MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tengwar2 | 2025-04-09 15:28:32+00:00
PostScript: this is how I solve the biggest problem I see. I don't care about linking to other pages. I don't care about reflowing. I care very much that if you use man in the terminal, the output is really hard to read other than for short man pages. man bash, for instance, is something you could reasonably want to read, but it's about 5000 lines long and in the terminal it's hard to see the organisational structure.

Reformatting as Postscript shows the pages they were meant to be. I started as a Sun admin, and we used to have paper manuals, properly typeset - and that's what you get when you use Postscript as the output.

For Unix/Linux users - investigate "man -t".

However - MacOS doesn't support reading Postscript now. It used to, but the feature was removed from Preview. At the risk of teaching multiple grandmothers to suck eggs, I use this script:

manps () { if [ -z "$1" ] then echo usage: $FUNCNAME topic echo This will open a PostScript formatted version of the man page for \'topic\'. else man -t $1 | ps2pdf - | open -f -a /System/Applications/Preview.app fi }

where ps2pdf comes from Homebrew.
by simonw | 2025-04-09 15:28:38+00:00
Prompting LLMs to turn search queries like "red loveseat" into structured search filters like {"item_type": "loveseat", "color": "red"} is a neat trick.

I tried Doug's prompt out on a few other LLMs:

Gemini 1.5 Flash 8B handles it well and costs about 1/1000th of a cent: https://gist.github.com/simonw/cc825bfa7f921ca9ac47d7afb6eab...

Llama 3.2 3B is a very small local model (a 2GB file) which can handle it too: https://gist.github.com/simonw/d18422ca24528cdb9e5bd77692531...

An even smaller model, the 1.1GB deepseek-r1:1.5b, thought about it at length and confidently spat out the wrong answer! https://gist.github.com/simonw/c37eca96dd6721883207c99d25aec...

All three tests run with https://llm.datasette.io using the llm-gemini or llm-ollama plugins.
by epolanski | 2025-04-09 15:28:52+00:00
> Nvidia seemed 'untouchable' for so long in this space that its nice to see things get shaken up.

Did it?

Both Mistral's LeChat (running on Cerebras) and Google's Gemini (running on Tensors) have clearly showed ages ago Nvidia had no advantage at all in inference.

The hundreds of billions spent in hardware till now focused on training, but inference is in the long run gonna get the lion share of the work.
Show HN: Raddle, my word transformation game
by santheo | 2025-04-09 15:29:24+00:00
I went from idea to execution on this word game in about 10 days, using the Svelte framework, and with a lot of help from Claude AI.

Raddle is like a word ladder game, but from step to step the words can change in a variety of ways, from semantic, to orthographic, to phonetic. Your guidance for figuring out each step is a list of clues. But it's up to you to figure out which clue goes with which step.

For instance, today's puzzle goes from OK to GO in 15 steps. You have 14 clues that help you figure out how to transform OK into a new word, which transforms into a new word, etc until you get to GO.

When you load the site for the first time, you'll be greeted with a tutorial that teaches you the game, using a short Raddle. There are about 45 days' worth of Raddles up on the site right now, and I'm posting new ones every day. Enjoy!
by arcbyte | 2025-04-09 15:29:51+00:00
> First you invite industry to reshore via subsidies and preferential access to government contracts. If necessary, the government must directly invest in new firms.

Summarized: the government gives money to companies, or more charitable "invests".

I would totally agree with you on this path forward BUT FOR the fact that thos nation is dead broke. Completely dead broke. There's no responsible money to do this with. None.
by alphazard | 2025-04-09 15:29:55+00:00
There seems to be a fundamental mismatch between how sane people think about sandboxing, and how linux manages namespaces.

A linux-naive developer would expect to spawn a new process from a payload with access to nothing. It can't see other processes, it has a read only root with nothing in it, there are no network devices, no users, etc. Then they would expect to read documentation to learn how to add things to the sandbox. They want to pass in a directory, or a network interface, or some users. The effort goes into adding resources to the sandbox, not taking them away.

Instead there is this elaborate ceremony where the principal process basically spawns another version of itself endowed with all the same privileges and then gives them up, hopefully leaving itself with only the stuff it wants the sandboxed process to have. Make sure you don't forget to revoke anything.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-09 15:30:03+00:00
As a US citizen it is still a bit useful. You cannot be denied entry (CBP has told me they would deny me entry, but in the end they just threaten to revoke your passport which is also a lie). If they have decided they want to search your phone, they will tell you that you just have to answer the questions and they will let you out in time to catch your next flight or whatever. The truth is they are vicious liars, as I have found out, once they are that suspicious you have already missed your connection. Once you are in secondary they are usually going to fuck you no matter what so might as well assert your rights.
by ta12653421 | 2025-04-09 15:30:27+00:00
> entire Eurosystem and beyond

mmh, not really - banks who are connected to the Euro-Zone can use it, but it has not a "beyond-EU"-ambition.

TIPS is just one of the two clearing-mechanisms, there is also RT1 (which is operated by a private entity and launchend long before TIPS came into place, TIPS is operated by each countries national bank in coop with ECB), since some time, there is interoperability, so you can transact from TIPS-connected entities to RT1-connected entities; RT1 is much more expensive than TIPS
by perrygeo | 2025-04-09 15:30:43+00:00
Alcohol is a potent carcinogen. The EPA considers it in the highest tier of risk - "Known To Be Human Carcinogen" - alongside such fun substances as Asbestos, Benzene and Formaldehyde. Yet fewer than half of Americans polled even realize that alcohol has any relationship to cancer, let alone an extremely strong and causal one! The booze industry was able to do what the tobacco industry couldn't - pull off a successful public denial of all links to cancer.
by TwirlPearl | 2025-04-09 15:30:46+00:00
Been thinking about the evolution of product configurators. We've gone from basic color options to some pretty sophisticated 3D customization.

But what about AI? How close are we to configurators that use AI to predict what a customer wants and then generate hyper-personalized options?

Is this exciting, or a bit creepy? What are the biggest technical challenges? Any cool examples you've seen?
by ryandrake | 2025-04-09 15:30:55+00:00
I'd love to be able to type:

man ffmpeg "-ss"

And have it jump right to the -ss option so I can see the expected format. For me the 99+% use case of man is to look up parameters of a command line or parameters of a programming function call. It's shocking that the UX for what I presume is the single most used use case is so broken.
by apexalpha | 2025-04-09 15:31:40+00:00
That would, again, be a government problem not a PV one.

Also how would they even know. These things feed in 800 watts max, it's barely anything.

In my country we don't even have to get permission for big products. I have 9kW of PV on my roofs and just put it there, same with the battery. It's the grids companies' job to figure out how to make it work, not mine.
by gwern | 2025-04-09 15:31:40+00:00
> That came out in 2009, correct? I wonder how much was spent on LLMs up to that point.

Quite a lot. Look back at the size of the teams working on language models at IBM, Microsoft, Google, etc, and think about all the decades of language model research going back to Shannon and quantifying the entropy of English. Or the costs to produce the datasets like the Brown Corpus which were so critical. And keep in mind that a lot of the research and work is not public for language models; stuff like NSA interest is obvious, but do you know what Bob Mercer did before he vanished into the black hole of Renaissance Capital? I recently learned from a great talk (spotted by OP, as it happens) https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/linguistics/bilingual/2013-... that it was language modeling!

I can't give you an exact number, of course, but when you consider the fully-loaded costs of researchers at somewhere like IBM/MS/G is usually at least several hundred thousand dollars a year and how many decades and how many authors there are on papers and how many man-years must've been spent on now-forgotten projects in the 80s and 90s to scale to billions of word corpuses to train the n-gram language models (sometimes requiring clusters), I would have to guess it's at least hundreds of millions cumulative.

> They're also not humble.

Funnily enough, the more grandiose use-cases of LMs actually were envisioned all the way back at the beginning! In fact, there's an incredible science fiction story you've never heard of which takes language models, quite literally, as the route to a Singularity, from 1943. You really have to read it to believe it: "Fifty Million Monkeys", Jones 1943 https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1943-jones.pdf

> I don't know why CYC went that way.

If you read the whole OP, which I acknowledge is quite a time investment, I think Yuxi makes a good case for why Lenat culturally aimed for the 'boil the ocean' approach and how they refused to do more incremental small easily-benchmarked applications as distractions and encouraging deeply flawed paradigms and how they could maintain it for so long. (Which shouldn't be too much of a surprise. Look how much traction DL critics on HN get, even now.)
by tenwz1 | 2025-04-09 15:31:54+00:00
If you go deeper, you will find that China's modern history is full of suffering. After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, the Kuomintang's post-war activities of taking over enemy property exacerbated the Kuomintang's corruption, which was regarded as "robbery" by public opinion, and the issuance of a large amount of currency led to serious inflation. Against this background, the Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek took the initiative to launch an armed attack on the Communist Party. At that time, the Chinese people were already very disgusted with the war. After fighting the Japanese, they had to attack their own compatriots. Therefore, the Kuomintang was very unpopular, and the people's hearts turned to the Communist Party.
by Robtop99 | 2025-04-09 15:31:58+00:00
Out of curiosity (and boredom), I trained a specialized AI image model on photos of my dog to see what would happen. I ended up creating a website around it —PetPicture AI— that turns your pet into stylized characters like astronauts, knights, pirates, etc.

It started as a side project, but people have actually started using it for gifts, memorial portraits, and just for fun. The AI model gets fine-tuned on your specific pet, so the results are surprisingly personal.

It raised a few interesting questions for me:

What other applications are out there for quick, personalized AI models like this?

Where’s the line between novelty and meaningful customization?

And are $70 personalized pet portraits on Etsy a thing of the past?

Would love to hear your thoughts—especially around the tech, ethics, or product potential.
by kstrauser | 2025-04-09 15:32:06+00:00
My family lived in a smallish town for a while, and I've gotta say that chain stores were a godsend. We did business with local shops whenever we could, but the stock variety was inherently much smaller than we found at Target (or even Dollar General). Much as we would have preferred to be able to pay our neighbor $1.50 for an item, it was awfully nice to find nicer items for $1 at the chain place.

Don't get me started at the local groceries which were associated with the large employer in town, a giant grocery wholesaler. I definitely want to support my neighbors, but I don't want to buy Local Brand Ketchup. I want Heinz, darnit.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-09 15:32:23+00:00
I've noticed DG stocks oddball sizes of packaged foods I've never seen anywhere else, not even at gas station convenience stores. It's usually their "large" size, and significantly smaller than the "large" size at other stores.

Next time I'm in there I'll check the unit price on those. I'm betting it's pretty bad, because usually if a business is doing anything distinctive like that, it's to screw people.
by danaris | 2025-04-09 15:32:41+00:00
But even that is impossible in the near-to-medium term.

The US just doesn't have the supply chain that China does. You need to be able to source the materials, and they have, effectively, entire cities dedicated almost wholly to producing those "intermediate" raw materials—eg, things like the grommets for the shoelaces, the big sheets of faux leather that can be cut to the right size & shape to make the body, etc. They also have the industrial capacity to do the molding for the soles, and produce the laces, at scale.

None of that exists here—in some cases not in the scale required, but in most cases not at all.

With across-the-board tariffs, the only way to fully avoid them is to start from the raw materials on up—mine and purify the minerals, raise the animals for their leather, pump and refine the oil for the plastics, harvest the trees for their rubber (are we still getting rubber that way...?). All here in the US.

Some of those raw materials likely don't even exist on our land in sufficient quantities to supply all our industrial needs, even setting aside how much time, money, and manpower it would take to set up the mines (and ranches, and oil fields, and rubber farms), the several stages of refining, and all the different ways the materials need to be shaped or alloyed or combined or extruded or or or...

And where is the money to fund all that going to come from? Clearly not the federal government (unless, I suppose, you posit that it's one or more of Musk's companies doing all this—I suppose that could be one of the aims here; just give Musk a monopoly over literally everything we make...). Every domestic company is going to be cutting back six ways from Sunday, because every product is going to cost massively more, so even the people still making as much money as they were last year are going to be buying less. And many people will be making less, either because of those same cutbacks (through layoff or hour/wage reduction), or because they were part of the federal agencies getting wantonly gutted for no good purpose, or among the companies that did business with them and now have lost a major customer.

Bringing manufacturing onshore for any significant percentage of our consumer or industrial goods is barely even a pipe dream. It's pure cloud-cuckoo-land fantasy.
by acureau | 2025-04-09 15:32:43+00:00
Thanks for your time Tudor, I didn't intend by any means to diminish your work by associating it with your company. I had read the first two chapters of your open book, and I found it useful to understand how the idea of moldable development came about and what problem it was trying to solve.

I think it has finally clicked in my mind. You're building a way to represent systems that is richer than text, which ideally reduces cognitive load when trying to understand or modify them. Since every system is different, this requires custom code, and that's normally expensive. GT is an attempt at reducing the cost of developing custom meta-programming tools. Building systems with rich representations from the very start is moldable development. Is this accurate?
by af78 | 2025-04-09 15:32:48+00:00
Consistent with what this German journalist at Handelsblatt reports https://nitter.net/HankeVela/status/1909259594787910009:

Brussels is watching amazed, as Trump destroys the US economy. "Nobody in the Commission thought that the US government would be this stupid and self-destructive," an EU official tells me. "That they would blow up their own country by letting ChatGPT make their trade policy." EU officials are quietly preparing brutal countermeasures — but they’re in no rush. Markets are doing the work for them. Here’s what’s happening behind the scenes: Trump’s chaos is collapsing the US markets faster than any EU retaliation could. Inside the Commission and among EU governments, the mood is: Don't give Trump an excuse to blame this on others. Since February, the S&P 500 has dropped 20%. European officials believe Trump's trade chaos is backfiring — and see no reason to escalate while the damage grows organically. Inside the Commission and among EU trade ministers, the mood is calm — almost mocking. “We’ll just let them stew,” another senior official says. “If Trump doesn’t blink by the end of the month, we’re ready to hit hard.” But for now? They'll watch him sweat. German Economy Minister Robert Habeck summed up the mood: “We're under no time pressure. The Americans are under pressure and are now in a position of weakness,” he said. “The damage can get even worse — that’s why we must act calmly, carefully, but decisively.” Habeck also mocked Elon Musk’s call for a US-EU "zero-tariff" deal: “It's sign of weakness and fear. If he has something to say, he should go to his President... Before we talk about zero tariffs, stop the nonsense and mess you just made in the last week.”
by DecoPerson | 2025-04-09 15:33:13+00:00
Author invents a programming language where the code is server-side JSX tags ("Early World") and the runtime evaluation is divided into as multiple lazily-evaluated stages ("Late World") in the browser.

Author unfortunately fails to justify or provide a demonstration that justifies the increased complexity over current methodology.

Interesting exploration of an unexplored space, but should be more concise (and use either better or no attempts at humour).

> In the Early world, you dissolve all the Early Components with interpret. This gives you a string that represents how to finish the computation in the Late world: [code]

> In the Late world, you parse that string, load the references, and then dissolve the Late Components with interpret. That leaves you with a tree of Primitives: [code]

> Finally, those Primitives are ready to be turned into DOM or some other format: [code]
by ryandrake | 2025-04-09 15:33:52+00:00
I don't think "careless" is a permanent, intrinsic attribute of a developer. It's something they learn to be, and it can be unlearned.

We respond to incentives. If a developer's only incentive is "we reward shipping as fast as possible" then they will carelessly ship slop as fast as they can type it. If that incentive is removed, they can learn a better way...
by pc86 | 2025-04-09 15:33:58+00:00
The problem is that for every example like yours where you run into very specific ORM edge cases, and seems completely reasonable, there are about 95 where a story like this is used as justification to spend months building something when a library would have actually worked out just fine and been implemented in weeks or days. And that running into these edge cases is used as justification for "throw the ORM out" not "don't use the ORM for this particular class of query."

One of my favorite features of Entity Framework from my .NET days is that it's very easy to just break out of the ORM functionality, even from within an EF-specific function, or to have multiple instances with slightly different configuration (I never had to do that last bit but I know it was possible a decade ago).
by volkk | 2025-04-09 15:34:36+00:00
is there anything super differentiating to this tool other than a nice UX on top of claude/chatgpt? don't get me wrong, this certainly has its merits/use cases, but like OP, i'm actually also looking for a tool that is a bit more interesting/advanced than nice CRUD on top of prompt engineering because I know how to write good prompts and am more than happy to use claude's tool to get stories/acceptance criteria written for me into csv format that I can drop into linear or something.

my more advanced use case would be an actual thought partner/cofounder that can go out and do laborious things like agentic researching through reddit, thinking through next steps on what we should work or even pivoting based on given market trends/conditions. i don't think anything like this exists that is actually good
by vintikzzzz | 2025-04-09 15:34:37+00:00
That’s a valid concern, and I’m aware of the risks involved.

Webtor is a tool, not a content provider — it doesn’t index or host anything itself. Users supply their own torrent or magnet links, and the system processes them on demand, like a torrent client with a browser interface.

That said, if someone uses the hosted version to stream content that triggers a copyright complaint — yes, I may receive a DMCA notice, and in that case I’ll take the content down as required.

This is also exactly why the project is fully open-source and self-hostable — anyone can run it privately, with full control and different legal boundaries depending on their jurisdiction.
by fhd2 | 2025-04-09 15:34:53+00:00
I can sort of relate. If you hire an expert, you need to trust them. If you don't like what they say, you're inclined to want a second opinion. Now you need to pay two experts, which is often not reasonable financially, or problematic when it comes to corporate politics. And even if you have two experts, what if they disagree, pay a third?

To manage this well, you need the courage to trust people, as well as the intelligence and patience to question them. Not everybody has that.

But that aside, I think business people generally like having (what they think are) strong experts. It means they can use their people skills and networks to create competitive advantage.
by the_snooze | 2025-04-09 15:35:25+00:00
>The only problem is taking into account those that are not good at public speaking.

A very common concern, but overblown in my experience. If you notice, I never actually said "judge the candidate's presentation skills" (or anything of the sort) in why I think this process is great. The presenation is really just level-setting; the candidate gets to set the topic and give sufficient context for a conversation to occur. The presentation is at most the first 15 minutes out of a ~3 hour in-person interview process. That's how little it matters.

It's the Q&A and subsequent discussions that matter.
by ben_w | 2025-04-09 15:35:30+00:00
Because phones are really useful.

I've got an old blackberry lying around somewhere. Even though that helps with "can you communicate at all with people not in shouting distance", there's a lot of stuff that just presumes you have the ability to install an app or visit a website — and that blackberry is so old that its web browser can't handle current standard HTTPS encryption.
by maxsilver | 2025-04-09 15:35:38+00:00
As someone who worked at a corporate-private-equity-owned Dollar store (but not DG, specifically), I highly doubt that's true.

They "manage stock on demand" in that they count SKUs sold and replenish as needed / as they have availability, sure. And they probably do a inventory / count day once in a while, to account for loss(shrink). But that's about it.

They might occasionally get to pick from a few custom options from the internal catalog, but they likely aren't doing any kind of active stock management, and store staff (even store managers) likely have close-to-zero direct influence over what is carried.