MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-28 15:19:02+00:00
It feels particularly bad if these capabilities come as part of one’s natural state.

I don’t think I’m an exceptional programmer or anything like that for example (on a whole I’d say I’m average), but the ability to keep a codebase in my head just kind of appeared after hitting a certain threshold of experience. It’s not something I intentionally developed. To meet social expectations, what am I supposed to do, pretend I don’t have that capability and handicap myself, ultimately making my workday harder? That doesn’t make any sense.
by specialist | 2025-05-28 15:19:14+00:00
My bro was (is?) a gambler. As kids, I'd tag along for giggles. We definitely spied the parade ring. Which horse was most like a wound up spring? Which horses defecated/urinate immediately prior?

It was fun pretending we had insight.

My farm-boy father never bet on the horses, certain it was all rigged.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-05-28 15:19:20+00:00
I tried Minix as my first unix-like, which had similar limitations. But was used to Commodore and DOS so it felt more advanced. Linux was still a year or so away.

I remember the thrill of multitasking at the command line for the first time with &, blew my mind. :-D

Can’t remember how I obtained Minix before having access to the internet. Maybe downloaded from a BBS? Or possibly an instructor had a copy on floppy.
by PeterStuer | 2025-05-28 15:19:29+00:00
At least over here, the Apple II was in a different segment from the hobby computing scene. You'd find that in reputable office equipment stores, together with t he likes of the Osbourne etc.. It was out of the pricerange of 99% of the hobbyists that made do with brands such as Sinclair and Comodore at less than a fifth of the price.
by pantalaimon | 2025-05-28 15:19:34+00:00
> They are non-falsifiable and are just stories.

It makes a falsifiable prediction:

> What’s novel in my theory is the idea that all the supermassive black holes must form first, by direct collapse – before galaxies form, and indeed before there’s any significant number of stars, or (probably) any stars at all. This emerges directly from the application of Darwinian evolutionary logic to universes. It’s not predicted by any other theory, and if I’m wrong, my theory wobbles badly and a wheel falls off. So the theory is falsifiable.

And in the other post

> Most of the first generation of stars will, if I am right, contain traces of carbon at formation, because early quasars make it by fusion and distribute it into the clouds to seed star formation. And such stars will therefore be relatively efficient at fusion, element formation, etc. (They will still be very low in carbon, and other elements such as oxygen, relative to later stars; but not completely lacking, as Population III stars are theorised to be.)

with more predictions: https://theeggandtherock.com/p/predictions-what-the-james-we...
by nthingtohide | 2025-05-28 15:20:33+00:00
The Who Cares Inception.

> As Elon Musk's DOGE rats gnaw their way through federal agencies, not caring is their guiding light.

He wouldn't have used this wording if he had actually spent sometime on understanding how wasteful the previous governments have been. So in a sense, Elon was correcting the previous Who Cares mistakes and not actually committing new Who Cares mistakes. This shows that even Dan doesn't care enough to ground his opinions in facts.
by 1dom | 2025-05-28 15:20:45+00:00
I read the title and it triggered something I've been thinking a lot lately: there's too much for everyone to care about right now. Article didn't really touch on it directly, but:

> something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later.

It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit. There isn't the required amount of caring available in the average human any more, and caring is needed for standards to be maintained.

15 years ago, the world was in awe that stuxnet, a cyber attack, had impacted the real world. I was in cyber at the time, and the idea that day to day lives of normal people would be impacted in the real world was like Hollywood fiction: unthinkable.

A few weeks ago, I didn't even notice the reason my local big brand store shelves were empty was because of a cyberattack. It was a week later I saw the article explaining it on BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg4zrpk5p7o

I feel like a cynical old man, but I'm sure most here will relate - the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us thought we were working to create.
by superkuh | 2025-05-28 15:20:47+00:00
Pretty much the only way to use google search as an HTML webpage instead of a JS web application these days. It's great. It reminds me of the scroogle.com proxy days.

I use it for all but my retro machines, which is a shame. I know Mullvad is a 'privacy' company but I really wish they'd acknowledge that HTTP+HTTPS is more robust to governments' censorship than centralized CA TLS only. HTTP+HTTPS would allow my non-bleeding edge TLS retro machines to search again.
by ElectricalUnion | 2025-05-28 15:21:18+00:00
The conda ecosystem was a early adopter of standardized binary packages.

Now it's mostly behind us, but there used to be a time where pypi didn't have wheels (a 2012 thing), or manylinux wheels (a 2016 thing) for most libraries. pip install was a world of pain if you didn't have the "correct source packages" in your system.

And now several of those projects built back then, they're no longer projects but deployed systems, might as well stick to what is working.
by krschultz | 2025-05-28 15:22:43+00:00
You don't make breaking changes. You provide the new API and the old API at the same time, and absorb the additional complexity as the library owner. Best case scenario everyone migrates to the new API and eventually remove the old one. This sounds onerous, but keep in mind at a certain scale there is no one commit in production at any given time. You could never roll out an atomic breaking change anyway, so going through this process is a reflection of the actual complexity involved.
by _shadi | 2025-05-28 15:22:45+00:00
I might have not been clear in my original reply, I don't have this problem when using an LLM myself, I sometimes notice this when I review code by new joiners that was written with the help of an LLM, the code quality is usually ok unless I want to be pedantic, but sometimes the agent helper make new comers dig themselves deeper in the wrong approach while if they asked a human coworker they would probably have noticed that the solution is going the wrong way from the start, which touches on what the original article is about, I don't know if that is incompetence acceleration, but if used wrong or maybe not in a clear directed way, it can produce something that works but has monstrous unneeded complexity.
by saubeidl | 2025-05-28 15:22:55+00:00
The solution to this is worker's self-management, an economic model that was pioneered by Yugoslavia, but has mostly disappeared with its dismantlement.

Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market.

This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.
by acheron | 2025-05-28 15:23:05+00:00
I don't think so. My dad worked for a consulting firm ("Big Eight" as they called it back then) in the early-mid 80s and as far as I can tell his job mainly involved slinging Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets on PCs. PCs very quickly infiltrated business starting in the 80s and had already left the exclusive "community of hobbyists".
by GMoromisato | 2025-05-28 15:23:25+00:00
Empirically, you're right. Starship has taken much longer than F9 just to reliably put something in orbit.

What I don't know--because I'm not in the field--is whether that's because of design complexity (size, need for header tanks, etc.) or because the Starship team is not as tight (larger team, weaker leaders, distracted Musk).

Maybe both.
by cleak | 2025-05-28 15:23:33+00:00
The book Smarter Faster Better introduced me to the concept of disfluency - the idea that extra friction such as awkward fonts, new environments, different tools, etc will pull you out of autopilot mode and force you to think in new ways. I haven’t seen references to it elsewhere, but it’s changed how I approach problems and learning the last 9 years. Switching to a notebook is one great way I use to trigger this as well.
by immibis | 2025-05-28 15:24:00+00:00
I've been blocking a few scrapers from my gitea service - not because it's overloaded, more just to see what happens. They're not getting good data from <repo>/commit/<every sha256 in the repo>/<every file path in the repo> anyway. If they actually wanted the data they could run "git clone".

I just checked, since someone was talking about scraping in IRC earlier. Facebook is sending me about 3 requests per second. I blocked their user-agent. Someone with a Googlebot user-agent is doing the same stupid scraping pattern, and I'm not blocking it. Someone else is sending a request every 5 seconds with

One thing that's interesting on the current web is that sites are expected to make themselves scrapeable. It's supposed to be my job to organize the site in such a way that scrapers don't try to scrape every combination of commit and file path.
by bsaul | 2025-05-28 15:24:01+00:00
"…we would never look to linguistic competence".

On the contrary, i strongly believe that what LLM proved is the fact linguists have always told us about : that the language provides a structure on top of which we're building our experience of concepts (Sapir whorf hypothesis).

I don't think one can conceptualize much without the use of a language.
by michaelrpeskin | 2025-05-28 15:24:02+00:00
This parallels an article that someone I follow wrote a couple of weeks ago. His way of describing this is the "second world effect". The article is better than I could write (link below). But basically, the "third world" is a low-trust society and everyone understands that and behaves in a defensive way. The "first world" is a high-trust society where things work. There is a discontinuous jump from third to first world once the culture has enough high-trust built in. But if the first world devolves back to low-trust, it doesn't go back to third world, it transitions to "second world" where things look like the first world, but nothing works any more because it's low-trust, but the society hasn't really recognized that.

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-second-world
Show HN: Wombcore 3K – Procedural Sound Machine for Baby Sleep (No Audio Files)
by bobnarizes | 2025-05-28 15:24:10+00:00
I built Wombcore 3000, a web-based sound machine to soothe babies using pure Web Audio API—no external sound files, libraries, or build steps. It generates calming sounds like white/brown noise, heartbeat, ocean waves, and a gentle lullaby in real-time. Features include:

- Sleep timer (15/30/60 min) - Background audio support on mobile - Volume control - Fully responsive - 100% client-side – just open index.html

Live demo & source: https://github.com/taranntell/wombcore3000

Would love feedback on performance, sound realism, or ideas for new features. Thanks!

BTW: The web app continues playing sounds in the background on Android even after locking the screen. On iOS, this doesn’t work due to JavaScript execution being suspended when the device is locked.
by doug_durham | 2025-05-28 15:24:31+00:00
Great points. The only reason that Civil Engineering isn't like software engineering is because of cost and legal regulations. It costs only labor to change software. If there were robotic workers and plentiful energy and materials you'd better believe that bridges would be getting refactored all of the time.

Also bridges are never done. They are continually inspected and refurbished. Every bridge you build has an on-going cost. Just like software.
by avastel | 2025-05-28 15:24:45+00:00
Reposting a similar point I made recently about CAPTCHA and scalpers, but it’s even more relevant for scrapers.

PoW can help against basic scrapers or DDoS, but it won’t stop anyone serious. Last week I looked into a Binance CAPTCHA solver that didn’t use a browser at all, just a plain HTTP client. https://blog.castle.io/what-a-binance-captcha-solver-tells-u...

The attacker had fully reverse engineered the signal collection and solved-state flow, including obfuscated parts. They could forge all the expected telemetry.

This kind of setup is pretty standard in bot-heavy environments like ticketing or sneaker drops. Scrapers often do the same to cut costs. CAPTCHA and PoW mostly become signal collection protocols, if those signals aren’t tightly coupled to the actual runtime, they get spoofed.

And regarding PoW: if you try to make it slow enough to hurt bots, you also hurt users on low-end devices. Someone even ported PerimeterX’s PoW to CUDA to accelerate solving: https://github.com/re-jevi/PerimiterXCudaSolver/blob/main/po...
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-05-28 15:24:45+00:00
Just to add to the above for clarity a proof that key based encryption isn't reversible requires a proof of P!=NP which hasn't been done.

That may surprise people but we have no proof of the robustness of the encryption we use. In fact it might not work! Consider a one time pad for really extreme security needs. One time pads do have a proof (see the work of Shannon).
by adjfasn47573 | 2025-05-28 15:24:57+00:00
I think your comment comes from a very specific point of view. Like software/tech jobs. (Even there you have long term stuff that we all would definitely benefit from).

There are so many things where short-term only thinking is counter-productive. It swallows money, creates frustration and leaves an overall net-negative to society and the world.

Just one example would be city planning. Repairing a road? What else is there like fiber cables, maybe some tram tracks, and so on, long term planning would be to acquire a holistic picture and to plan one timespan where everything is done fast but with quality. It’s a few months construction, after that everything is fine for years or even a few decades to come. But what you see instead is one part of the state that manages fiber cables doing there own thing, another part that manages street quality do their own thing. So the street has a construction site for a year (for just improving one part) then a few months nothing then another year of construction again, nothing, construction and soon you have over a decade of constant on and off construction work on this one street. Something that could’ve been done in 6-12 months once and be done, if planned correctly and with long term and holistic picture in mind.

And this is just one example. The world is full of stuff like this. Short term might be a good thing for very specific types of projects, but I hard disagree that short term is overall better in any way.

In my opinion this shortterm thinking is a huge negative factor of modern societies. Because not everything is a tech startup where things change super fast.
by squigz | 2025-05-28 15:25:42+00:00
> Hard work, humility, respect for others were actively inculcated into the growing generation.

Sure, and then, after we started getting more "external influences", we all realized that "hard work" isn't going to get us anywhere.

It's really easy to blame this on some kind of change in individual values - kids these days don't respect hard work, etc. It's harder to come to terms with the idea that maybe those values were a lie - or, perhaps a better way of putting it, a coping mechanism - in order to keep us placated with the status quo. Now we're really starting to wake up to the fact that employers do not reward things like hard work or loyalty. So why keep up the pretense?

Unfortunately this does indeed result in this issue - a lack of caring. But I don't think we're going to get people to care again by appealing to those older values.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-05-28 15:25:47+00:00
A network file system with a database which can be done with a PC and sqlite, but you need a new term to sell the new thing so now it's data lake and data warehouse and 'blob storage'. How are the 'blobs' stored? Probably with blocks of a constant size linked together to form the the 'full blob'. If this sounds like file systems invented 50 years ago, you just don't understand, the difference is that this is very expensive.
by theptip | 2025-05-28 15:26:52+00:00
“Who cares” is one way to frame it, perhaps a bit blame-y.

I view this as more epistemically significant, it’s the Post-Truth era. Politics and national discourse has been heading this way for some time, but now AI may mean that nobody can distinguish truth from falsehood, at least for online content.

We need new methods for attesting and chaining trust.
by cma | 2025-05-28 15:26:58+00:00
Changed it to use thinking in the followup, I don't think this is considered hand holding since original answer is probably what most people wanted, and it did give the clarification to them right away:

> Who won the 46th presidential election

Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, defeating Kamala Harris. He was inaugurated as the 47th president on January 20, 2025.

Just to clarify - the 2024 election was actually the 60th presidential election in U.S. history, not the 46th. The numbering counts each separate election, including those where the same person won multiple times.

> Think hard. Who won the actual 46th election in line with your clarification?

You're absolutely right to push me to think more carefully about this. Let me work through the numbering systematically.

If the 2024 election was the 60th presidential election, then counting backwards:

60th: 2024 59th: 2020 58th: 2016 57th: 2012 56th: 2008 55th: 2004 54th: 2000 53rd: 1996 52nd: 1992 51st: 1988 50th: 1984 49th: 1980 48th: 1976 47th: 1972 46th: 1968 The 46th presidential election was in 1968, which was won by Richard Nixon, defeating Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace.
by ge96 | 2025-05-28 15:27:03+00:00
I remember when I was in college 10 years ago they did this grade curving thing and it made me feel bad like my achievement was masked since people that did poorly were lifted or the other way, I thought I should have failed but I passed

I am lucky that I picked up programming because I initially studied physics/engineering and I used to able to do math but now I can't anymore and my focus sucks. Writing code to me is way easier than doing math.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-28 15:27:17+00:00
GE [1]? Boeing [2] [3]? The stocks go up because management and shareholders pull forward the gains as financialization destroys the long term value of the enterprises. Works until it doesn't.

[1] Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102034 - May 2025

[2] Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed - https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/boeing-corporate-... - April 9th, 2024

[3] HN Search: Boeing - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
by ignoramous | 2025-05-28 15:27:32+00:00
> This is surprising ... as it just provides marginal privacy improvements.

Diskless does not mean SSH-less or network-less. The "data" can be pulled / pushed just the same, which is to say, Diskless, in this case, is no better than verifiably read-only partitions (like on ChromeOS & Android, for example).
Show HN: Sequor – dbt for API Integration
by maxgrinev | 2025-05-28 15:27:38+00:00
Hey HN!

We built Sequor to solve a recurring problem: choosing between two bad options for API/app integration:

1. Proprietary black-box SaaS connectors with vendor lock-in

2. Custom scripts that are brittle, opaque, and hard to maintain

Sequor is a SQL-centric workflow framework for building reliable API integrations in modern data stacks — code-first, declarative, and version-controlled. It’s an open source alternative to SaaS connectors, giving data teams full control over their integration pipelines.

Sequor combines SQL with HTTP request handling — think dbt for API integration, but with explicit flow control:

• Iterate over input tables to make parameterized API calls

• Parse and map JSON responses back into database tables

• Use SQL for logic, YAML for flows, and Jinja/Python for dynamic behavior

• Works equally well for data extraction, reverse ETL, and iPaaS-style end-to-end automation

• Git-friendly, no drag-and-drop UIs

Our goal was to bring software engineering best practices to integration workflows — without proprietary environments or vendor lock-in.

Think of Sequor as your integration foundation, not your ceiling. We provide the proven patterns — you build the custom connectors that match your data flows and business logic.

We’d love your feedback, ideas, and contributions.

Website: https://sequor.dev — with code examples

Quickstart: https://docs.sequor.dev/getting-started/quickstart

GitHub: https://github.com/paloaltodatabases/sequor

Prebuilt integrations: https://github.com/paloaltodatabases/sequor-integrations
Show HN: Tesseral – Open-Source Auth
by ucarion | 2025-05-28 15:27:42+00:00
Hi folks! I'm Ulysse, and Tesseral (https://github.com/tesseral-labs/tesseral) is open-source auth for B2B SaaS.

Early in my career, I worked on enterprise auth and security features at Segment. I've been obsessed with the subtle details of enterprise software ever since. For example, I wrote an implementation of SAML in the early days of the COVID pandemic because I thought it was fun.

Over the years, I've felt frustrated that too few people have seemed interested in making auth obvious for developers of business software. Auth really doesn't need to be so confusing.

We made Tesseral to help software engineers get B2B auth exactly right – and focus their energy on building the features that users want.

You can use Tesseral to stand up a login page, authenticate your users, and manage their access to resources. Think of it like Auth0 or Clerk, but open source and built specifically for B2B apps. Among other things, that means that it’s designed for B2B multi-tenancy and includes enterprise-ready features like single sign-on (SAML SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), SCIM provisioning, and role-based access control (RBAC).

For those who expose public APIs, you can use Tesseral to manage API keys for your customers. You can even limit the scope of API keys to specific actions by using our RBAC feature.

We've taken care to make Tesseral powerful and secure enough to power real enterprise software but still leave it simple enough for any software developer to use. You don't have to be a security expert to implement Tesseral. (By default, therefore, Tesseral imposes a few opinions. Let us know if you have a good reason to do something unusual, and we'll work something out.)

If you want to experiment with Tesseral, you can host it yourself or use our hosted service. The hosted service lives at https://console.tesseral.com. You can find documentation here: https://tesseral.com/docs.

Here are a few simple demos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhYPzz3vB54

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-JJ8TNjqNU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwthBIRZO8k

We're in the early stages of the project, so we still have some gaps. We have more features, bug fixes, SDKs, and documentation on the way.

What have we missed? What can we do better? We're eager to hear from the community!