem/qualge

Would love feedback or ideas for other systems this could apply to.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-29 17:12:10+00:00
> Palantir is cognizant of the risks to privacy and civil liberties involved in these mission sets and how they may be influenced by shifts in priorities. Immigration enforcement may undergo significant changes due to any number of factors over the next few years—agency consolidation, enforcement criteria, public opinion, agency and government priorities, the use of advanced Al, etc.—and we will continue to support our teams partnering with ICE to help navigate the terrain as it comes into focus, while providing the tools that will enable the mission in the most accurate, efficient, and transparent way.

Given any knowledge at all of the context, I don't see a way to read this other than "we know this will be used for atrocities but no matter how bad they get, we're into it."

Another one that kind of caught my attention but I'm not completely sure how to interpret:

> We provide the tools for our customers to enable fair treatment and legal protections for individuals across the spectrum of immigration status.

First off calling the government "our customers" seems weird. Does this system have other actual or intended customers? Do they just mean individual states or police departments or something else? Is this service available to private citizens with enough money to spend on it?

Secondly "naturalized citizen" is also one of the formal immigration statuses, if they're using this as a term of art. This is likely the same tool they'll be using to come after journalists, women seeking abortions, protestors, trans healthcare providers (or just trans people themselves), any of the other groups the administration clearly considers its enemies or thinks its base will respond well to the persecution of.

My read on palantir for years now has been that they were very intentionally positioning themselves to take a sort of IBM-in-1930s-europe role if an eliminationist party came to power. This is pretty close to them just saying that themselves.
by serial_dev | 2025-04-29 17:12:12+00:00
It's important to consider whether it's worth it, even?

I worked on stream processing, it was fun, but I also believe it was over-engineered and brittle. The customers also didn't want real-time data, they looked at the calculated values once a week, then made decisions based on that.

Then, I joined another company that somehow had money to pay 50-100 people, and they were using CSV, sh scripts, batch processing, and all that. It solved the clients' needs, and they didn't need to maintain a complicated architecture and the code that could have been difficult to reason about otherwise.

The first company with the stream processing after I left, was bought by a competitor at fire sale price, some of the tech were relevant for them, but the stream processing stuff was immediately shut down. The acquiring company had just simple batch processing and they were printing money in comparison.

If you think it's still worth going with stream processing, give your reasoning to the team, and most reasonable developers would learn it if they really believe it's a significantly better solution for the given problem.

Not to over-simplify, but if you can't convince 5 out of 10 people to learn to make their job better, it's either that the people are not up to the task, or you are wrong that stream processing would make a difference.
by kenjackson | 2025-04-29 17:12:26+00:00
From your linked article: "It's clear that large language models have an emergent capability to play GeoGuessr, and play it well. Their abilities to generalize are nascent, but present"

This is very accurate -- their abilities to generalize are nascent, but still surprisingly capable. The world is about to send through its best and brightest math/CS minds over the next decade (at least) to increase the capabilities of these AIs (with the help of AI). I just don't understand the pessimism with the technology.
by thmoonbus | 2025-04-29 17:13:04+00:00
As someone who has several friends and family who work in the mid / lower tiers of the entertainment industry... if you want to pirate, fine, but don't act like you're performing a noble act. Are entertainment execs grossly overpaid and exploitative? Sure - not unlike many industries. But lower revenue and lower subscriber numbers do have an impact on the money that trickles down (yes, trickles, sadly) to employees.

I say this mostly because the tech set seems OK with content piracy in a way that they wouldn't be OK with say, shoplifting. I don't see people recommending walking out with a pair of Airpods from best buy because of Apple's ethical breaches.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-04-29 17:13:25+00:00
I don’t think any goalposts need to be redecorated. The “inner monologue” isn’t a reliable witness to o3’s model, it’s at best a post-hoc estimation of what a human inner monologue might be in this circumstance. So its “testimony” about what it is doing is unreliable, and therefore it doesn’t move the needle on whether or not this is “real reasoning” for some value of that phrase.

In short, it’s still anthropomorphism and apophenia locked in a feedback loop.
by abe_m | 2025-04-29 17:13:42+00:00
I doubt that an LLM for CAD would be using the free-form generation that seems to lead to the 5-legged chair.

I suspect it will be more of a tool calling layer that is building up the model based on the output of more deterministic tools. "I need this bearing mounted here" -> LLM reads the part number of the bearing, does a RAG search for the bearing properties to get sizes, looks up what type of fits should be used in the scenario, feeds that info into a function that generates the appropriate seat geometry. Rather than trying to morph triangles into sort-of-kind-of a cylindrical face that may or may have the 0.0XXmm interference that is the difference between success or failure of the fitment.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-04-29 17:13:45+00:00
It's my understanding that o3 was trained on multimodal data, including imagery. Is it unreasonable to assume its training data includes images of these exact locations and features? GeoGuesser uses Google Maps, and Google Maps purchases most of its imagery from third-parties these days. If those third parties aren't also selling to all the big AI companies, I'd be very surprised.
by rafram | 2025-04-29 17:13:55+00:00
From one of o3 outputs:

> Rear window decal clearly reads “www.taxilinder.at”. A quick lookup shows Taxi Linder GmbH is based in Dornbirn, Vorarlberg.

That's cheating. If it can use web search, it isn't playing fair. Obviously you can get a perfect score on any urban GeoGuessr round by looking up a couple businesses, but that isn't the point.
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-29 17:14:01+00:00
I'll give you that Bezos is mostly gone from Amazon.

However, Amazon does need to be in the USA, even if it's not their host country, because they're a retailer. They make their money by buying goods and selling them to the people who want them.

Remember when Amazon used to only have one warehouse in one state, and relied on being able to ship things to get around sales tax? That didn't last - and not just because the law caught up with the loophole. They wanted to do next-day or same-day shipping that basically required them to have a warehouse in every city, and thus pay sales tax everywhere.

Amazon moving out of the US would make them equivalent to Temu or Wish in terms of convenience, and their sales would crater. Not to mention Trump is closing off the loophole those companies used, too.
by ta1243 | 2025-04-29 17:14:05+00:00
It's not just speed that's critical, it's frequency. I believe that they're only proposing one train per hour, or 18 per day? Feels low for such a long piece of dedicated track.

In the UK the existing West Coast mainline has about 170 trains a day on the fast lines (between Milton Keynes and Rugby avoiding Northampton), the longest of which run about the same distance (London-Glasgow) as LA to San Francisco - albeit a 4.5 hour journey.

The original plans for HS2 were I think 18 per hour between London and Birmingham.

Fresno has a population of 500k, and is about 180 miles from LA from and 180 miles from San Francisco.

Liverpool has a similar population and is a similar distance from London and currently gets an hourly train, with arguments for 2 trains per hour. that's in addition to the more local services (Liverpool-Birmingham for example).

London frequencies on the fast non-stop trains are currently

Birmingham: 3tph

Manchester: 3tph

Glasgow: 1tph

Liverpool: 1tph

Trent Valley: 1tph (fast for the first 80 miles then local stopper at towns of upto 100k, like Tamworth, Lichfield, Rugeley

And typically

Lancashire (Blackpool): 1tph

North Wales: 1tph

Looking at cities like San Francisco an environms, Sacremento, Bakersfield, Fresno etc I don't see why you wouldn't send 2tph from LA to SF, and another 1tph to each of those locations, meaning 6-10tph heading north out of LA, and probably 3tph out of San Francisco, based on the population and distances. Not all services would stop at every station (you don't need a 3tph service from Bakersfield to Fresno, just 1tph would be fine)

I guess the lack of local public transport limits the benefit though, if you need a car to get to/from the station (especially if it's at both ends) then you might as well drive the whole way.
by em-bee | 2025-04-29 17:14:12+00:00
the problem is that bookmarks are to static.

remember where the term "bookmark" came from. a strip of paper or string that you lay in the pages of a book to remember where you are reading. when you read further you move the bookmark to the new position.

browser bookmarks don't do that. instead every time you remember a location you get a new bookmark. and then you have to go around and search for the old one to remove it.

a tab always remembers the latest state and gets updated automatically as i move forward or backward. the state is also cached as long as the tab is open. that matters for hackernews for example which tells me which messages are new since i last loaded the page. when i go to a tab the page doesn't get automatically reloaded so i get back to the old state, whereas with bookmarks that state is lost.

if bookmarks could keep the state (that means permanently cache the old version until i force a reload) and allow me to update them when that state changes while using the page, then i could use them instead of tabs.
by schickling | 2025-04-29 17:14:13+00:00
Hey everyone, host of the localfirst.fm podcast here (and previously founder of Prisma).

In collaboration with Jess Martin, we've been working on the Local-First Landscape resources which provides an overview and comparison of various local-first technologies. It's meant to provide orientation to people new to local-first app development.

We hope this is useful and welcome any form of feedback and suggestions! Thank you!
by EvanAnderson | 2025-04-29 17:14:33+00:00
This is overblown fear mongering, especially for desktop apps.

There are only a few applications with exposed attack surface (i.e. accept incoming requests from the network) and a large enough install base to cause "massive damage all of the Internet". A desktop screen recorder app has no business being constructed in a manner that's "wormable", nor an install base that would result in significant replication.

The software that we need the "average user" to update is stuff like operating systems. OS "manufacturers" have that mostly covered for desktop OS's now.

Microsoft, even though their Customers were hit with the "SQL Slammer" worm, doesn't force automatic updates for the SQL Server. Likewise, they restrict forcing updates only to mainstream desktop OS SKUs. Their server, embedded, and "Enterprise" OS SKUs can be configured to never update.
by blackoil | 2025-04-29 17:14:58+00:00
Ironic, but keep asking LLMs till you can connect it to your "known truth" knowledge. For many topics I spend ~15-60 mins on various topics asking for details, questioning any contradictory answers, verifying assumptions to get what feels right answer. I talked with them for topics varying from democracy-economy, irrational number proofs and understanding rainbows.
by guerby | 2025-04-29 17:15:12+00:00
You're completely wrong about this.

Inverters if told so can do frequency support better and cheaper than any other solutions.

No other technology can react as fast as an inverter.

See the Texas grid grid service market which is now completely dominated by GW of inverters.

https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/infrastru...

"One solution is to connect inverters with “grid-forming” capabilities, which help mitigate this risk by limiting fluctuations outside of 60 Hz, increasing grid stability. Experts see utility-scale batteries as a prime opportunity to deploy grid-forming inverters to the grid, as grid-forming integration with batteries is cheaper and faster than building new transmission."

"grid-forming" inverter is just software and parameters, your el-cheapo home solar inverter can do it too. It currently is prevented from doing so by ... grid operator regulations which ask it to disconnect at the first issue.
by dadrian | 2025-04-29 17:15:14+00:00
I dunno why you say it isn't useful. It is inherently plaintext, but still worth authenticating. If you just used an AEAD but didn't put e.g. the session identifier or connection ID or sequence number in the AD, it would be entirely unauthenticated, but the decryption of, say, the message body would still succeed.
by sieve | 2025-04-29 17:15:34+00:00
I am not sure about the names of the characters. But a Roman family is definitely involved in the first part (Familia Romana).

> I like to think it's worked

It works as long as you do some slow and steady work at it. I don't think it will work if you drop-in for a couple of days every few months, read something, and then disappear.

You might remember a few sentences here and there. But we want to be able to understand as well as use those sentences in the applicable context.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-29 17:15:40+00:00
Every "beautiful developing country" I've been in has been able to make prices arbitrarily low to the end user while still paying the full telecom prices by use of some sort of sharing like a cafe.

It doesn't matter so much that the nominal price is low, only that it is cheaper to buy bandwith from the satellite provider than their alternatives. If the local populace can't afford it as an individual subscription an internet cafe will buy it, and as the economy develops it slowly disperses into individual subscriptions rather than by the town internet cafe.

If you wait until everyone in developing nation has individual subscriptions you've already lost the game to someone else. Ground zero isn't selling internet to a goat farmer who can't afford it, it's selling one subscription to 100 goat farmers and one to the rich corrupt policeman and then capturing additional subscriptions as their wealth increases as their nation develops.
by sevensor | 2025-04-29 17:16:14+00:00
I’d heard US rice was heavily contaminated with arsenic due to having been planted in regions that formerly grew cotton. And cotton was once treated with arsenates to control boll weevil (https://a-c-s.confex.com/a-c-s/2005am/techprogram/P4552.HTM)

I was surprised not to see this reflected in the map
by m3047 | 2025-04-29 17:16:28+00:00
> behind the scenes

Asbestos was at times used in:

* cigarrette filters

* water filters

* hair dryers

* space heaters

* anti-scorch pads (stoves and bunsen burners)

* HVAC duct sealing

* boiler, pipe, and duct insulation (buildings, machinery, vehicles)

* brakes
by gruez | 2025-04-29 17:16:30+00:00
>The regional supermarket chain in new england that is owned by kroger ALREADY localizes their weekly sales flyer TO THE STORE despite every store in the state having the exact same tax rates.

Do they actually "localizes their weekly sales flyer TO THE STORE", or you only think that way because they ask for the exact store location to view their flyers? It could very well be that they ask the exact store for analytics purposes, but all the stores have the same flyer.
by freedomben | 2025-04-29 17:17:11+00:00
Did you miss the part about them using DDG? They do have access to their search engine.

If the choice were between no search engine or paid search engine, then your point is a good one, but that's not the choice here.

I'm a very happy Kagi subscriber btw. I think it's worth the money. I love the personal uprank/downrank feature and Quick Answers personally and get a lot of value from them. But if I didn't use those it might not be worth it to me either.
by trealira | 2025-04-29 17:17:55+00:00
I feel like programming an iterator like this akin to a state machine is just not that convenient or trivial, though. Below is pseudo-Java.

class InOrderTreeIterator { Stack stack; TreeNode cursor; InOrderTreeIterator(TreeNode root) { cursor = root; s = new Stack; } bool hasNext() { return cursor != null || !stack.empty(); } TreeNode next() { if (cursor != null) { while (cursor.left != null) { stack.push(cursor); cursor = cursor.left; } } else if (!stack.empty()) { cursor = stack.pop(); } else { throw new NoSuchElementException(); } TreeNode ret = cursor; cursor = cursor.right return ret; } }
Show HN: Conventional Comments in GitHub
by francesc_holly | 2025-04-29 17:18:59+00:00
Hey HN, Cesc here, co-founder at Pullpo.

We spend a lot of time doing code reviews on GitHub. One recurring frustration was deciphering ambiguous comments. Misunderstandings slowed us down.

We're big fans of the https://conventionalcomments.org (discussed previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23009467) standard for adding clarity, but remembering and typing the prefixes (suggestion, issue(blocking), etc.) felt like friction.

So, we built a simple, free, open-source Chrome extension to make using this standard effortless within the GitHub UI.

How it works:

• It adds a small toolbar above GitHub comment boxes.

• You click buttons for labels (issue, suggestion, praise, nitpick, etc.) and optional decorators (blocking, non-blocking, if-minor).

• It automatically formats the comment prefix for you.

• There's a "Prettify" option to display prefixes as visual badges (using Shields.io, linked to a simple explainer on pullpo.io).

• It adapts to GitHub light/dark themes.

We built it because we needed it ourselves to improve our internal review process, and thought others might find it useful too. It's completely free and open-source (MIT license).

• Install Link -> https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/gelgbjildgbbfgfgpib...

• GitHub Repo -> https://github.com/pullpo-io/conventional-comments

• Quick Demo Video -> https://youtu.be/jLzXlZ78rNE?si=KMzIH9Vb43glekEW

We just launched it on the Chrome Web Store. Would love to hear your feedback, suggestions, or any pain points you have with code review comments! Thanks, Cesc
by Misdicorl | 2025-04-29 17:19:01+00:00
I'll throw my hat in the ring for "disagree". Few kinds of work have such clear and unambiguous results as optimization work (its now X% faster!). Few kinds of work have such incredible and detailed tools to guide your hand in finding where to invest your effort (look at this hot loop!).

The fact that sometimes optimization work is tricky or requires some pre-thinking, or is even gasp counter-intuitive is such a hilarious way to say "this is hard". That's just table stakes starting points for so-so-so much work.

Edit: Heck, even deciding whether to prioritize optimization work or feature work is usually a harder problem than the actual optimization work itself.