MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rbanffy | 2025-05-20 09:48:23+00:00
Politics is an unavoidable aspect of larger groups, but it gets a lot worse when coupled by wrong incentives that reward heroic disaster mitigation over active disaster avoidance.

When you design a system around a database, it pays off to design your ways of mitigating performance issues you might face in the future. Often, a simple document explaining directions to evolve the system into based on the perceived cause. You might want to add extra read replicas, introduce degraded modes for when writes aren't available, moving some functions to their own databases, sharing big tables, and so on. With a somewhat clear roadmap, your successors don't need to panic when the next crisis appears.

For extra points, leave recordings dressed as Hari Seldon.
by johcard | 2025-05-20 09:48:36+00:00
We've had a very similar experience over the past year. We've been using Hetzner for over a decade and, until recently, we were really satisfied with their services. But in the last 12 months, the reliability has noticeably dropped.

Most of the issues we've faced are related to their Storage Boxes, multiple incidents where they were completely unavailable, sometimes for hours or even days. What’s frustrating is that these outages are never reflected on their status page, so you're left in the dark unless you open a ticket yourself. Even then, the only explanation we usually get is that the specific Storage Box is under "heavy load", and the suggested fix is always to migrate to another box. That might be fine for infrequent use, but it's not acceptable when you're relying on it.

To be fair, Hetzner has been a solid provider for many years, and we’re still hoping this is just a temporary rough patch. We really hope they get things back on track soon.
by cyanydeez | 2025-05-20 09:49:24+00:00
If they're VC backed startups, they'll post a bunch of jobs to fake metrics about grow. If they're consulting companies, they'll post a bunch of jobs hoping to find competitor's employees to undercut. A company may have space to hire 1 person, but may not care if its a engineer, QA tester, technician, etc, so they post 3 jobs and only hire one person; but will leave the other job posts up.

There's lots of reason why just going off job postings isnt a sufficient means to determine the number of jobs out there.

My brief experience back in the market suggested there's definitely not a real relationship between the jobs posted and the actual hiring process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_job
by rsynnott | 2025-05-20 09:49:30+00:00
If the proposed Cork-Dublin-Belfast high speed line (the 300km/h one, not to be confused with Irish Rail's _other_ more short-term project to bring Dublin-Cork to 200km/h standard, which will use the existing line) goes ahead, it'll almost certainly be a new standard gauge line, separate from the existing ones. Huge 'if', of course.
After 9 mnths of building someone used my product how I imagined
by anticlickwise | 2025-05-20 09:51:01+00:00
No, I don’t have paying customers yet.

But today, for the first time, someone used my SaaS exactly how I imagined. brain-dumped a bunch of messy thoughts, and let the system auto-organize them into a clean, actionable plan. They even filled up the onboarding steps (where I ask about how they work so I can tailor my AI to fit their style) the way I do.

That hit me harder than I expected.

I’ve been building this for 9 months. NotForgot is an AI-powered task assistant — built to solve the overwhelm of having too much in your head and not enough clarity. It breaks thoughts into tasks, adds tags, estimates time, batches them… etc.

And watching someone actually trust it enough to let it organize their chaos - instead of just testing it & made me feel like I’m not crazy for doing this.

Still no revenue. Its still a long road. But today gave me a quiet hope over the constant anxiety

If you're building something and it feels like no one gets it yet — hang in there. I can tell you that the first “they actually used it” moment is worth more than 100 likes or fake signups.

url if you are curious: https://notforgot.ai
by ricardobayes | 2025-05-20 09:52:54+00:00
When we had that power outage in Spain, for a brief period we had a taster of what the world used to be: we had electricity/TV/radio but no Internet access. I must say it was delightful but I'm not sure how it would be long-term. My world-view certainly opened up with Internet access.

ps. I considered using em dash in this paragraph but decided against it due to LLM's using it. Made me a little bit self-conscious for a second. I am self-editing myself not to be mistaken with an AI.
by herbst | 2025-05-20 09:52:54+00:00
Do you know Walserberg? I haven't passed Walserberg once in the last 10 years without a machine gun in my face. Passing it maybe once a year usually from Austria to Germany. Afaik the other way is easier.

I know I can just drive a hour more to drive around it where there is no active control but police cars hidden in bushes in the whole German area.

I am not used to stuff like this, for me it's a creepy experience every time.

Edit:// just remembered they recently started to do the same on the Swiss border around Basel. Whatever Germans think that's not normal within shengen. I usually don't see anyone at all on french or Italian borders, especially not young army forces with machines guns
by indiantinker | 2025-05-20 09:54:12+00:00
TBH, it seems like a questionable way to spend EU money. Technically, it's fascinating, but unless it's part of a broader geopolitical or long-term interoperability strategy, it's hard to justify the costs.

In Spain, we already deal with both Iberian and standard gauges—trains like the Talgo models can change gauges with minimal delay. It's not seamless, but it works reasonably well. Spain also has the world's second largest high speed train network.

What the EU could really benefit from is greater support for small companies and independent freelancers who are driving innovation. Unfortunately, governments (Spain included) often treat them as revenue sources, with high taxes and complex regulations, while large corporations can navigate around much of that with ease.
by aarroyoc | 2025-05-20 09:54:19+00:00
In addition to the other comment, which I agree as I've heard the same, for the most part Spain and Portugal have been operating as if the Iberian Peninsula was an island. The Pyrenees are a big barrier, and in Franco's era the country was very isolated.

The same happens with the electricity grid, even though it is connected to France, it has very small capacity.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-05-20 09:54:39+00:00
If I recall correctly, the rolling stock remained the same, tracks were re-railed and the 4mm came from tolerances that were historically very loose. So the stated goal was to get higher speed and stability from tighter tolerances.

I also remember reading a long time ago that there were two engineering schools: one modeled that tighter tolerances would decrease oscillations and vibrations and the other predicted exactly the opposite. I think in the end they settled on natural experiments. Hope I didn't make this up, need to search for sources.
Show HN: An elegant AI chat client
by krytro | 2025-05-20 09:55:48+00:00
Differences from other AI Chat clients:

- Supports more platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and Web (PWA)

- Supports creating multiple workspaces to isolate conversations and work on different themes

- Modifications and regenerations will be presented as branches, just like chatgpt.com

- Local-first data storage + real-time cloud synchronization after login

- Supports more MCP features, including Tools, Resources, Prompts, and supports both STDIO (desktop only) and SSE connections

- Supports using prompt templates and variables to build dynamic and reusable prompts

- Some detailed functions: user input preview, message content catalog, quote message content, custom keyboard shortcuts, etc.

- Supports document parsing, bug no RAG yet
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-05-20 09:55:57+00:00
> but I can't have a more noticeable car than the CEO or CTO lol

What kind of crazy company do you work for where this is something to worry about, at all?

Also no, I don't believe most new car platforms have problems with large metal bits coming off as you drive, at frequency high enough to cause a recall.
by gloosx | 2025-05-20 09:57:06+00:00
I left some room for myself with "a good reason" :)

When company is forcing you to use something out of inertia, then it's probably not for a good reason.

Actually regarding the "global scale" – I'm not really sure it's true, I think MS has influence mostly in US. Many EU and Asian companies I worked with were using OSX/Linux.
by pwitvoet | 2025-05-20 09:57:46+00:00
Writing an editor from scratch is a lot of work. That's one reason why I would use an existing editor whenever possible. For example, TrenchBroom (Quake editor) + func_godot seems to be getting more popular among Godot users, and Tiled looks pretty good for 2D games. For game data management I've seen CastleDB (never used it though), which now seems to be integrated into Hide, a full-blown 3D editor.

Either way, once you get the tooling up and running, the next big step is actually designing a game and creating all the content. :)
by kgeist | 2025-05-20 09:59:22+00:00
Feels like fiddling with snapshotting raw C++ memory is a can of worms (you listed some of the pitfalls yourself). Most of my snapshotting happened at the scripting runtime level, where everything is well-defined and well-understood: I manually snapshotted the VM's heap memory, the green threads' stack memory, the current instruction pointer of every green thread etc. I could safely validate those snapshots without segfaulting on a corrupted savefile, because it was a well-defined file format. The same code worked both as a time-travel snapshotter and as a general savefile format.

I think this is dangerous and can lead to remote execution attacks:

>The snapshot could even be exchanged over the network, assuming the receiving side has the same endianness, the same pointer size, is running the same binary, and can mmap the same memory location.

For physics, I needed to restore all those remembered motion vectors; for audio - current playback time, etc. Same as yours:

>The rest of the memory (the textures, the 3D models, the audio, the UI, etc...) should be allocated by your usual non-snapshotting allocator"
by rmind | 2025-05-20 09:59:49+00:00
The work is very much ongoing in Lithuania: 114 km of railway is under construction, with tracks already laid in large parts of it. That is 43% of the initial phase (links to Poland and Latvia).

Let's keep in mind that it's not just standard gauge track. It's a high-speed rail project (200-250 km/h) and, for any country, it takes time to build such a huge infrastructure.
by chii | 2025-05-20 10:01:10+00:00
It may also be possible that the data's value is not realizable today, but can be in the future (in a way that does not benefit the people from which this data was derived).

This has played out in real time since the advent of stable diffusion and LLM ai - the data available on the internet was originally thought to be unmonetizable. Most people putting that data online simply thinks nothing of it, and let it be freely viewed.

Now, all of a sudden, these same people start complaining that their data are being used to train an ai (from which they obviously claim they want a piece of the profit off).

I expect genetics data to follow the same trajectory (and we just dont have any use for said data right now).
by voidspark | 2025-05-20 10:01:29+00:00
The paid version "SuperGrok" has a larger context window, but nothing beats Gemini for that.

I tried your question with SuperGrok. Here's the result.

https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_d298dd12-9942-411c-900c-2994...

I use Grok for similar tasks and usually prefer Grok's explanations. Easier to understand.

For some problems where I've asked Grok to use formal logical reasoning I have seen Grok outperform both Gemini 2.5 Pro and ChatGPT-o3. It is well trained on logic.

I've seen Grok generate more detailed and accurate descriptions of images that I uploaded. Grok is natively multimodal.

There is no single LLM that outperforms all of the others at all tasks. I've seen all of the frontier models strongly outperform each other at specific tasks. If I was forced to use only one, that would be Gemini 2.5 Pro (for now) because it can process a million tokens and generate much longer output than the others.
by the_third_wave | 2025-05-20 10:01:41+00:00
O you sweet summer child, think of why there is no public evidence on Chinese espionage while you can easily rattle off a laundry list of Western espionage programs and you'll realise your mistake: China is a closed society without public inquiry while most of the West hangs its dirty laundry out for all to see and comment upon. Look under the cover of that Xiongmai camera, that Huawei base station or those Chinese inverters and you'll find plenty of remote access and control facilities which no doubt were left there purely by accident.
by int_19h | 2025-05-20 10:03:13+00:00
RDP is still the best remote desktop protocol - so much so that Gnome on Linux uses it for desktop sharing.

But, of course, it's a remote desktop protocol. Meanwhile Windows Server has been steadily moving onto command line & PowerShell for system administration for the past 12 years or so. The bespoke solution for remote admin has been remote PowerShell for a while, so ssh is arguably competing with that.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-05-20 10:04:40+00:00
No, they're Spanish trains: the Talgo Avril (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talgo_AVRIL, https://youtu.be/6iFfVpZwLJ4?si=ahxuQnauNw1-ucqR). It's a model specifically designed for that.

As an armchair expert, I think it turned out badly because they had to develop cutting-edge technology (no trains with that top speed and support for gauge change existed before, and it also has other quirks, like being uncommonly wide to support five seats per row) but, at the same time, make it very cheap (the project started in the context of harsh austerity in the years after the financial crisis, with PIGS accused of overspending, etc.). They promised too much for the budget and ended up delivering a half-baked train. At the beginning, a year ago, it was a disaster (lots of incidents with trains stopping mid-way, etc.), now they seem to be ironing out the problems and things are getting better but they're still much more unreliable than other trains.

I hope at least the lessons learned help towards making a better model in the future.
by tenzing | 2025-05-20 10:04:52+00:00
That's fine for you personally, and it may sound all good from a logical, theoretical, or academic perspective, however I personally know of people who have lost their license due to multiple fines and "demerit points" (NZ) resulting in that consequence.

The fines, and loss of license hurt them personally, professionally, and financially, but didn't change their behavior outside of the very short term.

In NZ we have people that are in and out of prison due to burglaries, robberies, etc... but the penalties don't change their longer term behavior.

There's a deeper problem, and penalties are important, but not the entire fix.
by versiqcontent | 2025-05-20 10:05:29+00:00
Most blackout coverage focuses on infrastructure or failure. This reflection looks at what disappears when the grid cuts out and how silence reshapes the way a city feels.

Just a few days ago, a ripple failure left parts of Portugal and Spain in the dark. No disaster, no major damage. But for millions, it was an unexpected moment of stillness.

This piece does not explain or solve. It observes. Familiar things like footsteps and laughter suddenly become audible. The sky looks wider. People stop scrolling and start noticing.

For a moment, the absence of noise becomes its own kind of information.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-20 10:06:05+00:00
HN crowd is ... mixed, it's perhaps the one last true melting pot we have on the Internet. A curse and a blessing, if you ask me.

You got truly anything here. Europeans that in general tend to lean more towards "democratic socialism" and its various offshoots, American libertarians (which have a large intersection with Musk fanboys), a bunch of extremely rich startup founders, American progressives, conservatives of all kinds, Zionists and Hamas apologists, probably Russian and Chinese psy-ops, accelerationists, preppers... name any ideology and you'll find supporters on HN.

What has changed a bit is that tribalism seems to have taken over from civilized or at least arguments and fact oriented discourse. Personally, I'd prefer if downvotes and especially flags would require one to give a reason so that repeat offenders that just flag and downvote everything they disagree with can get suspended for ruining discussion.
Metal – stealth browser for enterprise automations
by erekp | 2025-05-20 10:06:52+00:00
Hi HN!

Today we're launching Metal, a self-hosted stealth browser built for enterprise automation. We have many years of experience bypassing anti-bot protections and CAPTCHAs, and we've seen the same problems solved repeatedly with hacky solutions that don't stand the test of time.

We built Metal to address the most common challenges companies face when automating browsers or performing web scraping at scale.

Our custom browser comes with everything included—handling anti-bots, CAPTCHAs, and common deployment methods—and is entirely self-hosted, allowing companies to scale as needed without worrying about complicated usage-based pricing.
by keybored | 2025-05-20 10:08:26+00:00
> The AI

> I wanted to make a quick note of this here, as AI seems to be either constantly overblown or denigrated.

This just gestures at middle-of-the-road thinking.

So what’s this begrudging note about? To set us on the correct course in the middle of the road?

> I'd say it was right 90% of the time, too, and if you're not using AI aggressively in your software development work now (and I'm sure there are much better ways, too) I'm pretty confident in saying "you're doing it wrong".

Well done. AI plug done.

I don’t see how that statement fulfills the implied middle-of-the-road opinion though.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-20 10:09:18+00:00
I know how it feels, because I have been in enough projects driving offshoring teams.

Here is an unwanted advice, it is not going to be the new hotshot developer, rather hotshot technical and solution architects.

The dream of CASE tools is finally here, pump the requirements into the software factory (aks instruction files), and the replicator handles the rest.
by dgb23 | 2025-05-20 10:09:50+00:00
So far, automation has only ever increased the need for software development. Jevons Paradox plus the recursive nature of software means that there's always more stuff to do.

The real threats to our profession are things like climate change, extreme wealth concentration, political instability, cultural regression and so on. It's the stuff that software stands on that one should worry about, not the stuff that it builds towards.
by adrianmsmith | 2025-05-20 10:11:18+00:00
> One of the main goals of this is to not have the russian gauge available in case russians attack

This doesn't seem like it can be a goal given

> maybe in 2032 we can start construction

I mean unless the plan is to assume Russia won't attack until e.g. 2040 when construction will be complete && Russia can't implement multi-gauge trains that Spain is already using now?
Show HN: "Blog as a Service" for Next.js Sites
by devtanna | 2025-05-20 10:11:52+00:00
Hi HN

I built https://www.next-blog-ai.com because I was tired of wasting time spinning up blogs for my side projects. As a dev, I just wanted an easy way to boost SEO for my sites without constantly writing, formatting, publishing, storage and managing blog content.

What it does:

- Gives you a full-blown blog for your Next.js site with 5 minutes of setup

- Generates SEO-friendly blog posts automatically using AI (but you can also write your own!) using the target audience, keywords, topics, and industry that you provide for your project

- Fully automated publishing (you set the schedule – it handles the rest)

- Handles sitemap updates, SEO meta tags, and more

- Free tier available, great for indie projects and experimentation

I’ve launched it on 3 of my own projects already:

- https://www.rankresume.io/blog

- https://www.ideapulse.io/blog

- https://www.germanlanguagepractice.com/blog

The AI-generated posts are just one feature — I use it for manual posts too. The goal is to remove all the friction of maintaining a blog so you can focus on shipping your actual product.

Would love to hear your thoughts — especially on how you currently tackle blogging for your projects, and what would make this more useful for you.

Thanks!
by jajko | 2025-05-20 10:11:55+00:00
Every country in such position wishes for that (sans mandatory smaller part of population utterly brainwashed on some simplistic panslavic anti-soros fairy tales, when in reality russians cough cough soviets killed more slavs in past 150 years than all external adversaries combined, included nazi WWII warfare and genocides).

I don't think russians like to acknowledge how hated their country actually is, universally, across all countries that ever dealt with them on their soil long term, including former soviet republics and ie Warsaw pact. Not russian civilian population just to be clear but country as a whole definitely, just a consistently safe harbor for biggest scum mankind can produce.
by throw10920 | 2025-05-20 10:12:15+00:00
To add to your point, the phrasing of "$1K in a decade" seems convoluted to intentionally try to over-emphasize the cost. A much more fair/normal way of phrasing that cost would be $100/year, or $9/month, which is very little for someone who has the time and energy to write their own and gets enough value out of it that they find that worthwhile.

The tradeoff doesn't make sense otherwise. If you're poor, then you wouldn't have the luxury of the available time to write your own PKM - the opportunity cost is huge, it's massively preferential to use an existing free solution that is "good enough" (Obsidian without sync or using your own sync solution, Dendron, Roam, Org). If you're not poor, then $9/month is a rounding error, especially compared to the value provided.
by Ukv | 2025-05-20 10:14:39+00:00
> What is it with people who get all nitpicky about Ryanair charging on a per use basis?

People book with Ryanair expecting the advertised price, then get caught out by added fees for what typically comes standard.

> Maybe they should have a kind of all inclusive, flat rate, where you pay for food, drink, signed seating, extra luggage, etc. whether you use them or not?

They could keep the same pricing model and just flip the UX - show initial base price including standard amenities, then give discounts/refunds for opting out so it's a pleasant rather than unpleasant surprise. But they won't, because they rely on drawing people in with the low price and then sunken cost/escalation of commitment taking over.

> What am I missing? You’re also clearly free to not fly with them. All I hear is bitching.

Customers complaining is part of how that choice works. People have a bad experience (large unexpected fees at check-in, too late to change plans), make the bad experience known, and that drives decisions of future customers.