MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zubspace | 2025-05-24 11:14:12+00:00
Wouldn't it just solve a whole lot of problems if we could just add optional type declarations to json? It seems so simple and obvious that I'm kinda dumbfounded that this is not a thing yet. Most of the time you would not need it, but it would prevent the parser from making a wrong guess in all those edge cases.

Probably there are types not every parser/language can accept, but at least it could throw a meaningful error instead of guessing or even truncating the value.
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-05-24 11:14:32+00:00
> Wrappers rely on OpenAI. OpenAI relies on Microsoft. Microsoft needs NVIDIA. NVIDIA owns the chips that power it all

So this is the model that investors see. The reality is quite different. People and orgs are not stupid and want to avoid vendor lock-in.

So in reality:

* Wrapper don't only rely on OpenAI. In fact, in order to be competitive, they have to avoid OpenAI because it's terribly expensive. If they can get away with other models, the savings can be enormous as some of these can be 10x cheaper.

* Local models are a thing. You don't need proprietary models and API calls at all for certain uses. And these models get better and better each year.

* Nvidia is still the dominant player and this won't change in the next years but AMD is really making huge progress here. I don't mention TPUs as they seem to be much Google-specific.

* Microsoft is not in any special position here - I was implementing OpenAI API integrations with various API gateways and it's by no means something related to Azure only.

* OpenAI's business model is based on faith at this moment. This was debated ad nauseam so it makes no sense to repeat all arguments here but the fact is that they used to be the only one game in town, then the leader, and now are neither, but still claim to be.
by rft | 2025-05-24 11:14:38+00:00
DiodeGoneWild also has quite some of those: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfUGOPyKWwiriWhjmdtvj...

The worst has to be the charger without any isolation between mains and output: https://youtu.be/qTpVhNCot3Y?t=81

Edit: just to make it obvious, check the upload date for the second link
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-05-24 11:16:25+00:00
It's a shitty situation, and it seems unlikely that you will have a good path to monetize your work - and approaching it wrong can cost you your job.

If it's something that's specific to your company and there is no market outside it, you have one customer that at the same time has strong leverage over you due to your current employment.

If it's something that could be generally useful, you likely still don't have a market: if your product ever became popular, the big-name company selling the original software could add it as a feature or paid extension and would have a huge marketing advantage over you.

The company you currently work for will likely not be willing to pay much for your work, and might take offense and fire you if you try to negotiate too hard. They could also decide that your new job is writing this thing...

You could try to leverage it for a bonus or promotion or something like that. That's unlikely to capture a significant amount of the value you provide, but so are the other options.

If you think the idea in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44080196 will fly, you could try that. I think it's unlikely to fly but it's the option that likely pays out best if it does fly, and if you approach it carefully ("this is outside the scope of my role and my department, but I could do it in my free time"), you might be able to pull it off with limited risk.

You also need to understand how decision processes work at your company and optimize your proposal for it. If it's more work to get legal to approve the contract with you than to get approval to pay 10x as much to the original vendor to add something half as good as a feature, the vendor gets the job.
by oceanplexian | 2025-05-24 11:17:14+00:00
> Similarly, our grandparents lived pretty terrible lives in many ways.

Our ancestors also had more children, less rates of depression and mental illness and the modern rates of socialization, marriage, etc are all in steep decline.

Therefore maybe the cardboard box apartment, transient friends, and access to all that nightlife isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. While we’re a lot richer and more well off it doesn’t seem like people are happier.
by rjmill | 2025-05-24 11:17:40+00:00
Goodness, yes. The last time I put (genuinely constructive) criticism in a peer evaluation, it turned out to be the only non-positive thing that was said about that coworker. So it became a focus of his yearly review.

He later told me about how his review went (casually at a conference; he had no idea I was the source), and I fessed up and clarified what I actually meant. The HR process had twisted it to a much more extreme version of what I was getting at, completely undermining the utility of the feedback.

Nowadays, I'm just gonna give perfect scores and if I have feedback that needs to be given, I'll just tell the coworker directly. (And if I'm not comfortable doing that, then the feedback probably isn't important enough.)
by lylejantzi3rd | 2025-05-24 11:20:13+00:00
I had a similar issue, but I chose to solve it another way.

I connected both computers directly to the monitor and used lunar[0] to use a keyboard command to switch inputs. I then used a Deskhop[1][2] to share the KB and mouse between both computers.

It sounds awful, but in practice it was surprisingly nice. My monitor (LG Ultragear+) switches inputs fairly quickly. The process was something like this: hit the keyboard shortcut, then move the mouse off the left side of the screen. To go back, you reverse it: move the mouse off the right side of the screen and hit the keyboard shortcut.

[0]: https://lunar.fyi/

[1]: https://github.com/hrvach/deskhop

[2]: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1763041320/deskhop-jr-keyboard-...
by Rebelgecko | 2025-05-24 11:21:14+00:00
This video dives deep into a faulty 120W GaN charger, exploring its intricate design and uncovering the source of the failure. The video details the process of disassembling the charger, revealing its complex circuitry and identifying various components like the GaN transistors and the printed transformer. The investigation concludes with a surprising discovery about the cause of the malfunction.
by chiph | 2025-05-24 11:22:05+00:00
Dave Plummer went through this while at Microsoft. He had a product he was selling (a shell extension to handle ZIP files) and got a call out of the blue from a M&A person at Microsoft wanting to talk about purchasing it. It got strange when he told them he would walk over to their office to discuss it.

He said he pretty much took their first offer as he didn't want to endanger his position at the company.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j0yI41e0j4
by noduerme | 2025-05-24 11:22:06+00:00
Mentioning that you negotiated to keep your code from falling under "works for hire" does a lot of heavy lifting in this (very well packed) example. I recommend that the OP dig into what "works for hire" means in the US to get a sense of what they should negotiate [to avoid].

It can definitely be a win/win for the company as well as for an enterprising engineer. The general idea is simply to go outside the scope of your contract and do something the company didn't ask for, in exchange for a bit of money and the right to reuse whatever code you developed for them.

Avoiding works for hire contracts is how I built a 25 year war chest of reusable components and frameworks, each piece commissioned to an individual task but each used and modified in my next jobs for my next clients, until many versions later I would update my original clients with them.

My advice to OP is to always present your ideas to owners or managers with open ears, and explain how it will help the company. Secondly, never do the work for free. Thirdly, always retain your rights to your ideas and your code when you're working on something creative. If they have a problem with that you can also explain that it's unlikely anyone else will either fill this niche to save them money or that any competitor will ever actually know about or use what you will build for them, but that having it at your disposal is a way for you to continue increasing their efficiency (which is true). It's also a way to make them beholden to you at very little initial cost.
by imadj | 2025-05-24 11:22:24+00:00
Interesting. It's ~likely possible.~

I need to investigate what kind of mutations the other extension is doing to HN interface and figure out a way to be compatible with it on top of the native one.

I opened a GitHub issue if you're interested in following the status there: https://github.com/imdj/HNRelevant/issues/24

UPDATE: Based on initial look it seems that the 'Modern for Hacker News' extension completely restructures the DOM and uses its own class names. If someone have suggestions to be compatible with different designs, I'm down to do it.
by thebruce87m | 2025-05-24 11:23:09+00:00
Removing vegetation seems like a harder problem than buildings. Buildings generally have cuboids and other standard shapes, but how do you determine the difference between small trees, big trees, bracken etc?

It the Scotland we have heather that can coat hills but I’m not sure that you’d be able to tell the difference between that and a forest canopy to assume a height and then subtract. Maybe there’s more than the point cloud to work with.
by npodbielski | 2025-05-24 11:23:43+00:00
I am sitting in front of PC probably around 10hours a day and drink and sit rest of my day (excluding sleep) and still it is not a big deal for me to have a 7km walk to the city or back is not a big deal.

I think in US it just cultural. "You are walking?! With your feet?! How?!". Unless you more likely to get shot walking via some neighbourhood I can't understand that.
by glimshe | 2025-05-24 11:23:44+00:00
Most of the negative reactions to GenAI graphical content is for images used "as is". I've seen artists using GenAI content who process, compose and enhance what comes out of the AI for truly striking results.

We'll soon have artists whose skills will be more similar to editors than content generators. People who will be good at selecting the good parts of AI content while cutting out the bad ones.
by abenga | 2025-05-24 11:25:43+00:00
I have seen several. One interesting one was a "how I became an airline pilot at 21" video where the (obviously smart and hard working) young man talked about a life where he went to a high school with an aviation club, interning at an airline while in high school where THE CEO took personal interest in him and gave him one-on-one coaching. "Have rich parents" was not one of the steps explicitly but it was a massive part of the subtext.
by diggan | 2025-05-24 11:26:26+00:00
When for-profit companies write "Democratizes X for all" it means "for people who can pay and aren't embargoed". When they write "Simplify" it means "Get locked in to our ecosystem". When they write "Your favorite X" it means "The product we're selling to you", and so on.

Once you start reading press releases with this business-dictionary, it gets a lot easier to just close the tab and move on.
by delichon | 2025-05-24 11:28:22+00:00
> Local models are a thing. You don't need proprietary models and API calls at all for certain uses. And these models get better and better each year.

They are getting better so fast that I'm considering building a business that depends on much lower cost LLM inference. So betting years of effort on it.

But the bet is also that the proprietary models won't run away with faster improvements that make local models uncompetitive even while they improve. Can the local models keep up? They seem to be closing the gap now. Is that the rule or an artifact of the early development phase?

The safer plan may be to pass the inference cost through to the user and let them pick premium or budget models according to their need almost per request, as Zed editor does now.
by mkup | 2025-05-24 11:28:53+00:00
Could you please provide more info on this topic, e.g. a link? I intended to buy EV code signing certificate as a sole proprietor to fix long-standing problem with my software when Windows Defender pops up every time I release a new version. Is EV code signing certificate no longer a viable solution to this problem? Is there no longer a difference between EV and non-EV code signing certificate?
by pornel | 2025-05-24 11:29:17+00:00
For very big numbers (that could appear in these fields), generating and parsing a base 10 decimal representation is way more cumbersome than using their binary representation.

The DER encoding used in the TLS certificates uses the big endian binary format. OpenSSL API wants the big endian binary too.

The format used by this protocol is a simple one.

It's almost exactly the format that is needed to use these numbers, except JSON can't store binary data directly. Converting binary to base 64 is a simple operation (just bit twiddling, no division), and it's easier than converting arbitrarily large numbers between base 2 and base 10. The 17-bit value happens to be an easy one, but other values may need thousands of bits.

It would be silly for the sender and recipient to need to use a BigNum library when the sender has the bytes and the recipient wants the bytes, and neither has use for a decimal number.
by jtougas | 2025-05-24 11:29:58+00:00
I used Azure Data Studio with SQL Server for a while—decent, but still clunky. I believe this plugin is the evolution of that, so it’s probably solid too—but can't beat out what I'm currently using since it targets only Postgres.

It’s going to be tough to beat SQLTools for Sublime Text (https://code.mteixeira.dev/SublimeText-SQLTools/). It’s simple, fast, does the basics right, and crucially, works for many of the usual suspects.

Most IDEs try to do everything and fail, yet only target one db vendor. They’re _all_ bloated and buggy, with endless trees and menus, bells and whistles. Results grids are slow, copy/paste is janky, formatting is never quite right—or outright misleading.

SQLTools stays out of the way and just works.

...also, I don’t want AI-powered nonsense. I’ll reach for that when I need it. Get off my lawn.
by chachacharge | 2025-05-24 11:31:06+00:00
dyson is hot garbage. whenever i dry hands on their hand dryer it blows water back onto my body, my clothes, etc, making water stains on my expensive clothing. their vacuum cleaner air outlet blows air directly onto my arm (gross) and much more dumb dumb design... and now we have a pencil vac that requires a whacking motion to clean. nasty. does mr garrison design all their products?
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-05-24 11:31:31+00:00
Yeah I stole the link for this submission from your comment[0] as it's extremely useful and I wanted to make sure I don't lose it. I need to do a diagram every couple of months and I hate GUI-only tools, and the ones I used in the past seem to be no longer maintained. Also, some of these do just one job well, so for a different type of diagram I need to look for another tool. Your list is a nice summary, thank you.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44077684
by codingdave | 2025-05-24 11:32:00+00:00
You sound like you want to be an entrepreneur, but are stuck working in a corporation. Because the corporate answer is: "Seeing and working on improving your organization is already part of your job. Talk to management and get a project rolling." Do it well, get promotions and raises. And then the entrepreneurial answer is to skip all that, go build it yourself, then sell it to many organizations. But you probably cannot do that as an employee, depending on your employment contract.

So sure, the surface levels answers are to talk to a lawyer, your manager, etc. But the deeper answer is to decide on and commit to a direction - are you happy being an employee, or do you need to walk out and start your own thing?

(And as a side note, don't build a startup that is a front-end to someone else's product. It may fill a need, but you are going to be spending all your hours keeping up with their changes, and ultimately your success is tied to their decisions and they could wipe you out just by spending a month improving their UX.)
by ivanbakel | 2025-05-24 11:32:40+00:00
I doubt that would fix the issue. The real cause is that programmers mostly deal in fixed-size integers, and that’s how they think of integer values, since those are the concepts their languages provide. If you’re going to write a JSON library for your favourite programming language, you’re going to reach for whatever ints are the default, regardless of what the specs or type hints suggest.

Haskell’s Aeson library is one of the few exceptions I’ve seen, since it only parses numbers to ‘Scientific’s (essentially a kind of bigint for rationals.) This makes the API very safe, but also incredibly annoying to use if you want to just munge some integers, since you’re forced to handle the error case of the unbounded values not fitting in your fixed-size integer values.

Most programmers likely simply either don’t consider that case, or don’t want to have to deal with it, so bad JSON libraries are the default.
by marcinuio | 2025-05-24 11:32:40+00:00
You know that person who asks 4x if there are nuts in the cookies? - that’s me.

Not because I’m picky, just trying not to die in your living room.

So here’s the deal:

You set your allergens or any food sensitivites Upload or snap a pic of any food label The app analyzes and translates it if needed (even Japanese) Detects allergens & tells you if it’s safe to eat

Amazing, right?

I’ll be cleaning up some UI bugs, improving the analysis screen animation, publishing (learning) to the App Store soon.

https://allergy-scanner.created.app
by layer8 | 2025-05-24 11:33:18+00:00
Focus on what you're good at. Don't switch fields just because of a vague fear that your job will become obsolete (it won't; instead it will evolve). Understand the rough basics of how LLMs fundamentally work (e.g. 3Blue1Brown's videos). Evaluate and use AI as a tool, and get a general feel for what it can and can't do. Even that can become too much of a rabbit hole. Today's prompt engineering and AI workflow techniques may become obsolete in just a few years, and there is a risk in getting caught up in the month-to-month AI tooling developments. Successful techniques will spread quickly enough. Currently people still do a lot of experimenting to find out what's workable.
by DecoPerson | 2025-05-24 11:34:19+00:00
If it’s outside your job description, you’re not obliged to do anything.

You’re not a slave. You can say no to your boss. You’re on equal footing (though your boss generally has more power/wealth so can bully/manipulate you). It’s up to your boss as to what they do when you say no. If you’re a good employee when it comes to your usual responsibilities, then they’ll keep you.

If your boss tells you to write software as part of your job and you’re not a software engineer, you can tell them to get stuffed (or sign the contract and both parties benefit!).

Edit: I just re-read the original post and saw that the OP is a software engineer. Ignore everything I said. This sounds like a terrible idea. You’ll burn all your bridges if you pursue this avenue.
by pornel | 2025-05-24 11:37:32+00:00
The numbers are sent in this peculiar format, because that's how they are stored in the certificates (DER encoding in x509 uses big endian binary), and that's the number format that OpenSSL API uses too.

It looks silly for a small value like 65537, but the protocol also needs to handle numbers that are thousands of bits long. It makes sense to consistently use the same format for all numbers instead of special-casing small values.
by stranded22 | 2025-05-24 11:38:51+00:00
Whilst I liked some of the article, I got very bored with the structure and after about half way, I skimmmed it.

If you are going to write about AI companies going to be extinct next year, could you please write it without the use of AI? It turned very formulaic.

And the fact it was calling something a scam because it was packaged up? That’s the same as anything that’s packaged - may as well buy 6 apples and take home to wash/cut rather than the prepackaged/cut ones.

Some thought provoking ideas though - spoiling by the link to get early access to a local AI
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-05-24 11:38:51+00:00
> The reason mobile devices scaled so rapidly is that calling a specific person (wherever they are) is so much more useful than calling a physical location.

True, and then the next revolution was smartphones, with the iPhone being the first.

Steve Job's product launch highlighted the huge utility delta, which made all prior "feature phones" obsolete overnight.

"We're introducing THREE new products: a phone, a music player, and an internet communications device" ... which of course was 3-in-1 - the iPhone.

Raising the bar now becomes extremely difficult because the smartphone is a general purpose internet/wifi connected computer, chock full of sensors from cameras to microphone, etc. Now with local AI-acceleration as well.

What can a new device do that a general purpose computer in your pocket cannot?
by worthless-trash | 2025-05-24 11:39:05+00:00
I believe kABI is becoming less and less valuable over time.

> Especially when RHEL derivatives might not offer the same guarantees.

They do not, as you likely have experienced.

> Honestly, I'm not sure who kABI is even designed for.

You make it work once, using the accepted kabi's and then not have to worry about updating your drivers (You likely know this).

Some customers and systems are very change adverse, almost any change is too much for them.
Show HN: I made a cheaper alternative to customer support AI agents
by ethink | 2025-05-24 11:40:09+00:00
Hello, I'm Ezz. I left my full-time data engineering job 3 years ago and then got into freelancing.

Saw an opportunity on Upwork until I gained the Top-Rated Plus badge. Then I got almost zero customers for several months.

I knew that it was my fault since I used Upwork as my only channel to support my family. I didn't lose hope and I applied more proposals until I saw a Saudi client who's interested in building a WhatsApp-based AI chatbot for his hotel. He accepted my proposal and interviewed me and got the offer.

I was so happy and I told myself I'd never be at the same '5-month no money' situation as before.

So I started building Sadiq Agent alongside my gig. It's an AI agent customer support for websites.

I'm not saying it's the best AI agent support tool out there because this is just the beginning. But if you just need a chatbot embedded into your website that can retrieve knowledge base from your documents (or your website URLs), Sadiq Agent is THE tool that you need.

If you want just a tool that can reduce the stress of your customer service reps asking very boring repetitive questions, Sadiq Agent is THE tool you need.

If you want just a tool that can turn your conversations with customers into booked meetings 24/7, Sadiq Agent is THE tool.

That's why it's a lot cheaper than the alternatives. You get start for free and I'm all ears. Your feedback is much appreciated.

P.S. sorry guys, the free plan is not very generous b/c I'm very tight in budget