MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jamesdutc | 2025-05-24 20:29:44+00:00
> Malaysian guy has to watch a BBC cook make rice (https://youtu.be/53me-ICi_f8?si=0AaZ82dk_AYFqJAx&t=226)

Of course, this video is just stupid accent comedy, but we should be careful not to draw too much from it. (Let's also set aside the specifics of making fried rice.) The implication of the section of the clip you linked is that the presenter (Hersha Patel) does not know how to make rice properly, and this is evidenced by her cooking it in too much water and draining it.

But this is not correct.

There are, in fact, many different varieties of rice, different cuisines that incorporate rice as a major component, and different styles of cooking rice. Cooking (certain varieties of long-grained? rice) in an open vessel, cooking with an excess of water, and draining the water afterwards is an extremely common and popular way to prepare it for use in some cuisines: e.g., https://youtu.be/TARO_R4cE24?t=420

When this video first made the rounds some years ago, it was surprising to see how confidently people would weigh-in on this topic, despite demonstrating very little background or knowledge. (There's a big difference between saying “that's not the appropriate way to do this in this circumstance” and “that's completely wrong,” and the former creates space to derive knowledge. After all, the dish in the video is a popular one, even in cultures that predominantly eat jasmine or basmati rice, and there are interesting variations in technique and flavour that arise as a consequence!)

> Mexican moms react to Rachael Ray trying to cook (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFN2g1FBgVA)

I similarly do not understand why these kind of reaction videos are popular. There are slightly better versions of this format (e.g., https://youtu.be/DsyfYJ5Ou3g?t=182) but they are drowned out by this kind of fluff. What does one really gain from interacting with such criticism?

Perhaps there is something to be learnt from these situations: ones where, equipped with just a little bit of knowledge, we derive unearned confidence, and use this confidence not to venture forth more boldly in search of knowledge, but to convince ourselves of our own superiority.
Ask HN: I would like to help founders
by modelcroissant | 2025-05-24 20:29:55+00:00
Hey everyone, I’ve been in the tech space for over a decade and have seen all sorts of startup ideas from the whacky to the brilliant. What grinds my gears is how many of these ideas never materialise into something meaningful. And if they do, poor execution often kills them before they get off the ground.

As a software engineer, I’ve noticed a real disconnect between capable tech talent and ideators. Skilled engineers are often well paid and avoid high risk, early stage projects. What’s left is a saturated market of freelancers who lean on boilerplate and buzzwords, often resulting in bugs, delays, and broken promises. On the flip side, proper consultancies are prohibitively expensive and often charge more for overhead than outcomes.

So here’s my thought: I want to offer a service that bridges this gap. I want to provide honest consulting and technical scoping for free to help founders find the best technical solution for their product, handle the delivery (which would be paid based on complexity), and include free post-delivery aftercare with a grace period to resolve any post delivery issues.

I think this could be an affordable way for founders to circumnavigate the complex topic of tech whilst getting the most for their money.

Does this sound like something that would be found useful?
by nxobject | 2025-05-24 20:30:33+00:00
On the subject of prioritizing EDA:

I need to look this up, but I recall in the 90s a social psychology journal briefly had a policy of "if you show us you're handling your data ethically, you can just show us a self-explanatory plot if you're conducting simple comparisons instead of NHST". That was after some early discussions about statistical reform in the 90s - Cohen's "The Earth is round (p < .05)" I think kick-started things off.
by turtleyacht | 2025-05-24 20:30:34+00:00
> Reinvent for insight. Reuse for impact.

When Primeagen was once interviewed, he built out a whole Java architecture; the interviewer asked him, "Have you heard of grep?" And that started a journey.

If it were to happen to me, feels like a full circle to go from glue and dependencies to pointers and data structures. A welcome reverie.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-24 20:31:28+00:00
Ok so the math is off by a factor of 2, but the basic premise still holds. Harder to do if you have school age kids though or are generally in poor health. But otherwise doable. Not for everyone, but for some it’s a much better life, qualitatively.

I wonder at what point we’ll see this become a trend as young-ish people realize that the trade off is worth it for them. Will we see a reverse migration from the cities at some point? We did some of that during Covid but I haven’t seen any numbers on much of it “stuck” post-COVID especially with RTO. Anyone seen any stats on this?
by o1nder | 2025-05-24 20:31:44+00:00
Loved the tool. Modified it so you can drag and drop CSV files in the browser instead of having to pull and run locally, and of course credited you. Hosted on Github Pages here (https://thomasinch.github.io/csv-to-html-table/), but made it a single index.html so it can be downloaded and used offline. Cheers!
by sleazebreeze | 2025-05-24 20:32:38+00:00
I’ve read his writing for years, and he knows how to express things that feel real and true to me. However the skill of writing for a broad audience doesn’t mean you are more effective in your specific job or company.

It can be true that Lethain is an excellent writer and also a job hopper who doesn’t bear the consequences of his decisions.
by panstromek | 2025-05-24 20:33:50+00:00
This post was about LLMs so I was specifically referring to LLMs.

When I say "they immitate what classification looks like," I don't mean that the classification somehow isn't real, I'm referring to the specific technique of how it's done.

If you ask LLM "Is this sentence offensive: ...?", the task that it's doing is not simply "test whether this sentence is offensive." It's something like "generate what a plausible answer to this question looks like," part of which is answering the question (usually).

This means that if you ask this question in a way that is more often used with an expectation of a certain answer, LLM will use that as a signal to bias the answer, because "that's how the answers to these questions look like." which is the problem highlighted in the article.
by Blikkentrekker | 2025-05-24 20:34:11+00:00
Ehh, I always took the “don't reinvent the wheel” advice in context of “wheels” being very simple things that everyone can create but no one wants to spend time on. It's typically not really a learning exercise to say implement quicksort or some hash table; it simply takes time.

You will also rarely build a better implementation of these things than whatever is in the standard library or even some other library that already exists. If anything, it's better to, if one have a better idea, to contribute one's patches there.
by basket_horse | 2025-05-24 20:34:11+00:00
Agree. The article treats friendship as a career tool rather than a meaningful connection. Real friends aren’t just hype men or professional assets — they’re people who stick around through ups and downs.

> > It’s deeply believing that a rising tide lifts all boats. > I deeply believe that this is utterly naive.

While I don't fully disagree, I have often seen younger employees fall into the trap of overly chasing individual advantage over collective benefit. In other words, trying to be an all-star rather than a team player. Perhaps this is from schooling, where all that matters is getting an "A", but in the workplace it often results in being disliked and less likely to be promoted.
by graypegg | 2025-05-24 20:34:24+00:00
I mean, the phrase isn't "Don't reinvent A wheel". I do feel like it's good advice as-is! To me, "reinvent" implies starting from nothing (inventing), again: If you can learn from why THE wheel is the way it is, you can make A better wheel. Yes it's good for learning, but it's also good advice for focusing on building things as a participant in our own shared history of invention, not trying to be the main character.
by lukan | 2025-05-24 20:35:01+00:00
That seems at odds, with something I previously learned about Jupiter:

"As a result, Jupiter is thought to have about as large a diameter as a planet of its composition and evolutionary history can achieve."

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

So is this a significant new finding, changing previous assumptions, or is it part of the "evolutionary history" meaning it was assumed before, that in early times it was bigger?
by n2d4 | 2025-05-24 20:35:16+00:00
That's not true. The pandemic ended as Omicron became the dominant strain, which was by some measures 90% less fatal than Delta.

It's selective breeding; because we became careful about recognizing symptoms, any severe strain would cause the infected to isolate and hence not infect others. Therefore, Omicron was often symptomless, and COVID-19 was no longer deemed as much of a threat.
by Ekaros | 2025-05-24 20:35:25+00:00
Go ahead build your own wheel. But often it is better just to use one already made.

There is lot of complexity that mature wheels have taken into account or have had to solve and you are likely miss lot of it. Not that building your own does not help you to understand it.

Still, I wouldn't replace wheels on my car with ones I made myself from scratch... Just like I wouldn't replace reasonable complex library.
by underdeserver | 2025-05-24 20:35:49+00:00
100% this, and I'll add that libraries become popular because they solve an issue in many different scenarios.

That menas that almost by definition, if a library is popular, it contains huge amounts of code that just isn't relevant to your use case.

The tradeoff should be whether you can code your version quickly (assuming it's not a crypto library, never roll your own crypto), because if you can, you'll be more familiar with it and carry a smaller dependency.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-05-24 20:37:25+00:00
I recently wrote about gnome:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44043157

TL;DR: I use gnome only indirectly. In the past I've cut them slack, because (I thought) they were designing for touchscreens etc. Turns out they indeed destroyed the usability of their desktop but somehow forgot to make it work for touchscreens.

I have a starlite linux tablet where no gnome video player works acceptably, and I've tried around five. More than one looks like it is made for touch, big round corners/buttons, etc, but requires a keyboard for all but trivial functions... like rewind 15 seconds. WTF, can't tap?

Freetube, Netflix, and Kanopy work fine from a browser, so the problem sure as hell ain't the hardware. Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
by Someone | 2025-05-24 20:37:48+00:00
> It's also kind of funny that you could mine the shit out of Bitcoin with something like this, which would either pay for itself or crash Bitcoin, hard to predict.

Bitcoin has a built-in mechanism to counteract improvements in hashing speed (either because of hardware getting faster, algorithmic improvements, or more hardware getting devoted to hashing).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Mining: “The difficulty of generating a block is deterministically adjusted based on the mining power on the network by changing the difficulty target, which is recalibrated every 2,016 blocks (approximately two weeks) to maintain an average time of ten minutes between new blocks“

I think there’s more than enough range available here to handle a million-fold increase in hashing power.
by tocs3 | 2025-05-24 20:38:12+00:00
Doesn't it feel wrong to the author to snoop through that private information?

It feels a little strange at first but I suspect (correctly or not) that he has sought and received permission from the daughter first. Although I did not see any direct statement. The daughter is 18 or so now (maybe, adding up the times).

The article is as much about the humdrumness of family life as about what Alexa and Amazon hears. I am glad I read it. Puts life (and some parts of technology in perspective).
by grg0 | 2025-05-24 20:38:29+00:00
Not the expert in the area, but "classic static analysis" (for lack of a better term) and concurrency bugs doesn't really check. There are specific modeling tools for concurrency, and they are an entirely different beast than static analysis that requires notation and language support to describe what threads access what data when. Concurrency bugs in static analysis probably requires a level of context and understanding that an LLM can easily churn through.
by sdoering | 2025-05-24 20:38:49+00:00
So basically running a microwave for about 800 seconds, or a bit more than 13 minutes per model?

Oh my god - the world is gonna end. Too bad, we panicked because of exaggerated energy consumption numbers for using an LLM when doing individual work.

Yes - when a lot of people do a lot of prompting, these 0ne tenth of a second to 8 seconds of running the microwave per prompt adds up. But I strongly suggest, that we could all drop our energy consumption significantly using other means, instead of blaming the blog post's author about his energy consumption.

The "lot of burned coal" is probably not that much in this blog post's case given that 1 kWh is about 0.12 kg coal equivalent (and yes, I know that we need to burn more than that for 1kWh. Still not that much, compared to quite a few other human activities.

If you want to read up on it, James O'Donnell and Casey Crownhart try to pull together a detailed account of AI energy usage for MIT Technology Review.[1] I found that quite enlightening.

[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...
by ianbutler | 2025-05-24 20:38:55+00:00
Yup! So we have multiple businesses working with us and for pilots its deploying the tool, providing feedback (we're connected over slack with all our partners for a direct line to us), and making sure the uses fit expectations for your business and working towards long term partnership.

We have several deployments in other peoples clouds right now as well as usage of our own cloud version, so we're flexible here.
by lesuorac | 2025-05-24 20:39:11+00:00
Eh, isn't the driver shortage an entirely self-inflicted problem by having them wait around for literal hours instead of actually driving.

> In fact, according to one study by the ATRI, over 80 percent of drivers run out of available hours due to detention time, with an average of only 6.5 hours out of 11 available hours spent on the road. Many of those drivers also experienced wait times longer than six hours at some point. [1]

Granted, if I was running a warehouse I'd love to have a line of truckers waiting (for free) to un/load but that doesn't make it efficient.

[1]: https://www.rtsinc.com/articles/reducing-truck-driver-detent...
Ask HN: How to request specific tools from an MCP server?
by Arindam1729 | 2025-05-24 20:40:56+00:00
I'm working on a MultiAgent workflow that uses multiple MCP servers. Some of these servers expose 30+ tools, but I only need 2-3 specific ones per agent.

Now the issue is, Some servers support a `--tools` flag or allow passing a list of tools explicitly, which is awesome.

But many don't, and I can't seem to find a standard way to declare just the tools I want. When I use multiple MCP servers together, it often fails or conflicts because it can't resolve or match the right tools.

My questions:

Is there a standard or recommended way (via the protocol or any convention) to select only specific tools from an MCP server?

How are you handling this in your agent or mcp client setups?

Should this be a server-side feature (like filtering tools on init), or should agents filter post-discovery?

Would love to hear how others are managing tool overload when working with such MCP servers.
by tomnipotent | 2025-05-24 20:41:07+00:00
How can this be described as anything other than business? Local governments making concessions to businesses generating jobs and SALT is par for the course and Microsoft isn't special here.

> One of these is that Microsoft was a pretty bad actor when nobody reigned them in, and I was around at the time.

So was I (was working in Redmond at the time), and their behavior was no worse than what Apple or Google are up to today. The anti-trust case itself was 90% theater, Microsoft was let off with a slap on the wrist but somehow popular culture has decided it was much more devastating than it really was because it reinforces their "M$ bad" bias. It's hard for me not to chalk comments like this to the "borrowed" bucket rather than researched and well-informed opinion, and it just convinces me further than when it comes to Microsoft people are borrowing their opinions rather than earning them.

Yes, Microsoft made some dick moves over 25 years ago and paid for it. They continue to operate like every other business in 2025 despite being the largest company in the world by market cap. At some point folks can't keep pulling up this card like it's a wildcard-win-all.
by gizmodo59 | 2025-05-24 20:41:11+00:00
Having tried both I’d say o3 is in a league of it’s own compared to 3.7 or even Gemini 2.5 pro. The benchmarks may show not a lot of gain but that matters a lot when the task is very complex. What’s surprising is that they announced it last November and only now it’s released a month back now? (I’m guessing lots of safety took time but no idea). Can’t wait for o4!
Show HN: 1 min workouts for people who sit all day
by melvinzammit | 2025-05-24 20:41:41+00:00
I am a software developer and in the last few months after recently becoming a father I was barely finding time for a proper workout. Recently I was reading about new research on Snack Exercises and how beneficial mini workouts of less than 2mins every so often, during the day are to our body. So, I decided to build an iOS App for me and others to help with this. The app generates a list of exercises that I need to tick to complete daily or loose my streak. The algorithm takes into account muscle groups and balancing the exercises to hit most main muscles. I also stayed going through all exercises and adding a couple of alternative exercises in case I don't feel like the recommended exercise. Since I'm not a trainer I commissioned professional exercise posture video guides and animations by an exercise expert which I attached to each exercise.

I uploaded the app on the app store for free and no ads. If this is something that interests you, I want to hear how you balance a long day on your desk vs exercise.
by commotionfever | 2025-05-24 20:42:20+00:00
Hi all, I've been working on a new suite of tools for music managment. I've you've used beets.io or Picard, you get the idea. They are great tools but for me were not fast enough and hard to grasp. wrtag is fast enough that the filesystem can be the source of truth, so no need for a sidecar database which can get out of sync

it also includes a web interface to manage imports from external sources.

Hope you like it
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-24 20:43:23+00:00
UI development in C# can vary considerably depending on what platform and patterns you're targeting. You can do a native Windows UI, mobile, web, ect.

> Is UI work on C# so different, that it requires introduction of frontend dev role?

First, where Xaml is the most up-to-date native Windows UI API, and primarily C#, it's not "different," it's normal.

But, to answer your question: That depends on the kind of application you're making, organizational priorities, and the need for slickness.

For example, if you're making a quick and dirty CRUD web app, it doesn't make sense to have a separate UI role. Razor or Blazor (the two ways to do HTML in C#.) will be plenty. This will basically be like what was done in the 1990s. It's extremely easy for a competent C# programmer to learn Blazor (and HTML) and make a functional web application. (As long as you don't care about if it's pretty.)

If you're making a pretty web app, the need for a separate role again relies on organizational priorities. In my case, my job is C# in the browser (through Blazor compiled to WASM) all the way to the database. (The definition of "full stack.") I established the patterns we use in in-browser C#, and the components, but I hand off day-to-day UI work to a developer with less experience than me.

Getting back to organizational priorities: We could have a dedicated "UI" role if we wanted significantly more polish in our UI. For our company, the fact that our current team can generally handle any area of the stack is far more valuable than someone who can make a pixel perfect UI but get confused in the database.

Likewise, we aren't going to agonize over our UI like some organizations do. If an organization is going to do that, they probably need a dedicated UI developer role.

> If not, you are not “full stack” developer just because you do UI on C#.

Wow that is an insulting statement.
by megadragon9 | 2025-05-24 20:43:23+00:00
Thanks for this inspiring essay, I couldn’t agree more that “reinventing for insight” is one of the best ways to learn. I had a similar experience couple months ago when I built an entire PyTorch-style machine learning library [1] from scratch, using nothing but Python and NumPy. I started with a tiny autograd engine, then gradually created layer modules, optimizers, data loaders etc... I simply wanted to learn machine learning from first principles. Along the way I attempted to reproduce classical convnets [2] all the way to a toy GPT-2 [3] using the library I built. It definitely helped me understand how machine learning worked underneath the hood without all the fancy abstractions that PyTorch/TensorFlow provides. Kinda like reinventing the car using the wheel I reinvented :)

[1] https://github.com/workofart/ml-by-hand

[2] https://github.com/workofart/ml-by-hand/blob/main/examples/c...

[3] https://github.com/workofart/ml-by-hand/blob/main/examples/g...
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-24 20:43:30+00:00
Pause/Play still confuses me sometimes, so I think that not all apps do it the same. Is it showing the current state, or what will happen if I tap it? Just have two separate fucking buttons please.

Same as on/off controls, they should have clear external labels, e.g.:

Off |X | On

So it's clear what moving the slider will do.
by kaycebasques | 2025-05-24 20:44:14+00:00
So, based on the emphasis on "retrieval" in the blog title, are these models narrowly focused on retrieval tasks only? E.g. I shouldn't use them for clustering, STS, and so on?

How does voyage-3.5 compare against Gemini Embedding (GE)? I thought GE had top spot for retrieval tasks on MMTEB. Is Voyage saying here that voyage-3.5 now has the top spot? Or is it just that, for the 10 specified datasets, voyage-3.5 outperforms the specified OpenAI and Cohere models.
by dttze | 2025-05-24 20:44:17+00:00
> There is lots of data on which educational investments result in more stable cash flow vs less stable cash flow.

The whole point of the comment you replied to was that this data is now wrong, as capital has continued to rug pull industries however it benefits them. So, once again, people can analyze all the data and make the "correct" decision and then still wind up in 40k of debt and no good job prospects.
by richardjennings | 2025-05-24 20:44:38+00:00
I very much agree with the Author. "Do not reinvent the wheel" is unfortunate in that it muddles several things into one piece of subjective advice.

The advice as I would give it is:

"Try to re-invent the things you are interested in".

"Do not underestimate the value of the continued interaction between reality and established solutions."