MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lazide | 2025-05-07 10:19:05+00:00
Geopolitical decisions like this are always ‘least bad’. The Modi gov’t in India is not as strong as it looks, and they couldn’t continue to function if they let such a high profile and obviously religiously motivated terrorist attack go ‘unanswered’.

The water threats are the real leverage, but without some obvious military action they’d be skinned alive by the Hindu hardliners (Hindutvas).
by rglullis | 2025-05-07 10:19:25+00:00
Cathedrals vs Bazaars.

Cathedrals are conservative. Reactionary, even. You can measure the rate of change by generations.

Bazaars are accessible and universal. The whole system is chaotic. Changes happen every day. No single agent is in control.

We need both to make meaningful progress, and it's the job of engineers to take any given problem and see where to look for the solution.
Show HN: I made a free shapefile to CSV converter that runs in the browser
by carstonh | 2025-05-07 10:19:30+00:00
There are many times I find some government data in shapefile (.shp) format but want to use the attributes inside for analysis in tabular format. It's always a pain to open this in QGIS, convert the CRS correctly, then save as CSV. So I built a tool that will handle this for you, all running within the browser so data doesn't need to be sent anywhere. Under the hood it's using DuckDB built for Wasm + the spatial extension (which links GEOS). And full disclaimer, I'm using this as lead generation for my Honeycomb Maps product, but if you'd prefer not to give your email that's completely fine, just put from@hn.com or something similar :)
by hyperman1 | 2025-05-07 10:19:36+00:00
What's your alternative? The same thing holds for the US services, except we don't have any control. We're basically begging the USA to take our money and fuck us over.

Meanwhile, airbus works, GSM works, so Europe is capable of doing this if it wants to. Yes, it has been asleep at the wheel since 2000 or so, but Trump is busy kicking them back awake.
by ivell | 2025-05-07 10:20:55+00:00
Pakistan has a concept of good terrorists and bad terrorists. Terrorists against India (JeM, LeT) are good terrorists. They are protected and trained by Pakistan army (e.g. protection given to JeM leader). Good terrorists are sometimes declared dead to avoid international scrutiny while protected clandestinely (Sajid Mir).

Bad terrorists are of course that attack Pakistani Army (e.g. Baloch Liberation Army).

Notable is how Osama was protected by Pakistan army as he was a useful indirect source of income (war on terror)

Indias attack was aimed at the Good Terrorists of Pakistan. The hope is to reduce their capabilities. Not sure how much successful they have been though.
by m000 | 2025-05-07 10:20:57+00:00
You make it sound like a therapists' conspiracy.

I think the DoorDash culture is promoted because it means you can now work an hour more of (often unpaid) overtime, without worrying for your dinner. Or that you won't resist the extra time commuting to a far office location, so that your employer can save on their office space rent. Or won't complain for being forced to live out of the city because funds have bought up all the housing for "investment" and you can no longer afford a place in it.
by rsanek | 2025-05-07 10:22:35+00:00
This is an area I've been interested in and so I'm always curious to check out new apps. Love the idea of a "DAG SRS" algorithm. Congrats on launching!

Two pieces of feedback, when I signed up I tried to upload a book in .txt format, but got an error that I didn't have a user (not sure if it's supposed to work when logged out?). After signing up I was able to upload it and generate the course. On the first topic, in the quiz section at the end, I couldn't figure out how to input anything into the "Fill in the Blank" questions -- not sure if it's just me, but I'm on Mac, Firefox Developer Edition with uBlock running and I don't see any textarea or input box.

The app looks promising, best of luck!
by benterix | 2025-05-07 10:22:45+00:00
Actually S3 is a good example - it became the new de-facto standard for object storage management, and is used both by open source projects like minio and other clouds alike. This benefits the users/customers as switching from AWS S3 to another solution is a bit less painful.

What Amazon did with AWS, offering access to compute, storage and other services, was a good thing, and many EU cloud providers are implementing a small subset of their core services already. It's a good thing, there are no downsides really.
by vrch1e | 2025-05-07 10:22:59+00:00
Look at finance, business and economics grads. Do all of them go on to become bankers, MD's or Economists? No. I think CS degrees will join the line. It'll still be a very useful degree, but not a guaranteed ticket into software engineering / development. The people who put in the extra hours actually building stuff and exercising their passion for development and engineering, will be the ones snapping up the SWE jobs.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like they'll have to give up on tech entirely. They'll just have an easier time going into less demanding and competitive roles that equivalate to the calibre of whatever jobs those other grads go into. Or will be required to specialize early and put more time into their learning.

I mean as someone in the UK who landed a SWE'ing job last month (without a degree and with 7 months of learning programming and building my own projects) It's more doable and easy than you think. Just don't trust a university to give you a portfolio of experience that employers will be impressed by. Get on your ide and build, test, and deploy stuff
Decision-Making as a Founder or Investor
by mmusz | 2025-05-07 10:23:29+00:00
Hi All!

I am curious: how do you approach making big ("irreversible") decisions? Can be in business, investing, but also personal life, if applicable.

Have you learnt any strategies? Do you follow a specific process, or maybe you're using a tool of some sorts? Or you just rely on your intuition?

Any voice is appreciated!

All the best
by fennecfoxy | 2025-05-07 10:24:06+00:00
I feel like this would be sold as more of an app for a smart glasses platform than an individual product.

>I've never come upon a compelling personal use case for smart glasses

There are tonnes, it's just the technology isn't there yet; glasses are too bulky and heavy, the fov sucks, the resolution sucks, light transmittance sucks.

But the use cases are incredibly plentiful; stuff like this (music sheets, documentation, web browsing), getting realtime directions with a blue line or directional hints when walking around an unfamiliar place, overlays/information at tourist sites, home automation/controlling devices.

I remember an old anime or some show where it's a world where a digital world is overlaid the real world where AIs and devices from the digital layer can be interacted with in a similar way...what was it hmmm.
by eesmith | 2025-05-07 10:24:17+00:00
CR only reviews products after they are available on the market, it does not review all products on the market, and access to the reviews require a subscription.

How do you compare three hot water heaters when all three brands are "refreshed" each year, so the specific models aren't listed on CR?

It's easier for consumer groups like CR to back-stop the regulatory agencies by identifying and reporting fraudulent self-reports.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-05-07 10:24:24+00:00
Two programs can work the same way and still be distinct, independently developed works. This is especially true of programs that have to work in certain ways in order to be compatible.

Game companies back then had a "trademark security system". Their hardware wouldn't execute your software unless you wrote the company's name to some memory location somewhere. If you did that and you didn't have a license, they'd sue you for trademark infringement.

Well it went to court and judges found that not only was this "infringement" fair, it was the trademark holders themselves who were at fault for creating this stupid system where competitors had to infringe their trademarks in order to create interoperable software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

> Accolade's decompilation of the Sega software constituted fair use.

> the use of the software was non-exploitative, despite being commercial

> the trademark infringement, being required by the TMSS for a Genesis game to run on the system, was inadvertently triggered by a fair use act and the fault of Sega for causing false labeling

Such was the wonderful world before the DMCA and its criminalization of "circumvention".

The hard part isn't explaining things to judges, it's coming up with the fortunes necessary to pay lawyers to do it. That's why the big corporations have the advantage. They can afford to be wrong. In fact, it is literally their strategy to outlast their opponents in court by burning their money in legal fees. They can afford it, small companies can't and individuals will be literally bankrupted.
by krainboltgreene | 2025-05-07 10:24:29+00:00
https://www.foxnews.com/us/gen-milley-says-kyiv-could-fall-w... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/28/the-battle-for... https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_221723.htm

Ok
by namaria | 2025-05-07 10:24:59+00:00
Meditation is such a superpower. It costs nothing - not even time when you realize through meditation that there is no such thing as time, and emptying your mind is a great way to be in the now - it's "easy" in the sense that you don't really need to know anything, just let go of things. Letting go is tricky because we tend do engage with it in an active way and that's already grabbing on to something. Letting go is the opposite of doing anything.

Learning to just sit still and let the universe (including whatever your mind does) flow around you... It makes a huge difference in mental health. It really cannot be overstated how beneficial for humans it is to just have downtime and do literally nothing but breathing.

But I know it's hard. Our whole culture is predicated upon being busy. But we can just put everything down and be empty for a bit every once in a while and it is so beneficial.
by hyperman1 | 2025-05-07 10:25:05+00:00
While I like what he says, I wonder how serious I should take him. Is he part of an always ignored fringe group, or can he push his ideas forward? He sounds progressive, and all over Europe the politics shift to conservatism. Also, I've never heard about him on the news, only here on HN.

Politics is unfortunately more about who is talking than what is said.
by FjordWarden | 2025-05-07 10:27:21+00:00
WebMonkeys feels a bit like array programming, you create buffers and then have a simple language to perform operations on those buffers.

HVM is one of the most interesting developments in programming languages that I know off. I just don't know if it will prove to be relevant for the problem space it is trying to address. It is a very difficult technology that is trying to solve another very complex problem (AI) by seemingly sight stepping the issues. Like you have to know linear algebra and statistics to do ML, and they are saying: yes and you have to know category theory too.
by otikik | 2025-05-07 10:27:54+00:00
I thought about this several years ago and I think I hit the right balance with these 2 rules of thumb:

* The closer something is to your core business, the less you externalize.

* You always externalize security (unless security is your exclusive core business)

Say you are building a tax calculation web app. You use dependencies for things like the css generation or database access. You do not rely on an external library for tax calculation. You maintain your own code. You might use an external library for handling currencies properly, because it's a tricky math problem. But you may want to use your own fork instead, as it is close to your core business.

On the security side, unless that's your speciality, there's guys out there smarter than you and/or who have dedicated more time and resources than you to figure that stuff out. If you are programming a tax calculation web app you shouldn't be implementing your own authentication algorithm, even if having your tax information secure is one of your core needs. The exception to this is that your core business is literally implementing authentication and nothing else.
by alif09 | 2025-05-07 10:27:58+00:00
In 2023, the global V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) cybersecurity market was valued at approximately $2.6 billion. Projections indicate that by 2033, the market is expected to reach around $14.2 billion, reflecting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 18.5% from 2024 to 2033.
by bot403 | 2025-05-07 10:29:01+00:00
The gem of a point here is that a solid set of core services can go a very long way. You don't need to emulate beanstalk, sagemaker, lightsail, appsync and the like.

What you need is CloudFront,vpc, ec2, albs, RDS, S3, ecs, and other base services and many businesses can build a lot of great things.
Ask HN: Seeking Feedback on Hemmyevo – Full-Stack Web Development with Next.js
by Hemmyevo | 2025-05-07 10:29:44+00:00
Hello HN,

I'm Atilola Emmanuel, a full-stack web developer from Nigeria. I've built Hemmyevo, a platform offering modern, scalable, and secure web applications.

I'm seeking feedback on the following aspects: - User Experience: Is the interface intuitive? - Performance: Are there any noticeable delays or issues? - SEO: Suggestions for improving search engine visibility.

Tech Stack: - Frontend: Next.js, Tailwind CSS, TypeScript - Backend: Node.js, Express - Database: MongoDB - Deployment: Vercel, Netlify

Your insights and suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Best regards, Atilola Emmanuel
by phorkyas82 | 2025-05-07 10:29:56+00:00
If you want to use non standard fonts, I think, you should use XeLaTex to compile your file. After installing the font in the system, this just worked on my Ubuntu:

\usepackage{mathspec} \setallmainfonts(Digits,Latin){Old Timey Mono}

\begin{document}

Just test some equation \begin{equation} \frac{e^x}{2-x} = \int_0^\infty f(x)dx \end{equation}

\end{document}
by nonethewiser | 2025-05-07 10:30:06+00:00
For some reason, it's still amazing to me that the model creators means of controlling the model are just prompts as well.

This just feels like a significant threshold. Not saying this makes it AGI (obviously its not AGI), but it feels like it makes it something. Imagine if you created a web api and the only way you could modify the responses to the different endpoints are not from editing the code but by sending a request to the api.
by lupusreal | 2025-05-07 10:30:28+00:00
> If India's going imperial, why would Pakistan bother with hosting terrorist elements to provoke a hostile "belligerent" (according to you) neighbour, and letting them attack a civilian zone

Underlaying this line of reasoning is an assumption that Pakistan makes coordinated, coherent, and more or less rational decisions. But Pakistan is run by the military with civilian leadership being a farcical fig leaf. They routinely fall into prolonged periods of martial law, and arresting former prime ministers is the norm. What's more, Pakistan's military is divided into numerous factions which are operationally independent and have their own internal politics going on.

Therefore, any analysis of the form "[hypothesis] is unlikely because it would be irrational and uncoordinated" is extremely dubious.
by tromp | 2025-05-07 10:31:00+00:00
I read the FAQ and Pocket Manifesto. It provides zero information on the maximum hashrate of your device on various PoW systems. So the user has no idea whether, given current blockchain hashrates and coin prices, they can expect to make $0.01 per day or $0.00001 per day. Do you have any idea? What is the expected mining time to make 1 satoshi?

Perhaps you could state that the user can only expect to make back a small fraction of the $169 cost in a lifetime of mining, and that its primary purpose is instead that of a functional piece of art, which I think it is.

Unfortunately it cannot mine with the PoW I created [1], or I might be tempted to buy one.

[1] https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-05-07 10:31:41+00:00
> Take the argument to the point of absurdity: should we have an EnergyStar rule on doorbell efficiency? The same line of reasoning applies

Except it doesn't really, because doorbells use very little current in pretty much any configuration. Appliances use a lot of current in most configurations, hence why many of them require a 240V/20A circuit versus the standard US 120V/15A circuit. Hence why the Energy Star program focuses on appliances.

This is a real stretch as slippery slope arguments go. Pick something better.
by atombender | 2025-05-07 10:32:16+00:00
Isn't this an apples-to-orange comparison?

Neon's multi-region support isn't directly comparable to a single Postgres database in a single data center. You can set up Neon in a single data center, too, and I would expect the same performance in that case.

Meanwhile, if you tried to scale your single-Postgres to a multi-region setup, you'd expect higher latencies relative to the location of your data.
by nindalf | 2025-05-07 10:35:39+00:00
> There was a sharp drop in the terrorist attacks in Kashmir after the 2019 confrontation.

There were fewer terrorist attacks, certainly. I'm sure the Indian government would like to believe that the 2019 strike had an effect, but far more likely causes are

- Money. Pakistan's economy has stagnated and the country has lurched from one IMF bailout to the next (2019, 2023, 2024). It got so bad at one point that politicians were asking people to drink less tea so they could conserve foreign currency.

- Covid. Affected everything, but certainly harder to think about waging conflict when such a massive problem is affecting the country.

- Internal political instability, especially when Imran Khan took on the military and lost. The military was actually in danger of losing their primacy for the first time in decades.

- Conflict with the Taliban and Pakistani Taliban. The ISI had nurtured the Taliban to be tame pets and it turned out not to be the case. Crushing these was the highest priority, not least because it made their policy of nurturing terrorists look idiotic.

All of these factors meant Pakistan wasn't and isn't in the best shape to wage war overtly or covertly with India. India's economy has continued to grow, in contrast to Pakistan. The official Indian policy of "benign neglect" towards Pakistan appeared to work well.

I'm sure these attacks will be spun as a success in the future. Safe to say a Bollywood movie dramatising the events is already in the works. But Pakistan's own economic and political problems are far more likely to influence its decisions to engage in this sort of behaviour.
by namaria | 2025-05-07 10:36:23+00:00
> The Dawkinsian selfish gene framing is unfalsifiable.

Disagree. The whole thesis rests on genetic determinism, which was hypothesized early on - around the time the book was written - but discredited later.

> Even Darwin is practically unfasifiable. It kind of comes with the territory.

Which thesis in Darwin do you think is unfalsifiable? The null hypothesis of the time was that nature was created the way it is and variety was evidence of god's handiwork, and he proposed, argued and in my opinion convincingly established how a well structured system of rules could indeed lead to change and variety.
by gamman | 2025-05-07 10:36:31+00:00
Maybe this maps to some human structures that manage control-creativity tardeoff through hierarchy?

I feel that companies with top-down management would have more agency and perhaps creativity towards (but not at) the top, and the implementation would be delegated to bottom layers with increasing levels of specification and restriction.

If this translates, we might have multiple layers with varied specialization and control, and hopefully some feedback mechanisms about feasibility.

Since some hierarchies are familiar to us from real-life, we might prefer these to start with.

It can be hard to find humans that are very creative but also able to integrate consistently and reliably (in a domain). Maybe a model doing both well would also be hard to build compared to stacking few different ones on top of each other with delegation.

I know it's already being done by dividing tasks between multiple steps and models / contexts in order to improve efficiency, but having explicit strong differences of creativity between layers sounds new to me.
by Jean-Papoulos | 2025-05-07 10:37:14+00:00
No need to make it a percentage ; charge $1 and the spammers will stop extremely quickly, since none of their reports are valid.

But I do think established individual and institutes should have free access ; leave a choice between going through an identification process and paying the fee. If it's such a big problem that you REALLY need to do something ; otherwise just keep marking as spam.
by bell-cot | 2025-05-07 10:37:28+00:00
Re-read user jeisc's comment.

There are 200 or so nations on our planet.

How many of those nations have governments which believe that their own army, air force, & navy should be unable to buy (say) guns, bombs, and torpedoes? Vs. having to hire engineers to design them, then build weapon factories, then build all of their own weapons.

My assertion is that zero-ish of those governments want such legal restrictions.

(And obviously, actual legal restrictions on the sale of spyware might be similarly unpopular, with the people who actually write the our world's laws.)
by arghwhat | 2025-05-07 10:37:43+00:00
Countries who follow the Berne convention require neither "All rights reserved" text, copyright claim or year. Enforcable copyright is automatically assigned the moment the work is created.

The purpose of dating work is so that if your copyright is contested, you will have evidence that you created the work first. This is done by obtaining an officially recognized dating, which is usually done through registration with the copyright office (the registration has no other legal purpose after the Berne convention was adopted). External evidence or dating can also be used, e.g. having mailed the work to yourself and thereby having the work dated by the post office, having music be on hitlists, etc.

Writing the date on the work yourself has no value whatsoever. Dynamically injecting the current year has negative value as you are undermining the age of your work and thereby harming your ability to defend it as being the work first created.

In the case of a website, the only valuable evidence in proving the age of the content would be external content references and archive.org scapings.
by black3r | 2025-05-07 10:37:50+00:00
I live in Bratislava and order food to work everyday. Delivery times are on par or less than what would take me to fetch the food myself. All delivery services in the area use thermally insulated boxes to transport the dishes - I can't remember if I ever received a cold dish (that wasn't supposed to be served cold).

And because I'm a software developer with a flexible work schedule paid hourly, the act of going to grab the food myself and not working for 30 minutes would cost me way more than delivery costs (even cooking my own meals can be more expensive when time is factored in, compared to food price at restaurant + delivery cost (for ~2 portions prepared in 30 minutes. Proper meal-prepping would be cheaper of course, but yeah I'm too lazy to do that)).

Also the food delivery services often offer discounts and with them it's sometimes cheaper to order the food than going to the restaurant and eat there. Yesterday I ordered with a 30% discount - I got a dish which would cost 10.80€ at the restaurant for 7.50€ including delivery.