MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danparsonson | 2025-05-19 14:34:17+00:00
First, a couple of things to clear up.

If I came across as insulting you or anyone else, then I'm sorry - that was not my intention. I'm trying to express my confusion because I think we're talking across each other somehow, and I don't understand how.

Secondly, and related to that - when I said 'Perhaps I'm missing something?', that was intended as a genuine invitation to you to fill me in on what obvious/non-obvious thing I'm missing. Maybe I am in fact being stupid! It happens regularly. I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm trying to open the door to further discourse.

So with that out of the way - what am I missing? The problem seems straightforward to me, and I will try to lay out my thinking clearly here, not to imply that you don't understand any of this, but rather to make it easier for you to find and fill in the gap for me:

- physical shop buys trinket for $10, costs are estimated at $5, physical shop sells trinket for $16, making $1 profit

- online shop buys trinket for $10, costs are estimated at $3, online shop sells trinket for $14, making $1 profit

Result: physical shop goes out of business because (insert large percentage here) of customers see trinket in physical shop, decide they want it, then find it cheaper online and order it there; physical shop doesn't sell enough things in aggregate to cover its large fixed costs, and can no longer sustain the business. Even small savings are very valuable to a lot of people, as demonstrated, for example, by all the websites specialising in price comparison, and the behaviour of people during the sales season.

So from your replies you clearly think that's overly simplistic, but I don't understand why, and I'm asking for clarification in the spirit of discussion, if you're willing to entertain that.

I think the key difference is in this: "...there's more business value than direct sales..." but if you mean that enough people place enough value in try-before-you-buy to make it worth running a physical shop, then I would say that the massive decline in high-street stores in the last 10-15 years says otherwise. Side note that another problem shops face is choosing what stock to hold; a physical store almost never beats online stores for variety of inventory, which was another nail in the coffin so to speak.

So that's my hot take; by all means shoot me down - I don't mind if I've missed something obvious and if so I'd love to learn from the experience.

And if you were having a bad day yesterday for other reasons, then I hope today is going better for you.
by cableshaft | 2025-05-19 14:34:25+00:00
> Have you tried asking questions at the Google search prompt recently?

I do sometimes. It's not too bad when it comes to answers to simple programming questions lately, but I've found I mostly can't trust it with answers to other things, like medical or news or history. It sounds right but I dig into the actual articles and find it misinterpreted things often enough I can't trust it. But I also don't use ChatGPT for that purpose either (but Google insists on giving me those answers anyway when I'm just trying to search for articles).

I actually wish it didn't do A.I. responses by default. Like I'd rather it didn't spend the processing power for that when I actually really want to use it for a search engine and not for A.I. (I heard that A.I. uses approximately 10x more compute power than a standard search, on average... I'm not certain that's true, but I don't doubt it's at least significantly more than a search).

I'd rather only use processing power for A.I. when I specifically want to do so. I'm actually contemplating switching my standard search engine away from Google so I don't keep getting A.I. responses.
by akomtu | 2025-05-19 14:34:26+00:00
Downvotes is the natural allergic reaction to alien ideas. Science to many isn't just a theory equal among others, but a religion, a part of their identity that they are very defensive about. The core postulate of this religion is that everything can be reduced to concepts understandable by their minds and replicated in a mechanical experiment, or it doesn't exist. If a few dozens of people could reliably demonstrate that they see the same aura, that would be a disaster for science as a religion, because a phenomenon apparently exists, yet you can't build an aura detector. On the other hand, this defensiveness is necessary to protect the science, for if you start admitting alien ideas without their assimilation, the science will fall apart.
by hk1337 | 2025-05-19 14:34:41+00:00
I thought this was going to be software development focused, so I read it a bit from that perspective.

> There are any number of ways to build an ugly bridge, but its builders were allowed to make it pretty, and they were right to do that.

There's obviously extremes to this with developers being perfectionists holding up release (I could probably be on the poster for this) but the pendulum can swing the other way too. Sometimes not taking that extra hour or day to do something can cost you many hours and days later on in the future and to my point, sometimes taking that extra hour or day can save you hours or days in the future.
by modo_mario | 2025-05-19 14:34:53+00:00
My entire house is filled with mostly inherited stuff. I'm frugal and grew up between both lower and old money upper class but i have to say if you can make it look coherent it's fine and has saved me tons. Where it isn't it's a mix and match of thrifted high quality and low quality stuff.

My electric standing desk and chair being one of those modern things that costed a couple of thousands but i got secondhand for a combined 200. The desk is built like a tank. For the chair i replaced the cracking armrest covers with leather.

I also have some hardwood old tables and cabinets that are a couple generations old and as functional now as they were back then.
by moron4hire | 2025-05-19 14:35:25+00:00
Large chips glued together is Oriented Strand Board (OSB). Small chips glued together is Particle Board. Sawdust glued together is Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF). Plywood is layers of veneer--thin sheets of wood--glued together in alternating orientations.

Plywood can be nice. It doesn't expand with temperature changes like planks and doesn't have a grain direction that it can split along.

The others, I hate. Any small amount of moisture and they delaminate. OSB is so ugly and rough that you need to hide it because you'll never be able to apply enough primer to cover the chip pattern. I'd rather just use regular plywood at that point. Particle board is the same, but I'm okay with the kind coated on both sides with melamine. It's pretty hard to get a much flatter surface than melamine particle board without spending ridiculously more on granite.

But MDF is the worst. A lot of people like MDF because it's easy to work and can be fairly structural, if you use it right. But it's very, very easy to damage, has absolutely zero edge strength, and it makes a super-fine, extremely carcinogenic sawdust that is extremely difficult to clean up completely. Yes, all sawdust is carcinogenic, always wear a mask in the wood shop, but MDF sawdust never goes away.

Frankly, it's just easier to get a bunch of sheets of birch plywood and southern pine dimensional lumber shipped direct to my house and not worry about it.
by aspizu | 2025-05-19 14:35:36+00:00
> All of these new features are impossible in the visual programming paradigm.

I believe that to be not true. Visual paradigm allows for some interesting behaviours.

1. Integrate external tooling and workflows

This is just the result of the Scratch runtime being in the browser.

2. Macros

Okay, macros might seem very difficult in a visual paradigm, but its possible. And, in a visual paradigm, it would be very easy to visualize how macros transform the code. (You could have a pop-up that shows the expanded form of the macro)

3. Optimizations: Turbowarp is a Scratch mod that does JIT compilation with optimizations.
by lokar | 2025-05-19 14:35:42+00:00
While I generally agree with krugman, he and other on the left need to be more honest about what funding our (very modest) social safety net will cost.

The idea that a the billionaires could easily pay this is just wrong. You could take the wealth of all US billionaires and it fund government for less then a year.

They should pay more, but for fairness, it won’t fix the budget. For that the middle class needs to pay more. They pay less then they have in modern history, and less then other places.
by i80and | 2025-05-19 14:35:53+00:00
I moved from a place that puts at least some effort into beautification to a place that slaps everything as cheaply and minimally together as possible. Both with significant freeze-thaw cycles.

I'm pretty pragmatic in general. I get the argument in the abstract. But having been on both sides, I know which is better.

But more to the point, the parent used a very bad example to make their point.
by taeric | 2025-05-19 14:36:10+00:00
Suspension bridges tend to be much prettier than other styles. I think this every time I get to cross the Tacoma Narrows.

I'm assuming that is just a preference of mine based on how much rarer they are to see? Could be that they tend to be more expensive and have the maintenance baked into the costs?

Good examples in the article of how to make others pretty. I'm assuming cost is almost always the limiting factor. Many "ugly" bridges have a hard time keeping up with required maintenance. Keeping any art clean and maintained is almost certainly not in the budget.
by mstaoru | 2025-05-19 14:36:34+00:00
Redis Streams is a "go-to" for me, mostly because of operational simplicity and performance. It's also dead simple to write consumers in any language. If I had more stringent durability requirements, I would probably pick Redpanda, but Kafka-esque (!) processing semantics can be daunting sometimes.

I didn't have anything but bad experiences with RabbitMQ, maybe I cannot "cook" it, but it would always go split-brain, or last issue I had, a part of clients connected to certain clustered nodes just stopped receiving messages. Cluster restart helped, but all logs and all metrics were green and clean. I try to avoid it if I can.

ZeroMQ is more like a building block for your applications. If you need something very special, it could be a good fit, but for a typical EDA-ish bus architecture Redis or Kafka/Redpanda are both very good.
by miki123211 | 2025-05-19 14:36:49+00:00
Clearly there is some reason to do this.

I mean, Google does it, and they employ some of the most brilliant people on the planet. Showing people their website in the wrong language is clearly losing them money, so minimizing that is a very direct way to increase profits. There must be some reason they rely on IP more than on Accept-Language. They don't leave money lying around, and there's no way Google engineers aren't aware of that header.

I don't know why they do it, but somehow Accept-Language must be less reliable than IP. No other explanation makes sense in this context.
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-19 14:37:09+00:00
That's IMO the original sin: no automatic selection will cover 99% of use cases, that in itself it to me a fantasy that isn't worth pursuing.

People are complicated and having simple heuristics to predict what more than half of them want is not feasible at our level of technology.

Sure any single person will have somewhat simple rules to decide what languages they want, you could come up with simple rules for the people in your life. But you're not trying to solve it for a specific group of people. The target is 8 billion people, most of which we have no idea what their life is.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-05-19 14:37:11+00:00
> Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I think I can see in his deadened, ambitious eyes the character that would later lead Leopold to inflict immense suffering on the people of the Congo for personal gain. The spark of humanity that you can see in the eyes of so many of Nadar’s subjects just isn’t there.

Or maybe the author's perception is colored by what we know of this man.
by mikeyouse | 2025-05-19 14:37:52+00:00
For the text + an analysis of the legal implications:

https://www.justsecurity.org/113529/terrible-idea-contempt-c...

> The provision in the proposed budget reconciliation bill states: “No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.”

> By its very terms this provision is meant to limit the power of federal courts to use their contempt power. It does so by relying on a relatively rarely used provision of the Rules that govern civil cases in federal court. Rule 65(c) says that judges may issue a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order “only if the movant gives security in an amount that the court considers proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by any party found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained.”

...

> But the provision in the House bill would make the court orders in these cases completely unenforceable. Indeed, the bill is stunning in its scope. It would apply to all temporary restraining orders, preliminary injunctions, and even permanent injunctions ever issued. By its terms, it applies to court orders “issued prior to, on, or subsequent” to its adoption.
by the_snooze | 2025-05-19 14:37:59+00:00
Not just language. Some retailers' websites (e.g., Target, Home Depot) use IP geolocation to guess the nearest store to you. It'll even override your preferred store if you set it to the correct one earlier. If you're on a cellular connection, it's absolutely useless.

To anyone working in tech: stop trying to outsmart the user.
by whstl | 2025-05-19 14:38:01+00:00
I very often also get better programming results than less experienced engineers, even though I'm not remotely doing any kind of "prompt engineering".

Also how you ask matters a lot. Sometimes it just wants to make you happy with whatever answer, if you go along without skepticism it will definitely make garbage.

Fun story: at a previous job a Product Manager made someone work a full week on a QR-Code standard that doesn't exist, except in ChatGPT's mind. It produced test cases and examples, but since nobody had a way to test

When it was sent to a bank in Sweden to test, the customer was just "wait this feature doesn't exist in Sweden" and a heated discussion ensued until the PM admitted using ChatGPT to create the requirements.
by ozim | 2025-05-19 14:38:22+00:00
Ugh let infrastructure be infrastructure inconspicuous.

I don’t want to be attacked by flashy colored buildings all the time.

Once in a while it is cool to have some art or colorful painting.

I have my life to live, children, animals - I want to furnish my home to my taste.

I don’t want to live in self proclaimed “taste critiques” environment.

Every single of those posts “we live in boring landscape, cars are average and not standing out” - feels like those friends that come over for a party and want to show you all the funny YT videos they are amused by - I don’t care I have my own YT vids I am amused by and such people are just annoying not “cool”.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-19 14:38:28+00:00
> And its not exactly a easy job. Managing big money can be hard as any loss even a small percentage is a lot of money. And that begins to weigh heavily on you in form of stress as there is a lots at stake.

Only because the person "needs" to "have more". They could put it in TBills and never think about it again. And they'd be totally fine, still live a life of luxury.

It's only because the growth in money becomes a goal in itself, which is a trap.
Show HN: Distill – Automated company and industry monitoring
by gustavfridell | 2025-05-19 14:38:38+00:00
Hi everyone,

I just launched Distill, a tool automate company and industry monitoring by tracking every move from any company on autopilot.

I built it to solve a problem I had working in VC - that there's no way to get all the news and updates from all companies you care about in the same place and feed. Larger companies may be covered in regular news media, but smaller ones may only post something on their websites.

Distill solves this with your own news feed where you can add any company (large or small, public or private), and get all relevant updates summarized and sent to you automatically via email.

I (of course) use LLMs for many of the tasks to make Distill work - like summarization, classification, and translation. It's been interesting to see how the models differ in practice vs. how they appear on the leaderboards.

Happy to provide more details on how I built it and answer any questions!
by pyrale | 2025-05-19 14:39:00+00:00
> This is just for show

That is simply wrong.

The reality is that millions of people work for the government, directly or indirectly, and that not all of these people have aligned incentives, the same constraints, etc.

The people pushing open source initiatives in the french public sector are very serious about it. It is also true that there is a lot of inertia. The consequence is that, while most of the large administrations, including those that don't have that much wiggle room for initiatives, still use big-name proprietary solutions, more and more open-source and open-data gardens spring around, and that they provide a strong base for new initatives, both public and private.

Two examples I personally used are dvf [1], a database and application showing real estate sales, which I used to check market prices when I bought my home, and publi.codes [2], a simulator and an open-source law-as-code repository, which is one of the cornerstones of a friend's private company.

Would I like more of France's administration to move to open-souce? Sure, but it's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, I'm grateful for the core of people dedicated to push the case, bits by bits, and I know their effort is certainly not just for show.

[1]: https://app.dvf.etalab.gouv.fr/ [2]: https://publi.codes/
by tom_m | 2025-05-19 14:39:15+00:00
You also have to provide accurate instructions.

I find most often times, "bugs" aren't with writing code that doesn't compile or doesn't have passing tests. The "bugs" come from not understanding the requirements and what it is you're building.

I'm not entirely sure AI will help this at all. People are generally bad at describing software and how they want it to work. They are inaccurate there or entirely omit things in the requirements.

Yes, though, it would be overwhelming to manage a bunch of AI agents. Context switching and redirecting, guiding, will be very difficult and not everyone's cup of tea.

If argue this isn't really a result of AI though. Many people are already in this boat today. The industry is set up in this way with contractors and outsourced devs that are at a junior level...because it's the attraction of cheap labor. Many businesses are attracted to this beyond programming. One of the questions is going to be, is the cost per token economics cheaper? So long as it's cheaper, AI coding agents will have a future. If it proves to not be cheaper (and this could take years to prove out), then I don't think it'll be as popular. I think people will need to go back to the drawing board on how we use AI agents or use AI for other purposes (like training, education, developer onboarding, code reviews, debugging, etc.)
by Aachen | 2025-05-19 14:39:21+00:00
That picture was stolen from here:

> Building a 1979 Asteroids arcade replica —https://www.henningludvigsen.com/index.php/2022/09/10/buildi...

I see no license, only a copyright notice. OP does not seem to give any credit for the image or mention it was used with permission

But it's not CGI..! Celebrate the small wins
by cassepipe | 2025-05-19 14:39:22+00:00
Thank you for your response.

I'd argue that it is to the point insofar as the price of labor is important to the competitiveness of a finished product, isn't it so ?

I think your response stems from the fear of me trying to turn this into something "political" but it seems to me that going down the mine has been really hard work and low pay for most of History. I am pretty sure that most historians would agree that mining is one of the easiest use of slave labor (go down the mine and bring back the stuff failing which you will be punished, also no skills required) from the point of view of slave owner/manager that is. I am also sure they would agree that after the abolition of slavery, you could consider a big chunk of mine workers, quasi slaves. Hell, even today, mining is one of the main use for drug-addicted labor force in Myanmar and child labor in Congo.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-19 14:39:32+00:00
Kind of funny how your own "well I don't like what he's saying so I'll compare him to the communists" comment belies the real reason people have a knee jerk distaste for such architecture. Basically the USSR sucked and was miserable so when people see a parking garage that looks kinda like a block apartment they have a negative disposition toward it.
by IsTom | 2025-05-19 14:40:08+00:00
It might be using some nonlocal context e.g. something similar was proved earlier in the proof and the reader is assumed to remember and/or generalize this or there's some assumptions that are stated only in the beginning. There's also probably a bit of skipped proofs of the kind "I'll be able to do this if pressed, but so will the reviewer".
by lesuorac | 2025-05-19 14:40:52+00:00
> It's true that dimensions are all screwy, evidently due to variable shrinkage during drying in the old days.

That's just an old wives tale.

Lumber shrinks for money reasons, older lumber is bigger [1] with sequential revisions to the standard decreasing it's real size [2] [3] (the difference between 2in and 15/8in in strength is minimal however you can keep doing that math, and they did, to go down from 2in to 1.5in over a century).

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/vv9atu/t...

[2]: https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/dashboard/searchResults/titleDeta...

[3]: https://www.synthmind.com/miscpub_6409.pdf
by Chris2048 | 2025-05-19 14:41:04+00:00
There's a whole science of how natural sunlight differs from leds (and its biological effect) and how to recreate it. I believe SAD lights try to replicate sunlight, but generally modern LEDs, even "warm" ones are missing key wavelengths and have a different profile from sun/sky light. There are now LEDs much closer to real sunlight, but they are also more expensive (though arguable not more so than knocking out more windows.

What I'm surprised at is how rare fake windows/skylights are. I mean, such products/companies exist, but they seem to be relatively niche, and accordingly expensive (as in "call our sales team for pricing" expensive), not really ready for your usual DIY/domestic consumer.

I think what we really need is monitor/TV companies producing low-res, high lumen screens for this purpose, hopefully mass produced. I think Sony has produced a "passive" screen ("the Frame") , that is effectively a matt tv mean to display slow/static images to replace hanging pictures (and even stuffs the electronics in the wall to keep a low profile), but it's still a luxury niche.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-05-19 14:41:20+00:00
If I get time this week, I'll drop a README here that shows how to do it. Not too hard tho, read up how to build mcp with https://github.com/mark3labs/mcp-go

AnkiDroid has settings for linking a csv from google drive. Then just look up how to sync a local file/directory with Drive. Its just a matter of making sure the LLM knows the MCP Anki tool is available in every prompt (well I have a learning/Q&A prompt that uses this), then In the system prompt I tell it to make Anki cards whenever it seem like I'm having trouble with a concept, like asking a question twice, and to make sure the card doesn't exist already.