MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Peek – an AI "Spotify wrapped" for your money
by sherryyjiang48 | 2025-05-05 14:02:53+00:00
hey hn –

mint is gone, the clones feel like bloatware, and afaict every “personal finance” app still assumes you love staring at pie charts for fun. i don’t.

so i built peek.

- ai-first: an ai agent does the number-crunching and pings you with bite-sized nudges instead of guilt-trips

- habit loop > dashboard: get weekly “wrapped”-style digests that actually push you towards forming new positive habits, not just remind you you spent too much on coffee

- mobile-only rn (ios) bc that’s where gen z actually lives

link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/peek-ai-personal-finance-app/i...

would love honest feedback – performance, ux, skeptical takes, whatever. tear it apart. i’ll be here in the thread.
by metronomer | 2025-05-05 14:03:51+00:00
tbh that's in mostly an exaggeration, specially among new gens who tend to do more quick lunchs and take-aways. Even though we have lunch significantly later than the european average (I'd even say closer to 2pm or even up to 3pm rather than 1pm), something that somewhat awkwardly here I agree it's excessive, I doubt anyone (unless they're exploiting the cultural-difference thing and somehow it's working) stays until 5pm lunchin' midweek. Perhaps it may only be applicable in the context of the weekend (when lots of gatherings at bars and tapa overdoses for who-knows-how much time happen), but overall for at least 5 out of 7 days a week that's an oversimplification.
by xivzgrev | 2025-05-05 14:04:00+00:00
I tend to forget a lot of things, especially good things. Photos help me remember. What did we do for Mother’s Day last year? Remember how small our kid used to be? Photos remind us.

It’s a balance. Recently I was taking a video of my son at the beach. He noticed and said “no phone dad”. I laughed and put it away.

Btw I also got a photo of our son being born during c section. the anesthesiologist offered to take it. So I got best of both worlds: got to be fully present when the curtain dropped and we first saw our son, and got a once in a lifetime photo for him.
by necovek | 2025-05-05 14:04:20+00:00
For a teacher, they want to see you spend those 3h to see what you come up with, and if there's something they should direct your attention to, or something they should change in their instruction.

But ultimately, getting the concise summary for a complex topic (like SLIs and SLOs are) is brilliant, but would be even better if it was full of back-links to deeper dives around the Internet and the SRE book.
by bishmdl76 | 2025-05-05 14:04:21+00:00
We’re building a new investing platform that feels like a trading app on the surface—but under the hood, it’s powered by a fully autonomous AI that picks stocks and makes trades for you.

The goal: maximize your returns without the daily stress of timing the market.

Our backtests (from 2005-2025) show consistent outperformance over SPY by a good margin. It’s still early—we’re not launched yet—but we’re opening up our waitlist.

We’d love feedback, questions, or just curious folks to sign up: https://xvarx.com

Happy to answer anything about the AI/model/backtests or product direction!
by coldpie | 2025-05-05 14:04:22+00:00
> That's...a pretty strong opinion.

If you're a person who uses cash a lot, the comments you hear do start to feel a bit like hazing. You very often hear jokes like "who uses cash anymore?" both directed at you and not, like you're a crazy person for preferring not to support Visa's advertising empire with a ~1-3% tithe on every purchase.
by maxlybbert | 2025-05-05 14:05:07+00:00
I believe the current rules ( https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp ) require the schools to make some effort to avoid certain allergens.

When my children were in school, their school said that anybody who didn’t have lunch would be given a “sun butter” sandwich and food from the cafeteria. I wasn’t familiar with sun butter; it’s peanut butter made from sunflower seeds, because people allergic to peanuts may not be allergic to sunflower seeds.
by HillRat | 2025-05-05 14:05:56+00:00
Obama wasn't allowed to keep his Blackberry; he requested a secure commercial-quality cellphone to communicate with his aides, and NSA (which was, to be sure, not really happy about the request) selected the Blackberry as their platform. The end solution was a highly pared-down device that could only communicate via a hosted encryption server (a commercial product, SecurVoice) to a small number of paired devices, which were distributed to Obama's inner circle. The Presidential devices had additional security limitations (e.g., they could only connect to WHCA-controlled base stations). End of the day, what they had was an encrypted closed network of devices, some of which communicated over public wireless infra, running a very limited, NSA-reviewed, approved, and altered, software suite.

What's clear is that NSA put a fair amount of effort into securing and maintaining that system, so much that its use was limited to the White House; Hillary Clinton wanted a similar setup (her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, had been allowed to use unaltered "off the shelf" Blackberries under an NSA waiver, but NSA had declined to renew those waivers due to security concerns), but NSA slow-walked and effectively derailed the discussions with State's security team, perhaps because they wanted to limit the amount of technical detail discussed outside the White House, or because they were concerned that State would be unable to provide SecState with the kind of technical support necessary to secure the devices during global travel. (We all know what happened next, of course.)
by kazinator | 2025-05-05 14:05:59+00:00
The legal system is not going to be kind to the AI hucksters. Why? Because, quite stupidly and counterproductively, they have stepped on its toes by claiming that AI can replace lawyers. On top of that, there have been incidents of lawyers getting in hot water for generating slop instead of doing their work. So, this isn't just some distant, abstract tech issue for the lawyers and judges, like whether APIs should be copyrighted. If you're in any kind of business, you generally want these people to be on your side. Oopsies!
by betterThanTexas | 2025-05-05 14:06:19+00:00
> Plain text: text without mark-up

What is the utility of such a definition? As far as I am concerned, anything I can read with my editor is plain text. That definition is trivially useful on a daily basis. I don't see any point in calling markdown something other than plain text. Because it's just plain text.

And of course, I intend deep disrespect that you had the gall to claim correctness for such obviously arbitrary definitions.
by thechao | 2025-05-05 14:06:24+00:00
Hold on, let me translate my stupid freedom units into Science™. My exterior house walls are already ... 30cm thick? That's 15cm of insulation + structure, a thermal gap, and then 10cm of stone facade. I only have to run the AC for a few hours at night, once the house warms up after a full day of sun. The only time of year I need "full AC" is during the high summer when the temps go above 40°C. What really kills me is that house is heated with propane, owned by a local monopoly, and the cost of propane has a 300% surcharge. The next time the HVAC packs up, I'm getting a heat pump, and adding solar panels (I only need a few); the savings in propane will pay for the HVAC/solar in a few years (in fucking TEXAS). The irony of this is not lost on me.
by highdeserthackr | 2025-05-05 14:06:26+00:00
I did a lot of poking around when I first started. Tried ~10 different apps. On one end there are the toys, and the other end were sophisticated apps that were too big an investment in time. Settled on SolveSpace as the Goldilocks solution and have been using it for 4 years now. Can run on Linux, never crashes, GUI based, parametric constraints (which as someone that is not a mechanical engineer was the hardest part to get my head around), no cloud and no concerns about it getting crippled by a vendor. In the beginning, it took a day to get a simple design right. Now things can be whipped out in as little as 30 minutes. I'll caveat this as I don't make fancy stuff, just items in support of homelab projects and the workshop (examples at https://www.printables.com/@HighDesertHacker).
by tecirpinslime | 2025-05-05 14:06:52+00:00
My significant other work at a school during Covid where they were giving free breakfasts and lunches. The waste I witnessed from it all was atrocious, due to the fluctuations from day-to-day how many students would come in. The staff always wanted to err on the side of caution, because they didn’t want any kids to miss out. We’re talking sometimes over 200 lunches that were discarded in a day. Some things could be reused, but a lot was thrown away. It was against the rules to do anything but either give them to a student, or throw them away.
by treis | 2025-05-05 14:07:02+00:00
It does make sense. You don't want archers to burn energy & ammo by firing too rapidly or before the enemy is in range.

I agree that sitting there for minutes holding the bow taut is dumb. But something like a Attention, Nock, Ready, Draw, Loose cycle isn't that. Maybe you hold it a half second and it's slightly more fatiguing but I don't really see it.

If it is you just combine draw and loose. It will make the spread between arrows slightly larger but it's still a volley.
by tantalor | 2025-05-05 14:07:14+00:00
Pittsburgh Public Schools started doing this (free breakfast & lunch) in 2014: https://www.pghschools.org/departments/food-services/free-me...

This program replaces free & reduced-price lunch for qualifying kids, with "free for everybody".

They directly cite reasons like increased participation and better service (faster lines). It also cuts down on administrative overhead (don't need to separately qualify each kid). Another benefit is kids are not shamed for getting free lunch, since everybody gets a free lunch.

It is a USDA program: https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/cep

I'm genuinely worried the current administration will decide it is a waste of money, or woke, or some other BS.
by quuxplusone | 2025-05-05 14:07:17+00:00
Betteridge's Law of Headlines strikes again. (Well, Hacker News' abbreviated headlines, in this case.)

"Professors Staffed a Fake Company with AI Agents. Guess What Happened?" "No."

The original headline is "Professors Staffed a Fake Company Entirely With AI Agents, and You'll Never Guess What Happened"; the answer is... uh... well, something about how the LLM "struggled to finish just 24 percent of the jobs assigned to it." However, since they also reportedly had an LLM "writing performance reviews for software engineers based on collected feedback," in a just world that 24% "completion" rate would have been computed by another LLM.

Clicking through, it looks like the actual "researchers" are here:

https://the-agent-company.com/

And their project is here:

https://github.com/TheAgentCompany/TheAgentCompany/blob/main...

Which (at first glance) looks like a plain old task-based benchmark, i.e. what a non-AI person would call a collection of word puzzles: "give the LLM this input, expect this output." These word puzzles are themed around office jobs. Here's an example input:

https://github.com/TheAgentCompany/TheAgentCompany/blob/main...
by ItsBob | 2025-05-05 14:07:17+00:00
In The Peoples Republic of Scotland, all primary kids get free lunches now, I think (Primary is aged 4/5 to 11/12).

When it was introduced, my son was in P1 or 2. We spoke to the head and asked if we could pay for our son's lunch as we didn't need the freebie. She said there was no way to pay for it: it was free whether you wanted it or not.

Crazy.

I'm a rampant capitalist, every man for himself and all that but there is something about denying kids the fundamentals, like shelter, food etc. that rubs me up the wrong way. There should never be a situation where they are denied proper lunches. Never.

School lunch debt is an adult-designed problem that we shouldn't be passing onto kids.
by icegreentea2 | 2025-05-05 14:07:23+00:00
School lunch programs across the world get setup and perpetuated for a variety of reasons. They also have a variety of funding models.

For the US specifically, major federal programs began during the Great Depression as a two for one combo. It solved the direct problem of... people being poor and their kids not having food/lunch, and it also provided a reasonable supply sink for the government to buy out supply from farmers to help keep things going.

Anyhow, since then for a variety of reasons, subsidized/free lunches have stuck around. Primarily because the underlying problem (food insecurity) has not been adequately solved. School lunches also tends to be amongst the more politically palatable/defensible forms of welfare in the United States, since its very structure and beneficiaries make it harder to criticize.

So while expansion of SNAP or other programs that might help tackle general food insecurity might run into headwinds, most of those arguments tend to falter when it comes to feeding children directly at school. For example, it's hard to argue that getting free lunches at school would encourage "abuse and malaise" amongst students. Similarly, since the composition of lunches tend to be under control of the supplying organization, there's reduced concern of people spending their assistance on "luxuries".
by mproud | 2025-05-05 14:07:30+00:00
I love living in Minnesota.

Walz passed the Free Meals for School Kids Program[^1] at my elementary school, no less! about two years ago.

I’m happy that other states are finally realizing, gee, this is such a straightforward issue we could actually solve.

[^1] https://education.mn.gov/MDE/dse/FNS/SNP/free/
by taylodl | 2025-05-05 14:07:45+00:00
Sniper rifles have longer barrels that both suppress barrel flash and increase muzzle velocity - thus making the rifle more accurate at longer distances. They also fire larger rounds with larger cartridges to get even greater muzzle velocity. The trade-off is size and weight. Longer barrels, larger rounds, bigger cartridges - that increases the size and weight of the weapon and its ammunition. That's size and weight an infantry neither needs nor wants.
by kazinator | 2025-05-05 14:08:38+00:00
Do you not understand that "fair use" is not some copyright free-for-all which lets you use works wholesale without attribution as if they were suddenly public domain?

To make fair use of a book's passage, you have to cite it. The except has to be reasonably small.

Without fair use, it would not be possible to write essays and book reviews that give quotes from books. That's what it's for. Not for having a machine read the whole book so it can regurgitate mashups of any part of it without attribution.

Making a parody is a kind of fair use, but parodies are original expression based on a certain structure of the work.
by mrktsm__ | 2025-05-05 14:08:43+00:00
Good question — before diving into the project, I did have the chance to choose. I looked into both OT and CRDTs and found that OT is widely used in collaborative editors like Google Docs, so I leaned that way. I wouldn’t say it was a deeply informed decision — I just had more reference points for OT at the time. I think with more hands-on experience with CRDTs, I’d be better equipped to weigh the trade-offs more clearly
by prasadjoglekar | 2025-05-05 14:08:45+00:00
This was 9 years ago.

The article itself says the theory isn't completely kooky. Quote: This is not as crazy as it sounds, and other engineers at SpaceX aside from Musk entertained the possibility, as some circumstantial evidence to support the notion of an outside actor existed. Most notably, the first rupture in the rocket occurred about 200 feet above the ground, on the side of the vehicle facing the southwest. In this direction, about one mile away, lay a building leased by SpaceX's main competitor in launch, United Launch Alliance. A separate video indicated a flash on the roof of this building, now known as the Spaceflight Processing Operations Center. The timing of this flash matched the interval it would take a projectile to travel from the building to the rocket.
by elp | 2025-05-05 14:09:03+00:00
Between this story, the cable sabotage (https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-sabotage-undersea-cab...), the UK spy network (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqx0v599wqvo) and a bunch more this is clearly real.

Can someone explain what Russia gets out of this? I would have thought if anything it would be more likely to harden attitudes towards them.
by indymike | 2025-05-05 14:09:28+00:00
The bow has a slow rate of fire, you can't hold a longbow in firing position for long (150+lbs of force required hold the drawn back bow), and you are only accurate from 300-800 feet (add 15% if in a high tower). That means charging calvary will reach your archers in 10-15 seconds and moderately paced walking infantry unit will be on top of your archers within 20-30 seconds of entering range. That leaves time for a few arrows. The bunched up, tight formations formed a reasonable defense - your outer troops would take the hits from the archers for the 20 seconds it took to get to the archers.

We romanticise the longbow because our frame of reference is a rifle. For modern people, it is hard to understand how superior the musket was to any bow. A rifled muzzle loader made up for it's slow rate of fire with lethality and a range of 350-1000 M. 1000M is not a sprint - it will take infantry 20 minutes, at a minimum (more likely 30-40 minutes). Additionally, at close range, a musket could tear through several soldiers...
by Polizeiposaune | 2025-05-05 14:10:07+00:00
"It was, for all intents and purposes, akin to an automobile idling in a driveway with half a tank of gasoline. And then it exploded."

Not entirely unheard of.

A certain vintage of Ford cars had a cruise control defect that led them to catch fire while parked (something to do with a switch connected to the brake hydraulics that was connected to +12V from the battery even while the car was off). There were, I believe, multiple rounds of recalls (as the problem manifested itself across a number of different models).

In one case I'm familiar with, the car's owners left the car in their garage while they went on vacation. The car caught fire - fortunately the garage was sufficiently well sealed that the fire ran out of oxygen before it spread to the rest of the house.

The recall notice for their car was waiting for them at the post office when they returned home.

Damages, etc., were immediately taken care of by their insurance company and ultimately paid for by Ford - as I recall hearing the story this included thorough professional cleaning of rugs and such due to smoke from the fire making it into the rest of the house.
by m-hodges | 2025-05-05 14:10:10+00:00
I just popped over to Honda's website and clicked through on a new CR-V. I went with the EX trim which is the 2nd cheapest of six available trims. After clicking next on every screen without adding any upgrades, it offered me $33,745 MSRP with 36-month financing at 2.49% APR, which came to $1,035/month.
by RajT88 | 2025-05-05 14:10:27+00:00
> Has making music for a living ever not been tough?

Fair.

> I think that argument is further hampered (taylor being an exception) by the fact that most pop stars already don't write their own songs.

That accounts for the big artists on the radio (yes some people listen to that). But, what about everyone else? I would posit that most artists (the one-hit wonders, the ones without radio success, etc.) write their own songs. It seems like there's such acts who make a go of it just fine, who write their own songs and really nail the connection with fans. I would point to a regional band near me: Mr. Blotto.
by watusername | 2025-05-05 14:10:34+00:00
LuaTeX is the de facto successor of pdfTeX and is basically a more maintained pdfTeX with Unicode support and Lua scripting, whereas XeTeX has its own engine. In practice, it means that LuaTeX "just works" with most documents while with XeTeX you run into all sorts of weird incompatibilities. Fancy packages that make use of Lua scripting (e.g., graphdrawing) will only work with LuaTeX.

Edit: Looks like it's not de facto anymore, and LuaTeX is now recommended for all documents and XeTeX is being recommended _against_ (https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/05/engine-news-from-the-latex...)
by bgwalter | 2025-05-05 14:11:04+00:00
The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default.

Now that big capital wants to steal from individuals, big capital wins again.

(Unrelatedly, has Boies ever won a high profile lawsuit? I remember him from the Bush/Gore recount issue, where he represented the Democrats.)
by wrmedford | 2025-05-05 14:12:03+00:00
Been working on a completely open source LLM utilizing MLA from DeepSeek, PEER from DeepMind's research, and adding in a couple of performance optimizations for GH200's and PEER (including what I think is a nifty caching strategy). I named it LLM720 because the goal is to have this be the next iteration of what was accomplished with LLM360.

I'm looking for collaborators. We're about to start a large training run now that ablations are starting to finish, and would like to have more people along for the ride.
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-05 14:12:07+00:00
For those who find the notion of rejecting a computer in favour of a typewriter (or even the typewriter-spouse combo set), maybe pitch the essay in terms of current consumer options, such as WiFi-enabled, Internet-connected refrigerators, cookers, clothes-washers, driers, and the like.

Or the trajectory of always-connected devices such as Nest thermostats (first editions now EoL'd and abandonware), Ring doorbells (part of state surveillance), or the question of mobile and/or smartphones by students in schools.

Berry's arguments and philosophy can be translated to other domains.

I'd also strongly suggest you consider that what he was writing about were computers in 1987.

The IBM PS/2 was released that year, and featured Intel processors (8086, 80286, or 80386, depending on the model), 512KiB to 64MiB RAM (most shipped with 512KiB -- 4MiB AFAIU), a floppy drive if you were lucky (720 KiB to 1.4 MiB), hard drives were optional, and ranged from about 20 MiB to 400 MiB (again, mostly smaller). There was no networking absent a very rare modem, to which there were few options to connect to, and no public Internet access. Printing was dot-matrix or daisy-wheel. Displays were typically 640x480 pixels, at 256 colours of any (though monochrome displays were common as well).

Even the "cruel twist of fate" pseudo-computers most people carry today (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43887109>) have vastly greater raw performance and interactivity options. They definitely have their negatives, and I'm not convinced of their net usefulness. But used with intention they can in fact be quite useful. (The fact that marketing and design teams deploy billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of engineers to frustrate such intentional use is a major argument against such devices, of course.)

I'm cognisant and sympathetic to Berry's arguments, but don't share his outright rejection of much technology, and find several of his arguments and principles unconvincing (see earlier comments in this thread for examples). But even as someone who finds computers generally useful now, I didn't find it persuasive to purchase one of my own until the latter half of the 1990s, and even then what was available as a mid-market personal system was just teetering on the threshold of usability.

I'll also note that Berry's argument wasn't that the computers of his time simply weren't very useful. His case is far more fundamental than that. But the combined case would be pretty persuasive, and was: computer owners in 1987 were the overwhelming minority even within quite wealthy nations. And that wouldn't change for at least another decade.