MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Chatwoot 4.0 – Open-source intercom alternative with AI agents
by sojanofficial | 2025-04-30 00:59:05+00:00
A couple of years ago, we launched Chatwoot here on Hacker News as an open-source alternative to Intercom. Back then, it was a scrappy live chat widget with a shared inbox and just enough backend logic to make things work. What made it stand out was that you could self-host it, own your data, and actually read the code.

Since then, things have grown. We got into Y Combinator, has grown into a platform used by thousands of companies around the world. Some teams use it for a few hundred conversations a week. Others run it at massive scale, handling tens of millions of messages across channels. Through all of that, we’ve stayed focused on keeping it open-core, self-hostable, and developer-first.

Today, we’re back on HN to share Chatwoot 4.0 — the biggest update we’ve shipped so far.

The most visible change in Chatwoot 4.0 is Captain, our new AI agent. It’s built into the platform and can automatically handle repetitive support questions. Under the hood, it uses OpenAI, and it’s fully opt-in. Nothing gets sent anywhere unless you configure it to. Right now, it generates responses based on your Help Center articles, and we’re actively working on adding actions (tool calling capabilities). We’ve already tested it with Shopify and Linear APIs. It works great and opens up some interesting automation paths.

Additionally, we’ve reworked core parts of the system. The UI has been fully revamped using Vue 3. It’s faster, cleaner, and easier to extend. On the backend, we focused heavily on performance. Some deployments now handle over 200 million messages, so we’ve optimized querying to make things faster and more predictable. We’ve also added smarter caching, reduced duplicate fetches, and cleaned up both frontend and backend logic to better handle high-throughput workloads.

We also rebuilt the Help Center module. It’s now a proper self-service portal. Markdown-based, cleaner UI, better search, and support for custom domains.

If you’re already using Chatwoot, the upgrade is available now. If you remember our original launch or you’re looking for a support tool you can actually own and extend, we’d love for you to check it out again.

Code: https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot

Docs: https://www.chatwoot.com/docs

Demo: https://app.chatwoot.com
by doublescoop | 2025-04-30 00:59:52+00:00
Hybrids are the only choice for the vast majority of the country that doesn't have the needed infrastructure to support EVs. If you never leave your urban enclave, then sure, EVs are great. But hybrids are perfect for _right now_, even if EVs are the future.

The Toyota hybrid engine is also rock solid and has been for more than a decade. They don't have a reason to abandon that right now when the industry is highly unstable and government funding for infrastructure that isn't Tesla's is being cut left and right.
by alissa_v | 2025-04-30 01:00:18+00:00
Honestly totally agree with this take. Apple's in trouble and most people don't see it yet. Just look at Vision Pro - $3.5k for a headset nobody wants. I've read sales are basically non-existent now that the early adopters are done. They've completely missed the AI wave too. Selling iPhones won't save them if everything shifts to AI and they're playing catch-up. App Store monopoly getting challenged + tariffs eating their margins + no leadership in emerging tech = way more vulnerable than their market cap suggests.
by carefulfungi | 2025-04-30 01:00:30+00:00
Batch processing is just stream processing with a really big window ;-). More seriously, I find streaming windows are often the disconnect. Surprisingly often, users don't want windowed results. They want aggregation, filtering, uniqueness, ordering, and reporting over some batch. Or, they want to flexibly specify their window / partitioning / grouping for each reporting query. Modern OLAP systems are plenty fast enough to do that on the fly for most use cases - so even older streaming patterns like stream processing for real time stats in parallel with batch to an OLAP system aren't worth the complexity. Just query the DB and cache...
by rat87 | 2025-04-30 01:00:39+00:00
It's not for the most part. He's delivering far lower percentage of his promises than most presidents.

He made a shit ton of promises and many were nonsensical and contradictory. But that doesn't change that he hasn't delivered on them. The problem is people see him doing the most ridiculous stuff people thought he would drop and assume that means he kept most of his promises
by sneak | 2025-04-30 01:01:01+00:00
Perhaps it‘s the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, but I find it hard to consider anyone enamored with Trump to be legitimately libertarian. The guy basically regards himself as a dictator and his edicts are mega-authoritarian.

To me it is logically impossible to reconcile the two positions. You simply can’t be a pro-authoritarian libertarian.

You can’t really espouse libertarian values while being what is coded as “culturally conservative”, because that worldview demands conformity and the mechanisms to enforce same, which are inherently anti-liberty.

A good rule of thumb is that anyone who had any issue whatsoever with other people wearing masks during the pandemic are pretty obviously not pro-individual-liberty and just factional culture brawlers.

There seems to be a lot of definiton drift in the term “libertarian”, and that seems wrong to me. (The same thing happened to my other primary identifying social group, “techno”. I spend a lot of time yelling at clouds now.)
by romanovcode | 2025-04-30 01:02:01+00:00
Spot on, also to mention:

- Open-Source models released this year are comparable with commercial ones from ChatGPT

- NVIDIA to release 3k USD/EUR tiny AI-box that can run those beefy models for your own use cases very fast

While majority of people will be fine with "ai-ligh"t on their phones, enthusiasts can just invest 3k EUR/USD one time and run their own private, personalized, heavy and maybe most importantly uncensured AI using open source models.
by valenterry | 2025-04-30 01:02:07+00:00
In a few ways, no.

Taxis/uber etc. are all built as "regular cards". It requires at least 2 people in there. How often is actually more than 1 person in a car? Wasn't that like 2/3 of all drives?

Now let's assume we have specialized cars for just a single person - that saves a lot of material, fuel, and also (parking) space.

But that only works if you don't OWN the car, because if you own it, you might sometimes have to have passengers right? So you always get a big car that is not needed in 2/3 or so of the drives.

That aside, having another driver is annoying for various reasons (e.g. privacy).
by zik | 2025-04-30 01:02:55+00:00
That's one vision, but it's probably not the most likely one. People like privately owning cars, and as long as they're more convenient than hiring taxis it'll probably stay that way.

Here's another vision of the future - gradually everyone's cars become self-driving, and now cars are more accessible to a wider range of people. 30% of the population currently can't drive due to age or disability, but if cars drive themselves the elderly, disabled, and even children can now own and operate vehicles. And now you have 30% more cars on an already congested road system. That should be enough to make traffic jams the norm everywhere.

But in case that wasn't bad enough, consider this - now people can do other things while they travel, because they don't have to be driving. So, in turn, they can live further and further away from their workplaces in cheaper, larger houses and do more of their work on the go. And while they do this they're spending more time on the roads, and - you guessed it - causing more congestion.

And because parking will always be expensive and hard to find in busy city centers, people will set their cars to loiter while they visit, rather than parking. Just going round and round while their owners shop. Causing - you guessed it - even more congestion.

TL;DR - the most likely result of autonomous vehicles is out of control congestion.
by EasyMark | 2025-04-30 01:03:01+00:00
This does none of that. The rich will only get richer, that is the trajectory, until there is a civil war. In the meantime this is only going to hurt the middle class on down and they will finally come to realize their orange "benefactor" is actually a stooge for powers much smarter than him who want to see the USA and democracy utterly fail.
by spiderice | 2025-04-30 01:03:08+00:00
Simple. Not having a driver in the car. The driver is the only part of Uber I don't like. I feel like if I make them wait 20 seconds they could ding my rating. If I have kids with me, I hate having to get their carseat buckled, knowing the driver probably doesn't want kids in their car anyway. I hate the awkward silence. I hate listening to their shitty music. At no fault of their own, they are the only weak link in the Uber chain. Everything gets better for me if there just isn't a person waiting on me the whole time.

I'd sell my cars in a heartbeat if "Uber minus the driver" existed and was cheaper than owning a car.
by poincaredisk | 2025-04-30 01:03:28+00:00
Sad to hear that. I seriously considered registering, but knowing this I can't in good faith pay money to Kagi. I know it sounds petty, but to people in my country this issue is very important.

And for many businesses in the EU it's illegal to transfer money directly or indirectly to Russia. I don't know how this applies exactly, but I know my company cannot legally pay for this
by bicx | 2025-04-30 01:03:59+00:00
I bet you could find a better cultural fit and be a lot happier while still doing what you love. There are vastly different cultures across different companies, particularly in startups and mid-size.

I took a break from city life and regular work for a year while I lived and traveled in an RV doing contract work. It was fun for a while, but I missed having a challenge and feeling like I had a stake in what I’m working on. I now work remotely in a town that has nothing to do with tech, and my friends here work largely in tourism and real estate. They all get treated like shit compared to software engineers. It made me thankful for my place in life. I’m likely moving back to the SF Bay Area after my lease ends here.
by gregce10 | 2025-04-30 01:04:14+00:00
Working on specstory.com which today is an extension for Cursor & Github copilot that allows you to save, search, share your AI chat history.

Most AI first coding tools don't seem to respect how much critical context gets lost between sessions. Prompts, chats, refactors, decision paths all gone. Really believe that intent (prompts & responses from AI) is going to be the critical artifact upstream of code and there is a need to capture all of it: what the AI suggested, what you kept, what you rewrote, and why. We integrate directly with AI-powered IDEs so your intent becomes as searchable as your code.

We started with Cursor and just shipped support for GitHub Copilot (Agent Mode). The long-term goal is to build a canonical intent layer for codebases built with AI—something like git log/blame, but for why things changed, not just what.
by wahern | 2025-04-30 01:04:27+00:00
> * Lying about the efficacy of masks: Again, not sure what lie you're referring to. Masking was a rational response to an unknown virus. Since covid is a highly contagious respiratory disease, too much masking is certainly better than not enough masking.

During the first few months of the pandemic the CDC, as well as various media commentators, stated that masks were not an effective measure. The advice was based on decades-old studies that established the "air-borne" vs "not air-borne" dichotomy, according to which COVID was not air-borne and thus masks were unnecessary. But the advice was also motivated by a desire to prevent a run on masks, which were in short supply and already being rationed in healthcare settings. Saying they lied is a stretch, but they were quite intransigent about it even as evidence piled up supporting masking efficacy. This history eventually became one kernel truth justifying a lot of anti-CDC, anti-institutional medicine rhetoric. Though that rhetoric existed before the incorporation of this history into their narrative, and of course the broader movement was always against masking, anyhow, so it's kind of inconsistent logically, but consistency isn't that important when it comes to politics.
by celsoazevedo | 2025-04-30 01:04:27+00:00
Good enough for what? I've read the article. It's speculating that solar could be the culprit as it was the main source of energy at that time, but the grid operator couldn’t say what exactly failed, only that they had "two separate losses of power generation in southwestern Spain, a second and a half a part".

If you look at the generation stats[0][1], everything from nuclear to gas to solar dropped. And it was solar and wind that kept producing most of the energy for hours after the failure.

If renewables were the cause of this blackout, then fine, but that's not what the WSJ article says. The guy who wrote the tweet you linked to was blaming renewables 2 or 3 hours after it had happened and the tweet contained wrong information, as pointed out by a different comment here. To me, it's not a good source.

Just to be clear, if renewables were the main reason behind this blackout, then let's blame them and point out their weaknesses and see what we can do to mitigate them (batteries?). What we shouldn't do is jump to conclusions before we know what the heck happened.

---

[0] https://i.imgur.com/J375gbQ.png

[1] https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...
by stronglikedan | 2025-04-30 01:04:49+00:00
> He's blasting right through the Project 2025 checklist

You are confusing that with Agenda 47. While Project 2025 was all those things you describe, that Trump endorsed any of it or is implementing any of those destructive things simply isn't true.

He's faithfully implementing Agenda 47, just like the majority of people in this country elected him to do. And all of those people expected the storm before the calm.
by philipkglass | 2025-04-30 01:07:42+00:00
I was trying to identify "evergreen" and "time-sensitive" kinds of writing -- basically, I wanted to figure out if web pages captured in 2016 would still have content that's interesting to read today or if the passage of time would have rendered them irrelevant.

Here's the training code that I used to fine-tune ModernBERT from the ~5000 pages I had labeled with Llama 3.3. It should be a good starting point if you have your own fine-tuning task like this. If you can get away with a smaller context than I used here, it will be much faster and the batches can be larger (requires experimentation).

https://pastebin.com/Saq1EyAB
by tkgally | 2025-04-30 01:08:10+00:00
I tried it with Japanese, and it sounded about as good as in English. Only at one point did it sound unnatural. Japanese two-person conversation uses a lot of backchannelling, that is, semilinguistic sounds made by the listener (aizuchi). At one point, the female voice said very distinctly fumu fumu, which is how such aizuchi might be written in a script or manga. In actual speech, though, it would be a continuous sound without syllables and with a rising and/or falling intonation.
by chongli | 2025-04-30 01:09:12+00:00
They're not a black box though. They're querying an external resource (Google Search). That's crossing an API boundary. If you're going to let them use Google Search then let the human opponent use Google Search as well.

It's like if you were building an AI robot to run a marathon against a human opponent, except you let the AI robot ride a motorcycle and force the human to stay on foot.
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-30 01:10:09+00:00
What are you using to unload tabs?

I've got to confess that my FF memory management is a run-as-needed-or-think-it-should-be-needed shell script which arbitrarily kills the top 10 Firefox processes by memory utilisation. If I'm leaving my desktop for a while I'll run that several times.

Tree-style Tabs keeps the slots open, and can reload tabs as needed.

I'd really like to have the capacity to unload all tabs other than, say, a specifically-specified set. Though on balance, the tabs that are likely to be most usefully kept open also tend to be the worst memory offenders.

If I fail to prune, MacOS falls over early and often, which is somewhat unpleasant.
by vharuck | 2025-04-30 01:10:54+00:00
>now have actually no idea what to do now that this kind of situation has happened

They know what they would do, if this were under any other president: make phone calls, write editorials in major newspapers, start donating to future political rivals.

But this is Trump. He's surrounded by equally corrupt lackeys, and immediately fires anyone showing a shred of morality. The entire federal government does his bidding. He sues news media until they settle with him for millions, signs executive orders banning specific law firms from working with the federal government until they offer him millions in legal services, cuts off money from states that dare defy his will, and demands universities let the federal government investigate all staff in Middle East studies. Any business leader who stands up to him will be crushed. The best way to keep making money is to get on his good side, like Elon.

This is literally tyranny. Thank goodness there are plenty of judges willing to stand against the obviously illegal acts.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-04-30 01:12:01+00:00
> Integrity, honesty, and principles is literally what they mean by the word "woke"

No it isn't, and saying things like this just adds noise. What they mean by the word "woke" is a worldview that delegitimises the things they aspire to or worked hard for (status based on power based on individual agency), and prioritises other forms of social currency (victimisation by external forces) in a way they find performative.
by nyell | 2025-04-30 01:12:37+00:00
I am working on Scharf, an open-source SAST tool to identify and auto-fix 3P GitHub actions those are prone to supply-chain attacks. It is blazing fast and written in Go.

Project link: https://github.com/cybrota/scharf

Quick demo: https://imgur.com/a/wEyk9AR

This tool can cutdown hours of grind for Security engineers.
by prhn | 2025-04-30 01:12:49+00:00
The future of (public) transportation absolutely is driverless cars.

Every time I'm stuck in traffic on an LA highway with 5+ lanes and I see the horrendously inefficient use of space this future becomes clearer.

Waymos are also really confidence inspiring. They drive more safely and cautiously than any Uber/Lyft driver I've ridden with.

If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.

So I'm happy to see more announcements like this. I hope the Waymo driverless tech becomes ubiquitous.
by simonw | 2025-04-30 01:12:58+00:00
The document suggests unblocking OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt, and then clarifies:

> OAI-SearchBot is for search. OAI-SearchBot is used to link to and surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features. It is not used to crawl content to train OpenAI’s generative AI foundation models. Learn more (opens in a new window).
by gitremote | 2025-04-30 01:13:15+00:00
For anyone who didn't get this reference:

'In fact, there's an old saying about Mussolini that goes something like this: "Mussolini made the trains run on time." In other words, even dictators have their good points. Sure, fascism is an often brutal model of efficient government, full of poverty and corruption, but hey, at least the trains were newly punctual.

https://history.howstuffworks.com/history-vs-myth/did-mussol...

The fact check goes on to explain:

"Italy's railway had entered into a state of disrepair after World War I, but after the war ended, there had been a number of measures implemented to boost efficiency. Mussolini, of course, liked to say he was responsible for those improvements. However, those changes actually took place before he assumed power, so technically, he couldn't really take credit (although that didn't stop him). More to the point, the trains didn't always run on time, either."
Show HN: Tariff Calculator for Amazon
by wyxuan | 2025-04-30 01:13:36+00:00
I made a simple tariff calculator extension for Amazon.

It queries gemini flash 2.0 to determine the category, and then matches it with the corresponding tariff category.

Fun quick hack – it does brick a little – but the majority of the code was cobbled by a first pass of Claude Code

Repo is here: https://github.com/mergd/amzn-tariff
by hakfoo | 2025-04-30 01:13:57+00:00
Insane idea: Intel releases a big RISC-V product, even if it's just an existing Lake with a new decoder on the front.

I could imagine it sucking a lot of air out of the competitive ecosystem. Anyone working on with fiddly little Rasperry Pi class products to help get the platform bootstrapped to full desktop performance suddenly has to compete with a much heavier opponent.
by leereeves | 2025-04-30 01:15:56+00:00
Funny thing about the fictional "Wilhoit’s Law". It's not a law of science. It's nothing but an Internet snipe from a blog post by a music composer. It wasn't even written while the political scientist Frank Wilhoit was alive.

https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...

It's just half of a truism: people apply different standards to "their side". As true of the left wing as the right.
by refurb | 2025-04-30 01:17:50+00:00
If you follow the economic news China has some severe structure problems that it’s going to have to solve.

Huge debt overhang, much of it “hidden” that is dragging down growth

The real estate problem still isn’t solved and a big reset of prices is going to have a big impact on the economy

China placed a big bet on “key industries” under the theory “supply first then we find demand” which isn’t panning out well with tariffs

This is showing up in the stock market which rent saw a 50% decrease

And economic growth has been a weak 5% when they need 9-11% if they hope to avoid the middle income trap

All while the population is rapidly aging and shrinking at the same time
by rayiner | 2025-04-30 01:19:55+00:00
The question isn’t whether it’s “relevant,” but whether that framing is the best approach for advancing EFF’s primary mission. I’d argue EFF’s primary mission is best served by avoiding provoking needless partisan fights on an issue where the EFF is going up against both parties.

> For being “anti-government types” it sure seems like they voted for dramatic and unprecedented authoritarian uses of the government.

I came across an excellent article on this, but I can’t find it. Basically, authoritarian populism is a response to the rise of the professional managerial class, and the ideological divergence of that class from the rest of the citizenry.

Most of the rules that affect your daily life don’t come from the President, or even high level cabinet officials, but career government officials and managers, as well as government-adjacent institutions such as universities and certain NGOs (the latter of which set rules through impact litigation). How can voters change how this distributed managerial class governs the country? They can elect someone like Trump, who is authoritarian, but whose authoritarianism is directed chiefly at the government itself and adjacent institutions.

It doesn’t behoove the EFF’s primary mission to alienate the large number of Trump voters who chafe at professional managerial control. Its primary mission is advanced by appealing both to the people who oppose policing porn on the internet, and also people who oppose policing so-called “hate speech” on the internet.

To make a comparison, look at Cato. Traditionally they’ve been more aligned with conservatives. But they have stuck to their guns on open borders and free trade, even though that’s made them hated by much of the more populist modern right.