MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by red_admiral | 2025-05-23 15:01:56+00:00
I presume the Blackwall one is that unlit LED sign just at the start of the off-ramp. Then there's another set of height detectors on the same post to catch out anyone who's still not paying attention.

I question who approved that the main lanes ahead of your link have 2.8m/9ft limits but the police warning says vehicles over 4m/13ft will be stopped. Can I take my 10ft truck through or not?

I'm starting to feel a tiny bit of sympathy for drivers that get confused by this.
by smackay | 2025-05-23 15:01:56+00:00
> you are always birding

Amen, Brother.

I think a large part of the blame for this state of affairs belongs to people like the BBC's Natural History Unit who licence their material to film and TV companies far and wide. So, for example, in many a scene you can thrill to the song of Willow Warbler (Phylloscopus trochilis) or Eurasian Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs), which would be knee-deep in twitchers if the birds were actually there.
by FooBarBizBazz | 2025-05-23 15:02:19+00:00
The article has absolutely nothing to do with "hashes vs. PRNGs". Literally nothing. It's all about the linear algebra and floating point operations that happen (in this case) to be used to transform those numbers. It has nothing to do with PRNGs.

Also, PRNG and hash functions are extremely similar, and there's no reason why one should be deterministic and the other not. They're both built out of simple integer and bit operations. If a certain PRNG is implementation-defined, that's a detail of the specific (possibly standard) library you've chosen; it's nothing fundamental.
by hamburga | 2025-05-23 15:03:52+00:00
Thank you for this. It gets exactly to the heart of the issue and what I sense is being missed in the AI alignment conversation. “What does ‘aligned’ mean” is and ethical/political question; and when people skip over that, it’s often to (1) smuggle in their own ethics and present them as universal, or (2) run away from the messy political questions and towards the safe but much narrower domain of technical research.
by opello | 2025-05-23 15:04:29+00:00
I understand. However, in the climate of the nuclear arms race, I think that all projects having anything to do with nuclear physics were likely to be kept under tight wraps.

The comment I replied to seems to be taking a snarky tone toward a comment that was interesting and furthering the actual topic of the post. By highlighting that it didn't take a stance:

> one of the creators wasn't aware the immediate application of the algorithms they were optimizing was nuclear weapons

Even your reply to me seems to only allow interpreting "application ... was nuclear weapons" to mean "building" or "developing" instead of "detecting" when to me it simply means "in the domain of." And certainly you agree that detection is in the space of nuclear weapons?

The obvious reason detection technology falls under the same secrecy umbrella as weapons design is because one leads quite quickly to the other if you start to think about why it might be developed.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-23 15:04:47+00:00
>> We're all interested in this by virtue of discussing it.

> No, I don't think that's true at all. It's the whole premise of crowdsourced/curated forum, that there is some 'we' that is not, in fact, interested in 'everything' - hence the curation, the votes, the rules, the moderation, the non-infinite-scrolling front page.

Yes, I was speaking inclusively of those people who have affirmatively expressed interest, whether it be via upvoting or commenting. Disagreement about the post or other engagement counts as expressing interest for the purposes of this discussion. We, as in you (pvg) and I (aspenmayer), specifically are interested in this post by dint and by virtue of discussing it, because it hasn't been dismissed out of hand.

>> It's clear the thing that happened did happen independently of my beliefs about it

> You should find out how clear that is by asking the people who can clarify it. That's all.

I am asking the people who can clarify it (HN moderators) on the site they moderate (Hacker News). HN mods are HN users also.

If you're not interested in my comments, you aren't obligated to reply if you can't be constructive and curious. I can't speak to your intent, but the effect you are having on me is anything but that. In polite conversation like HN, your intent matters, but the effects of your communication matter, also. It feels to me like you're concern trolling, ostensibly on behalf of HN, but that's not really consistent with the guidelines' admonition to encourage posts that increase in curiosity as they progress. This is not meant as a personal jab at you, as I do think of you positively on this site, and yet, to not mention how I feel you're coming across would be unfair to you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(slang)#Concern_troll

> [Concern trolls] profess a commitment to social change for ideals of justice, equality, and opportunity, and then abstain from and discourage all effective action for change. They are known by their brand, 'I agree with your ends but not your means'.

In the absence of any clear guideline on the protocol for asking HN users (including mods, who are users first) about their experience of using HN, I know of no better venue for my question.

Like, just assume that I emailed them also, or instead, and that I'm sharing it after the fact, if it helps you to relate to my post in good faith on the merits any post which is on-topic and within guidelines, like mine, deserves.
by vel0city | 2025-05-23 15:05:33+00:00
Most of the market of actual paying customers don't really care to have directories of FLAC files and terabytes of local data. And most of the people who have large collections of FLAC files probably didn't spend much to get those collections and aren't likely to bother paying for an app to be developed and supported. Most people I know with a local music library of thousands of FLACs spent $0 on that content.

And then there's a massive chunk of the market that finds the tradeoff of ads for "free" access to music an acceptable tradeoff. A few dollars a month in cost for access to music is way more than they're interested in spending, even $10 for a CD is more than they're usually looking to spend to acquire content. They're the kind of people who maybe only bought a handful of CDs or cassette tapes back int the day total and got a lot of their content from the radio.

Most of the paying customers for digital music tend to be generally OK or even prefer streaming services. And generally speaking, those streaming apps work pretty OK. Most work better than the early streaming/subscription apps back in the day (like old Rhapsody and Zune Music and non-pirating Napster). I still remember how long it would take to go from clicking Play on Zune to the time it would actually start playing the song compared to Spotify which felt nearly instant in comparison. Not having to reconnect my Creative Zen every few weeks refresh the DRM from Napster. Having all that content on demand from my wireless portable device. Practically all of what is available today is quite a bit better than what was, in terms of "I don't want to bother buying all of this content, I'm OK with renting a lot of it" standpoint.

I've got a collection of music I own, things I really care about. Mostly physical formats, a few hundred songs exclusively digital files. But for a lot of music I consume, I don't really care if I have it locally or have it forever. Its like listening to the radio, that song may never play again, that's OK. Buying all that content legitimately costs considerably more than what I pay for a streaming service, so the streaming service makes a ton of economic sense for what I'm looking for. I'm mostly looking for something in between a radio and a privately curated music collection, which is exactly what streaming is.
by belter | 2025-05-23 15:05:53+00:00
I am not conflating faith with religion, but the statement clearly refers to his religion...MacIntyre appeals and arguments smuggle theology in through the back door.

Presents basic commitments as if they were simply the unavoidable presuppositions of moral reasoning, yet in practice the basic commitments he privileges are those of Roman-Catholic Thomism. By treating them as axiomatic rather than doctrinal...transforms a Catholic moral vision into what looks like a neutral starting point.

Disguises an apologetic project as pure philosophy.

“At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.” ― Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue
by oa335 | 2025-05-23 15:06:43+00:00
There are already several ways to force postgres to use or not use a particular index. We use cloud-hosted and managed Postgres instances on one of the major provider, and I've used a couple of these strategies to massage the query planner.

1. Fiddle with the Query Planner settings (this can be done on a per query level as well, so its not global). E.g. enable_indexscan=off, enable_indexonlyscan=off

2. Add a trivial calculation to the filter clause of the query. E.g. select * from table where indexed_col + 0 = 12345 shouldn't use the index, as the planner won't do the arithmetic.

3. Use the pg_hintplan extension, which allows you to add comments to your code to urge the planner to use certain data access strategies, including specifying which indices to use. See: https://pg-hint-plan.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hint_table.htm...
by munificent | 2025-05-23 15:07:09+00:00
> This is why it's imperative that inline caches learn and adapt to the observed behavior.

True, but if you only have a single bottleneck cache site for all constructor invocations across the program, the only reasonable thing that callsite can learn is "wow, every single constructed class goes through here".

That's why it makes sense to have a separate cache at every `.new()` location.
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2025-05-23 15:07:22+00:00
I'll be harsh, but they deserve it. The value of SO plummeted as documentation got better, disallowing open ended questions and discussions completely removed the value of talking to other humans. It was useful as junior and intermediate, but the value for a senior dropped to 0 due to the inability to ask what I would consider important.

I had to resort to reddit to ask those questions, which is ironic given the focus of SO.
by victorNicollet | 2025-05-23 15:08:31+00:00
I have seen the similar assertion "some of the water molecules you drank today were once part of a dinosaur", which is false because water molecules do not last very long when in liquid phase (they continuously swap protons, turning into hydronium ions and back).

The O-O and N-N bonds are much stronger than H-O bonds, but there are still atmospheric processes that can break them. For instance, O2 undergoes photodissociation under ultraviolet light and recombines into O3 ozone, and N2 likely also undergoes photodissociation. And obviously, the fact that living beings breathe O2...
by lkmill | 2025-05-23 15:08:51+00:00
i believe so, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%E2%80%93Boltzmann_dist....

2k years is a long time for gas dispersion in such a "small" volume as the earth's atmosphere. early weather behaviour probably affected the distribution unevenly, but by now it should be relatively evenly distributed across the globe. no more or less in rome or italy. this is, however, as we say in sweden, a "guy's guess".
by williamdclt | 2025-05-23 15:09:05+00:00
> EDIT: they have an aggregate of 1 million QPS across ~40 read replicas, so 25K QPS each, modulo writes. I am less impressed.

Yeah that's my point! That's the load per instance that I see at my current company, we just have fewer replicas.

> Assuming your table statistics are decently up to date and representative (which you can check), this basically comes down to knowing your RDBMS, and your data

I'm pretty good at this stuff, and I don't often dabble with complex indexes. And yet I don't have 100% confidence. No-one is perfect: maybe I made a mistake in assessing index equivalence, maybe I forgot to check replicas, maybe there's _something somewhere_ that depends on this index without me being aware of it... It's a destructive operation where the only confidence you can have is _theoretical_, not operational: it's kind of crazy and people have been requesting this feature for years for good reasons. If you get it wrong (and getting it right is not trivial), production is on fire and it's potentially hours of downtime (or days, if it's a massive table!).

For example, RDS forces you to shutdown an instance before deleting it. At this point, if anything was relying on it then alarms go off and you can quickly turn it back on. This should be standard functionality of anything stateful.
by Swizec | 2025-05-23 15:09:15+00:00
> if you are not too write heavy you can scale Postgres to very high read throughput with read replicas and only a single master

The number of interviewees (I do the sys design question) who want to jump straight into massively distributed eventually consistent complicated systems for 5 reads/second is too damn high. 1,000,000 users is not a lot.

I wish we did better with teaching folks that while we (as an industry) were focused on horizontal this and that, computers got fast. And huge. Amazon will rent you a 32TB RAM server these days. Your database will scale just fine and ACID is far too valuable to throw.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-23 15:09:37+00:00
I never said you did change the codebase. I think you misinterpreted me as referring to you personally, when I meant you exclusively, because it was eminently clear from context what each of us meant, but I'm happy to clarify that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusivity

I agree with you about the pragmatic nature of moderation under discussion, to your point.
Show HN: I made an International calling app after Skype shutdown ($0.01/min)
by hermann_ai | 2025-05-23 15:09:51+00:00
I built CallSky as a simple alternative for international calling after Microsoft shut down Skype earlier this month. The app lets you make calls to landlines and cell phones worldwide starting at $0.01/minute with a pay-as-you-go model.

I noticed that while Teams replaced Skype's video/chat conferencing, it doesn't offer the same affordable PSTN calling that many people relied on. WhatsApp and other messaging apps don't solve this - whether you're an expat calling the IRS for taxes, reaching elderly family members who don't use smartphones, or contacting people in areas with limited internet infrastructure, you still need traditional phone calls to landlines and mobile numbers.

So I built this focused solution using Swift/UIKit for iOS with Supabase handling the backend.

The app has been live for about 10 days with 49 in-app purchases so far. There's clearly interest from users, but discoverability remains extremely challenging without a significant marketing budget.

Currently iOS-only with Android in development.
by theptip | 2025-05-23 15:10:06+00:00
I think “going full generalist” is perhaps not a generalizable solution, though directionally it’s good advice if you have more than two dev roles (or maybe two plus Q) in a 10-person team.

No mention of task composition, but I wonder if framing stories in terms of user needs was another missing piece. It sounds like you were giving updates on low-level eng tasks not user stories.

When I ran a team of this size, sure the implementation details of a technical task wouldn’t make sense, but generally we had a frontend and backend engineer buddy up to own a user story, and reporting to the team was mostly at the level of “we are shipping feature X for customers Y,Z - API work turned out to be gnarly, let’s break out and have a backend guild design session asap”.

If you have QA then the “three amigos” approach is nice, product owner, dev owner, and tester all sit down and craft a story that is mutually comprehensible. If you achieve this then you can feel confident that others on your team will also understand the framing of the story. Takes discipline though!
Ask HN: Fakespot is shutting down July 1. Alternatives?
by cjbarber | 2025-05-23 15:10:06+00:00
I loved Fakespot! I was a paying user even, back when they had subscriptions.

What alternative will you be switching to? I remember trying ReviewMeta in the past and not liking it.

And, I'd be interested in building one, so: what would need to be true for you to be a paying early adopter of a Fakespot alternative?

And how would you monetize it? I heard from a friend via a Fakespot founder that Amazon didn't let them use their affiliate program basically because Amazon doesn't like the look for their brand. Subscriptions may be cleanest. It looks like Fakespot was selling to the brands, which makes them biased and then you get the Wirecutter problem.
by weitendorf | 2025-05-23 15:10:09+00:00
We are building similar functionality for our own postgres setup right now.

Of course, postgres is very powerful and you can implement anything like this in many different ways. But at the same time, maintaining DDL history and tracking major changes to the database is a very common requirement, and unfortunately many people don't realize that until they learned that lesson the hard way.

Relatedly are not DDL changes per-se, but big/important db operations that you want to also keep a record of so that you can look back and understand why something changed. I am not sure if this is the right term, but basically when we update our pricing model or skus, or set custom pricing for someone, we want those updates to be "auditable".

Actually, I think this is a relatively common use case too: a fully relational model often leaves you with a large number of "static" tables that only change when you're making updates to your application. They support the smaller number of big, important, dynamic tables that your application is regularly modifying. If you had the foresight to recognize that you'd likely need to change those static tables in the future, you probably organized them so you could do so by adding new rows. It is not quite a DDL change but it is a big, risky change to your application logic that only happens rarely, and you basically just want to keep a list of all those big changes in case things get messed up or you find yourself unable to make sense of older data.
by boudin | 2025-05-23 15:10:59+00:00
Mozilla publishes firefox on Flathub and anybody can install it from there. After, I'm not sure why they don't advertise it, most apps distributed this way just have a button that do so.

Fedora has its own repo, they manage it, i don't see the problem there. After it doesn't prevent adding others like flathub and the experience from a user point of view is the same.

You can also provide a flatpak ref file that user can use to install.

Signing app doesn't means much appart that someone paid for that and went through a process IMO, there's not much value to it from the user pov, especially when the first thing a Windows user learns is to ignore signature warnings.

Have you tried using flatpak?
I helped my client get 100% investment round
by canxerian | 2025-05-23 15:11:30+00:00
Wanted to share a breakdown of how I went from freelancer to helping my client get funding, and in the process, built my agency business.

My client, WhipSnap, wants to serve the niche of 3D car scanning - applications range from enabling car showrooms to conduct virtual sales and marketing to letting petrol-heads scan and share their own cars, with annotations in 3D.

I designed and developed an MVP for them. I also visited high-end car showrooms with my client to scan cars. I was also the "tech guy" in calls with investors (I rarely spoke, TBH).

Here's everything that led to this moment:

[-2]. Pitched to a different client.

[-1]. Got rejected.

[ 0]. Lesson learned: needed to dramatically increase the quality of my proposal.

[ 1]. Heard from a former colleague about another project

[ 2]. We setup the initial call for intros

[ 3]. Before the call, I worked the weekend to research their niche and the technologies they could use.

[ 4]. During the intro call I impressed them with my research, my understanding of their niche and suggestions on how we'd build their app idea.

[ 5]. They signed.

[ 6]. During the project, I sent weekly video updates via Youtube (unlisted). I'm a fan of async comms.

[ 7]. We spoke regularly, via a WhatsApp group chat!

[ 8]. Within 4 weeks we had a useable MVP. Real customers could scan their cars!

[ 9]. Then some chaos: I personally helped scan a $4.5M Koenigsegg.. and the scan failed

[10]. More chaos: Runpod (the GPU cloud provider) became unreliable. I ended up buying an RTX 5090 to run our 3D pipeline on.

[11]. The weekly videos and regular comms kept my client informed and calm. Together, we worked around issues.

[12]. I delivered and hosted the solution. Did some extra bits to increase the quality of car scans (like manual cleanup).

[13]. We onboard early adopters.

[14]. Investors understand and are excited by the solution.

[15]. Investment money arrives in my client's bank account.

I appreciate some of the above doesn't sound scalable. I also appreciate that it sounds unconventional (like using WhatsApp group chat with clients). But they worked for me.

Thanks for reading!

p.s, my company is https://llume.co, you can find a more in-depth case study there - see "Carvatar"
by foldr | 2025-05-23 15:11:40+00:00
There’s the potential for a sensible post here about how Elixir and LiveView isn’t all roses. I agree, for example, that it remains unclear what the best approach is for integrating client-side interactivity with a LiveView page. (It’s totally possible — it’s just hard to be confident that you’re doing it in a robust way.)

That said, it’s a bit disappointing that someone whose GitHub profile wants to sell me a book about how to level up to being a senior dev (to be fair, the link is broken!) appears to have completely given up on investigating the source of a performance problem, and thrown up their hands in the face of whatever error messages they’ve seen.

LiveView isn’t perfect, but it’s not anywhere near being so bad that you can blame it for a total failure to build a working product.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-05-23 15:11:46+00:00
> Like many airlines, Yemenia use one of the major rostering apps, and rosters release 15 days before the end of the month. Even despite the rocket attacks, car bombs, mortars, and intermittent electricity and wifi, they do still manage to get the roster out on time, which is more than I can say for the few European carriers I worked for.

Outstanding.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-05-23 15:12:42+00:00
When I replaced my Pixel 6 with a Pixel 9a a couple months ago, the transfer process went fine. Everything transferred automatically.

The only complaint I had is that it waited until 19 minutes had passed of a 20 minute estimate before telling me I could connect the phones with a USB cable and go faster than the wireless transfer.
by strogonoff | 2025-05-23 15:12:44+00:00
Again, citation needed. For as long as humanity existed, creating art always implied [the promise of] sharing it for either utilitarian reasons, or for enjoying the resulting reputation and recognition (we can go all evolutionary biologist about it and say reproduction, etc.), or for financial gain (more recently). Am I missing some point in human history where this was done without ever expecting any of that?

Writing “for the drawer” is generally a thing that happens if one is not yet satisfied or not confident about the quality of own output, or if one is self-censoring, or if one is expecting someone to read it eventually (communication can happen over time and space). I don’t think this is worth in-depth look, as art that was not seen by others for all intents and purposes does not exist.

(All art is communication; if you shouted into the void and made sure no one hears it, did it really take place?)