MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hbroadbent | 2025-05-26 07:55:10+00:00
I'm still building AttendList, a Google Meet attendance tracking extension (https://attendlist.com).

It's starting to pick up! Which is cool — a few new users are trickling in each week. I think it's about time I invest more time in marketing now though (which is probably what I should be doing now instead of posting on HN!)
by CuriouslyC | 2025-05-26 07:56:31+00:00
The fun part for me was coming up with ideas for new things, then architecting those things, creating the high level systems to implement them, and iterating on them to make them better. Figuring out why some test harness wasn't mocking some random thing correctly, remembering which api call had which syntax, or just writing a bajillion almost-boilerplate endpoints was always drudgery and I'm glad to be rid of it.
by LeonB | 2025-05-26 07:56:47+00:00
I spent a little time writing software for a plastic injection moulding company who supplied parts for a range of different automotive suppliers.

You could say that they were all made the same way — they were all moulded from tiny little plastic balls that are melted down — but the reality is that there was a huge difference in the products produced for each vehicle.

The vent for an A/C is one example. To produce that piece for a Ford might be one piece of plastic, which falls off the conveyor at about 1 every 20 seconds. The same piece for an Audi would take 3 different types of plastic, and some rubbery material, and would take about two minutes per unit - as well as some assembly, by a human, before it is done.
by lmm | 2025-05-26 07:56:51+00:00
> London is an example of such a city. Its population in 1750 was 750000 people

And its population in the 1930s, with a healthy fertility rate, was 11 million.

> for the price of an apartment in Tokyo, you can build a _new_ home with all the modern amenities.

Maybe - bear in mind that building costs are much higher out in the country. But assuming you build a big house, what would you do with it? I guess all the cleaning will help make life less boring.

> It won't kill anything, it will just move jobs out of large cities. We've already had a "dry run" of this during the pandemic.

The pandemic did a lot of economic damage, and many jobs stayed in the cities or are rushing to return there now.

> Europe has free (or cheap) education.

But much stronger womens' rights and correspondingly low marriage rates.

> Then why people moving out of cities have a greater fertility rate?

In Japan? Maybe because of all the cash subsidies for moving out with children.
by layoric | 2025-05-26 07:57:14+00:00
> You can deploy to AWS, Vercel, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare, etc.

It's interesting that this is now and has been the default for quite sometime. I'm still waiting for the pinch to hit where people realize running on these platforms is either really expensive (EC2/RDS), or platform specific ("serverless", Cloudflare workers, lambda, etc).
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-26 07:57:15+00:00
Partly because that is how it’s spelled in Magic: the Gathering; the Ethereum founders say:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum#Founding_(2013%E2%80%...

Buterin chose the name Ethereum after browsing a list of elements from science fiction on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_elements,_ma...

Also, “Ethereum” looks like a misspelling to me; even though we’ve got “petroleum” and “linoleum” my instinct is to replace it with the more common “-ium” ending from the Periodic Table.

However, I have never been inclined to pronounce or spell “Dubai” with a diaresis, because it’s an Arabic word with a diphthong.

I am a native speaker of American English, second language Spanish; polyglot including proficiency in Latin, Italian, Greek, Sanskrit, and Semitic family.
by bjackman | 2025-05-26 07:57:42+00:00
> No GitHub PR sync for stacks

FWIW, I think the fact that you need client support for this is a bizarre shortcoming of GitHub.

If GitHub just let you review individual commits like Gerrit does, the concept of "PR stacking" would be unnecessary (as it is with Gerrit).

The model of "a PR is just a blob of changes" is a weird baby's toy version of a code review tool IMO!
by tuyguntn | 2025-05-26 07:57:59+00:00
when I was building my own side projects my biggest bottleneck was everything around the product.

- polished landing page - SEO - marketing and branding materials - setting up social accounts: Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn - preparing basic CI/CD to be able to quickly deploy changes - setting up ads across many ad services like Google, Facebook and etc,. - setting up CNAMEs, records for email deliverability
by bosborne | 2025-05-26 07:58:52+00:00
I’ve been building tsc.run, a new serverless framework focused on TypeScript and minimal setup. It’s now in alpha and I’m looking for feedback.

The core idea: define a function, export it, and deploy, no routing setup, no config overload. It’s built to make common things (REST APIs, background jobs, events, infra config) work with strong typing and defaults.

Highlights:

Typed request/response for APIs

Auto-discovered REST routes, jobs, and subscribers

Simple config for defining resources like databases, queues, and caches

AWS-first deployment (no Docker/zips); GCP and Cloudflare support planned.

It’s still early, so I’d love to hear what makes sense, what’s confusing, or what you'd want to see next.

Docs: https://docs.tsc.run

GitHub: https://github.com/tsc-run/tsc.run

Happy to answer any questions!
by pyr0hu | 2025-05-26 07:59:02+00:00
> No GitHub PR sync for stacks. Managing stacked diffs locally is great, but (a better version of) Sapling's PR syncing would be a huge value add. This is somewhat of a pain point for me directly, but even more so a weakness when I've tried to evangelize jj internally as a viable "stacked diff" solution (e.g. to be blessed by our eng tools team). Someone familiar and comfortable with Sapling (or just skeptical of jj) can easily point to this feature gap in a way that pretty much ends the conversation.

Can you explain this point in detail? I've been using jj and doing stacked PRs on GitLab using `jj git push --all`. I haven't used Sapling so I'm not familiar with it's way of doing stacked PR and I'm really just curious what do you miss from it.
by fhd2 | 2025-05-26 08:01:15+00:00
100%. I keep thinking this, and sometimes saying it.

Sure, if you're stuck in a horrible legacy code base, it's harder. But you can _still_ automate tedious work, given you can manage to put in the proverbial stop for gas. I've seen loads of developers just happily copy paste things together, not stopping to wonder if it was perhaps time to refactor.
by JPLeRouzic | 2025-05-26 08:01:37+00:00
> "By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries"

In France it is officially 1607 hours per year, but it could be legally much higher and the mean duration is 1 679 hours. From Eurostat, in 2021 the mean duration in Germany was 1 769 hours and 1 923 hours in Italy.
by piva00 | 2025-05-26 08:01:55+00:00
For speeding up chores it can be useful but removing the actual fun part of experiences, the research, the looking into, the figuring out, to instead only get the result of it sounds like a quick path into unfulfilling experiences.

But to be honest, I don't think it will get to the state you dream about, just like smart homes never got close and are more of a hassle than an actual life improvement. Unless it is almost 100% perfect it will error out in ways that are extremely annoying, ordering the wrong groceries, booking the wrong trip, etc. It's really hard to cross over the point where it's absolutely helpful without hiccups.
by watwut | 2025-05-26 08:01:59+00:00
Germany does not have 10% tariffs on American cars. This part is simply not true. Germany has 10% sales tax called VAT on all the cars - German cars included. Teslas were popular in Germany, prior Musk open support for far right. Even Fords are common in Germany, although mostly small ones not huge ones.

Oh ... and America has outright ban on Japanese cars. They are reliable and popular pretty much anywhere else.

tl;dr this is a problem with hillsdale and heretage foundation - they simply lie.
by palm-tree | 2025-05-26 08:02:16+00:00
You joke, but there are plenty of companies working on something similar to this, for example: https://www.sw.siemens.com/en-US/technology/generative-desig...

I haven't touched CAD for a couple of years, but I get the impression that (inevitably) the generative design hype significantly exceeds the current capability.
by estsauver | 2025-05-26 08:03:10+00:00
I shipped a tool that uses logprobs to generate pretty detailed estimates about how long tasks are going to take (i.e., give a new product manager/business person/sales person this tool and then they'll have reasonable estimates for how long various tasks will take.) If anyone wants to try it at universalestimator.com, it's free with code "TYHN".

I'm also making a picture book generator for my kids. I want to be from some pictures, a description of a story, and will then pop out a ready-to-print picture book for them.
by WinstonSmith84 | 2025-05-26 08:04:44+00:00
I just quoted the definition of a Ponzi scheme, hence the word "fraud". The definition of a fraud is "... fraud is intentional deception ... to gain from a victim ... unfairly" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud - maybe this gives another perspective what a fraud can be?..

> the first pensioners didn't invest in the system

I agree with you .. I suppose you're making my point here?

> It's also not a pyramid scheme, since the structure is upside down

The structure would be upside down if the demography was growing as expected - and that's the core of the issue, why governments have to extend the age of the retirement: the burden of the pensions is becoming unbearable relative to the amount of active people.

> there is no recruitment.

No indeed, though if you decide to live in Denmark, you are not recruited, you're forcefully enrolled in this scheme.

> ... to taint ... its receivers by associating it with a criminal undertaking is bad faith

There is no "criminal undertaking" here, the system is simply broken and you're saying things I didn't - I certainly don't blame the current pensioners, nor the active generation working for these pensioners - they are all victims of this system.
by nobody9999 | 2025-05-26 08:05:07+00:00
>It's funny how people here always complain that any money government spends is wasted, but if you look at big companies they are "wasting" money as well. Just look at the number of projects that google killed. It's simply a function of large (and small) organizations that they don't get it right all the time, it's difficult to predict the future.

I worked at a Fortune 50 financial services company back in the 1990s and they designed, built and deployed a brand, spanking new customer service platform.

They spent USD$200,000,000.00 building the system. It was ready for production when someone realized they'd spend USD$50,000,000+ per annum supporting the platform. The product roll out was scrapped, and tens of millions of dollars of equipment sat in warehouses.

When trying to redeploy said equipment across the enterprise, group heads would purchase new equipment rather than using the equipment sitting in warehouses as it was "cheaper" on their budget lines to spend real money rather than put the depreciation of already purchased equipment on those budget lines.

So yeah, big companies can be incredibly wasteful. Often more wasteful than government (e.g., US Medicare has ~3% overhead -- show me any private insurer that can top that) as well.

It's all about the incentives. People (and consequently, organizations) respond to the incentives inherent in a situation.

Sometimes those incentives promote efficient outcomes and sometimes not so much. The trick is to maximize the former and minimize the latter. Something easier said than done.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-05-26 08:05:23+00:00
Plus EV tariffs + banning of TikTok unless sold to a U.S. firm.

The Biden administration had already taken several targeted measures to defend local industry from China.

One can argue whether this was good policy or not, but it’s hilariously wrong to argue that Trump was the first person to recognize the threat of China.

In fact, Trump has been extraordinarily useful to China. One of the first steps he took in his first term was to withdraw from the TPP.

Again, one can legitimately argue whether the TPP was good or not, but the entire purpose of the TPP was to reduce dependence on and create alternatives to China, which is why the trans Pacific partnership did not include the second largest world economy despite it lying on the Pacific Ocean.
by denys_potapov | 2025-05-26 08:06:23+00:00
I'm working on a block-based visual programming environment for kids — a sort of Scratch alternative — but instead of inventing a new language, it's a subset of Elixir. I'm using Google’s Blockly to generate real Elixir code from the blocks.

Right now, I'm building a Space Invaders clone in Elixir with LiveView, and integrating Blockly so the game's core logic can be edited visually. Hoping it becomes a fun way to learn both functional programming and web dev.
by duttish | 2025-05-26 08:07:03+00:00
I merged the last major big thing for the android version of Tricktrapper over the weekend, it's kind of 2FA for normal phone calls, verification that you're talking to who you think you're talking to in this age of deepfake voice. There's no LLM in this, because I think that way only lies model vs model competition and nobody can win. Better to try and cut the whole vector if it's possible.

Been chasing pilot customer but it's few companies that only have android, so I'm picking up a mac mini after work to start working on the ios version, see what's possible with the various restrictions.

https://www.tricktrapper.com/ if anyone is curious, it's sparse of the details though. I'm working on a doc with all the technical info. The plan is to release it for free to private people, charge companies.
by Cyphase | 2025-05-26 08:08:14+00:00
Myself.

Been a freelance dev for years, now going on "sabbatical" (love that word) very shortly.

Planning to do a lot of learning, self-improvement, and projects. Tech-related and not. Preparing for the next volume (not chapter) of life. Refactoring, if you like, among other things.

I'm excited.

---

I posted about this on last month's thread, and mentioned in a descendant comment that I was going to PyCon US in May. Someone well-meaning asked if tech conferences are in tune with working on myself. I just got back from PyCon. Yes! It was an incredible experience. Not for learning technical things from talks – the talks are mostly online already – but for the social and community aspects.
by impossiblefork | 2025-05-26 08:08:49+00:00
Basically you'd familiarize yourself with transformers by implementing different variants of them, and changing them around according to your own ideas on different toy datasets.

Then you'd figure out a set of toy tasks that you like and think are important.

In this particular case you take something like NanoGPT, go to model.py, go to class GPT, go to __init__, modify the self.transformer ModuleDict by changing nn.Embedding to a ModuleList of nn.Embedding, then you change the for loop at line 180 to loop over a range, modify forward by adding x = x + self.transformer.wte[i], something like that I think.

I haven't tried yet though (I've got a terrible cold, so I am on social media instead of doing anything sensible).
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-26 08:10:41+00:00
That's £17M of electricity, not including all the equipment, staff, installation costs etc.

To put this in perspective, Sadiq Khan already runs the system at a massive loss. They just about cover their operating costs at the momemt, and rely entirely on grants from the rest of the country to do upgrades of any kind. So cooling efforts have to be very cost efficient. Also the UK grid is very supply constrained. New nukes are being built but there have been the expected massive cost overruns and problems, so any large new energy demands in the UK just aren't happening anytime soon. It's actually been deindustrializing due to very high electricity costs.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-26 08:10:54+00:00
But wait, there’s more crowdsourcing!

Google Maps actually processes historical data about how busy the location is throughout the hours and each day of the week.

You can find this rendered as a little bar graph with a blurb describing the current estimate.

This is believed to be aggregated from everyone’s Android devices reporting their locations in a very small radius.

Also, Maps asks its users to answer extended questions about amenities. Such as: parking types, accessibility features, kid-friendly, vegan/vegetarian.

When I am on board a bus or light rail train, there is information about how full it is, what temperature, accessibility, etc. They are tracked in real time because the transit authority shares their live telemetry with Google. Once, Google had demonstrably wrong schedule information and I discovered that it reflected the official website’s version. (It was reporting every train canceled, but they were actually running.)

When I worked in an office in 2012, we were trying to get our arms around various listings in 3rd party "Yellow Pages" publications, on paper and online. It seems that compiling business listings has been around a long time. And every business needs a Social Media manager to be aware of their footprint and manage multiple sites like this. Yelp, TripAdvisor, you name it.
by mlindner | 2025-05-26 08:11:33+00:00
Under Biden if you climbed over the border wall illegally, waited to be picked up by border control, and then falsely claimed asylum, you'd be assigned a court date, and then disappear into the country. They'd almost always miss their court date and never be heard from again. Millions of people were entering the country per year in this manner.

Yes there were many systems as you mention, but all those systems amounted for naught when the end result is the person still entered and remained in the country illegally.
by mattlondon | 2025-05-26 08:11:36+00:00
> I don't see why someone who worked their ass off their whole life should be poor because some parents are too poor to have children.

The issue is the "triple lock" (state pension rises by whichever is higher of either rate of inflation, average earnings increases, or 2.5%).

While laudable in intent, recently this has led to situations where pensioners are getting bumper increases linked to high inflation, while the younger working age people are getting stagnant wages while inflation shoots up.

This is is why pensioners are on average getting wealthier than the working population. Let that settle in for a moment: year after year pensioners are getting more wealthy than the working population that is financing the pensioner's increase in wealth.

This is universally accepted as unsustainable and deeply unfair on an intergenerational basis as the pensioners - who generally tend to own their own homes and also get various benefits like free transport and extra money for heating costs etc as well as benefiting from more generous policies/working conditions of the past like free university education and final-salary private pensions or purchasing government-built social housing at steeply-discounted rates, lower tax burden - continue to get more and more well-off while the people financing their retirement are struggling with soaring costs, expensive childcare, high education costs, zero-hour contracts, stagnant wages and all the rest.

Yet pensioners complain that they paid their taxes "all their lives" so they deserve to continue getting a bigger and bigger slice of the pie, that they deserve to get wealthier and wealthier than the working population, all at the cost of pushing more children below the poverty line and financially crippling the current workers who have also paid their taxes all their lives (so far).

Eventually with policies like these, you run out of other people's money.

Trouble is that it is a political landmine since pensioners are a big part of the vote so no one has the balls to abolish (or at least reform) the triple lock.
by Dan-Q | 2025-05-26 08:12:16+00:00
No, I gave my phone number to Google to gain access to Business Profile, as part of an identity verification process, and specifically didn't give them one to publish on the business listing. And they correctly didn't publish one. For 4+ years.

And then one day then decided to publish the one I'd given them for an identity check... in search results. I don't yet know why.
by ludee0 | 2025-05-26 08:12:29+00:00
I’m hacking on a tiny open-source/self hostable “prompt vault” so you can stash prompts and personas once and use them with whatever AI model you’re playing with today (or tomorrow). Right now it’s just a single-binary server with a SQLite file next to it—add / edit / tag in a simple UI, then copy or share. Next on the list: a lightweight browser extension that pops your saved snippets anywhere there’s a text box. Maybe it could grow to a more serious prompt testing/comparison pipeline, prompt templating etc
by axegon_ | 2025-05-26 08:14:01+00:00
Same thing as comparing a phone camera to a professional camera really. For the average person, nothing really changes beyond a steep learning curve. But better quality video, faster(not fpv fast of course), can carry a heavier payload, a lot more options when making videos/capturing photos(which will likely be my next biggest challenge - geting the wiring from the drone to the gimbal and camera. But one bridge at a time - the gimbal is proving to be insanely challenging as it is so far.
by Digit-Al | 2025-05-26 08:14:13+00:00
Even worse, in my opinion, is when you're typing away and a dialog from some other application suddenly decides to pop up and swallow all your key strokes; or, in the worst case, one of your key strokes just happens to coincide with a shortcut key on the intruding dialog so you accidentally accept something without having a clue what the dialog was and what you accidentally accepted.

OS should prevent any dialog from a background application from coming to the foreground of it detected that use is in the process of typing. It's not that difficult of a task after all.

[Edit: auto-incorrected text]
by Dan-Q | 2025-05-26 08:15:01+00:00
Yes, there is.

I'm not claiming that my personal phone number shouldn't be online anywhere. There are plenty of places it's pretty easy to find!

I'm just saying that I didn't put my personal phone number onto a public Business Profile (only providing it for identity verification, many years ago). But then, randomly, one day Google decided to start publishing it to anybody who searched for that company name.
by anticodon | 2025-05-26 08:15:47+00:00
My only and biggest pain point with Git is that it requires a lot of manual merging even in a small project. You have several branches that are several weeks/months old and they touch the same set of files. Eventually, when they'll be approved for merging, you'll have to manually resolve lots of conflicts in all of them, and do that repeatedly. rerere is supposed to at least save you from repeating repeating same merges in every branch you rebase, but in my experience it never helps.

Unfortunately, as far as I understand, jj won't help with issue of unnecessary manual merges either.
by flembat | 2025-05-26 08:15:51+00:00
In the UK You don't get paid for lunch which is why real white collar hours worked are more like eight to six or a lot longer. And typically you get to work through your unpaid lunch, while your contract says 37.5 hours and 'any other time necessary to complete your work'. At least that's been my experience for the last forty years or so.