MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crazygringo | 2025-05-03 21:11:31+00:00
Do you have a citation for that?

In my personal experience, that does not seem true. I have a number of friends who have been seriously injured climbing, e.g. from large rocks falling from above, presumably loosened by water freezing and expanding over the winter.

I don't know anyone who's gotten into an accident on their trip to or from climbing. Car accidents are already pretty rare overall, and driving to/from climbing is a teensy fraction of your overall driving.

Mountains are inherently dangerous, unpredictable places in ways that roads usually aren't.
by johnea | 2025-05-03 21:12:39+00:00
This was going to be the gist of my reply.

I don't have the depth of experience with solar installations cited in your comment, but I have worked with systems that expected automated moving parts to continue to function in an outdoor environment. They all required near continuous maintenance.

Having a high level of cynicism regarding the utility industry, I wonder if the preference for moving parts is due to the requirement that only a large company with a constantly employed force of service personal can manage such a system. This would provide a certain amount of cost-of-entry that only large utilities could provide.

To quote what a utility company's compliance office once said to me, in a different context, "Only big companies can do that".
by whatnow37373 | 2025-05-03 21:12:43+00:00
> dramatically reduce complexity

If you ever worked seriously on anything non-SPA you would never, ever claim SPAs “dramatically reduce complexity”. The mountain of shit you have pull in to do anything is astronomical even by PHPs standards and I hate PHP. Those days were clean compared to what I have to endure with React and friends.

The API argument never sat well with me either. Having an API is orthogonal: you can have one or do not have one, you can have one and have a SSR app. In the AI age an API is the easy part anyway.
Track All Your Companies in One Dashboard – Free Beta Testing
by DeTurenne | 2025-05-03 21:12:52+00:00
Hey everyone!

I've developed an all-in-one financial KPI dashboard called Tracky: https://tracky.cc/

It integrates seamlessly with accounting platforms like QuickBooks Online and Xero, and you can also connect your Google Sheets.

The idea is to provide a single dashboard for people managing multiple companies/projects, so you can track your financial metrics without switching between different accounts and platforms.

Tracky is completely free for the first two months since the only thing I need right now is your feedback (for example, what integration options you need that Tracky doesn't have, what new accounting reports I should add).

I've also implemented the data encryption required by Intuit to ensure your data is secure.

I'd really appreciate your feedback!

Thanks!
by infecto | 2025-05-03 21:13:15+00:00
Didn’t he retract from the Gates foundation last year. His children will be in charge of it to “donate”. I don’t know the specific mechanics but seems like it’s a good way to simply give it to your kids. They all run types of charities.

https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/with-4-words-warren-buffett-e...
by rorylaitila | 2025-05-03 21:13:34+00:00
It's becoming a big problem. But also, pretty easy now to filter out authentic people. In terms of AI in personal and business relationships, the maximum I'll do is short auto complete. Superhuman email, which I use, just came out with AI written replies, and it is too much.

I simply don't want to live in a world where all I am doing is talking back and forth with AI that are pretending to be people. What is the point in that? I am working on https://humancrm.io and I am explicitly not putting any AI into it. Hopefully there are more than a few people that feel like I do.
by hn_acker | 2025-05-03 21:14:10+00:00
In my personal experience, people usually use "you have the right to say it, but not the right to be free from the consequences of saying it" when referring to non-government responses to speech. It is a less rigorous offshoot of the concept "the First Amendment only applies to government restrictions to speech".

> Whatever happened to the refrain "you have the right to say it, but not the right to be free from the consequences of saying it". That's all this is.

That's not all it is, because you're ignoring the First Amendment. The consequences must fit the action, and proving third-party liability for speech (that is, liability for distributing the speech of others) requires overcoming a high First Amendment standard. I believe that the correct standard in this case is strict scrutiny because the broadly written bill's private right of action will chill bookstores from selling books that parents think are harmful to minors even though bookstores can sell both books that are safe for minors and those that aren't. Read my reply to OP at [1]. I also doubt that the bill would pass intermediate scrutiny, particularly the "further an important government interest" prong, because there is already a law criminalizing sale of harmful materials to minors [2]. The existing law better aligns with the First Amendment because criminal prosecutions have significantly less DDOSing potential and because the existing law has the following safeguard [2]:

> It is an affirmative defense to prosecution under this section that the sale, distribution, or exhibition was by a person having scientific, educational, governmental, or other similar justification.

The new bill might conflict with the safeguard because of [3]:

> Sec. 98C.005. PROHIBITED DEFENSES. It is not a defense to liability under this chapter that the defendant:

> (1) has been acquitted or has not been prosecuted or convicted under Subchapter B, Chapter 43, Penal Code;

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43882169

[2] https://codes.findlaw.com/tx/penal-code/penal-sect-43-24/

[3] https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/billtext/html/HB01375I...
by kevinlinxc | 2025-05-03 21:14:17+00:00
Another huge time sink is rotoscoping, e.g. in my video I rotoscope the legs of the piano bench and its a cool effect but it took almost an hour for those few seconds. AI has come far here, but afaik there's no great, free workflow yet. Would love to Docker compose something on my computer, open a webapp, drag my clip in and export segmented videos.
by WalterBright | 2025-05-03 21:14:57+00:00
There are many interpretations of that line, and without the context it is in it is difficult to see which one is correct.

Here's one:

"Jesus' statement highlights the principle that salvation is a gift from God, not earned through good deeds or accumulated wealth. It emphasizes the need for humility and faith, rather than relying on material possessions or social standing."
by giantrobot | 2025-05-03 21:14:58+00:00
XSLT solved this problem. But it had poor tool support (DreamWeaver etc) and a bunch of anti-XML sentiment I assume as blowback from capital-E Enterprise stacks going insane with XML for everything.

XSLT did exactly what HTML includes could do and more. The user agent could cache stylesheets or if it wanted override a linked stylesheet (like with CSS) and transform the raw data any way it wanted.
Building MapReduce (Based on Google Paper)
by venkat1017x | 2025-05-03 21:16:23+00:00
I read the MapReduce paper recently and wanted to try out the internal working by building it from scratch (at least a minimal version). Hope it helps someone trying to reproduce the same paper in future

You can read more about it in newsletter: https://buildx.substack.com/p/lets-build-mapreduce-from-scratch

Github repo: https://github.com/venkat1017/mapreduce-go/tree/main/mapreduce-go
by welder | 2025-05-03 21:16:43+00:00
Just eww... you were an expert at Rails 10+ years, failed to become an equivalent expert at Next.js so you went back to what you're used to. You just didn't dive in deep enough.

I was the same expert level with Python, now I'm using trpc, nextjs, drizzle, wakaq-ts, hosted on DO App Platform and you couldn't pay me enough to go back to Python, let alone the shitstorm mess that's every Rails app I've ever worked on.

I've also not seen the 1s Next.js pageloads you had, but I'm confident of figuring a fix if that becomes a problem.
by whatnow37373 | 2025-05-03 21:16:51+00:00
Agreed. We started with one API to rule them all. What happened? Now we got two.. and now we have to communicate like this:

“So the backend gave this weird …”

“What backend?”

“The backend for the frontend…”

“So not the backend for the backend for the frontend?”

I jest, but only very slightly.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-03 21:17:12+00:00
It’s futile. The first thing people will do if the ”written by a human” crypto-signature takes off is to wire it up with LLMs. You can’t make any reasonable guarantees on authorship unless you change the entire hardware stack and tack on loads of DRM.

Even if that happens, and say Apple integrates sigs all the way down through their system UI keyboards, secure enclaves, and TPM, you think they’re going to conform to some shitcoin spec? Nah man, they’ll use their own.
by swyx | 2025-05-03 21:17:47+00:00
1. eyerolls and judgment can be a trap in that it makes you feel superior without actually having walked their walk and having skin in the game. value of a player >> value of a critic. they're in the arena doing their thing. if you're so good, show it in your own work before passing judgment on others.

2. it may not just be VC. if it works on "cringe" boomers or Fortune 500 execs to get their attention and money, then they truly do not have to give a flying fck about how much your eyes roll while they laugh their way to the bank. VC is in its ideal form an effect, not a cause.
by khazhoux | 2025-05-03 21:18:02+00:00
For all I've heard about WB the last few decades, I couldn't tell you a single thing he's done that's impacted my life, the country, or the world. AFAIK he's a guy who makes a ton of money, plays bridge with Bill Gates, gives advice, and has a fund that made money for other people. Am I missing something?
by pier25 | 2025-05-03 21:18:27+00:00
> The obsession with DX tooling is exactly why JS is such an awful developer experience.

I used to agree but these days with Vite things are a lot smoother. To the point that I wouldn't want to work on UI without fine-grained hot reloads.

Even with auto reload in PHP, .NET, etc you will be wasting so much time. Especially if you're working on something that requires interaction with the page that you will be repeating over and over again.
by crazygringo | 2025-05-03 21:19:00+00:00
I mean, it's not much different as from "X" to "mobile X", or from "X" to "cloud X".

Most of them, like most startups overall, will be bad.

A few lucky ones will come to dominate the new space, executing well on a first-mover advantage.

Think what Tinder did by reimagining online dating for mobile with swiping. Or what Google Docs did by reimagining the office suite in the cloud.

There are going to be some HUGE winners in the AI space. But most startups will be losers, like it's always been. And the investors who can tell the difference will be the ones who make money. Again, like it's always been.

(This isn't like "blockchain-powered X" where it really was a buzzword only. AI is actually delivering meaningful benefits, and it's probably only just starting.)
by seanbeever | 2025-05-03 21:19:15+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Denver, CO | Remote | Mechanical Engineer |

Mechanical engineer with a background in CNC manufacturing. I work with clients ranging from start-ups to established corporations, helping to consult and manufacture prototypes. Proficient in CAD design, and have in-house capabilities to machine parts for clients on Haas and Doosan CNC equipment.

Recent work includes designing and machining electrical enclosures and racecar parts.

I am well rounded with skills outside of mechanical engineering including experience in automation and control systems, robotics, software development, and more.

Current projects of mine include developing engine dynamometer systems, including the required control systems and mechanical assemblies to accurately test racing engines: https://www.precisiondynotech.com/

Email: Sean@SeanBeever.com | Web: https://seanbeever.com
by hx8 | 2025-05-03 21:19:15+00:00
I honestly don't think I would be comfortable off grid without 4x+ that size. Of course, environments vary so significantly that these numbers don't translate well when discussing them without geographic context.

My primary concerns would be consecutive cloudy days, and winters with very short days. While my actual heating/cooling needs are more mild than global averages, I think the combination of short daylight hours and increased heating needs makes off-grid solar unviable for climates closer to the poles, especially those not near sea level. I do think relaying on propane or wood for heating might make off grid viable for these locations, but that introduces questions of scalability and increased carbon footprint.

There is some argument that burning wood should be considered carbon neutral if the trees are replanted and used as a renewable resource (Carbon is released to the air, and then captured by the next tree in a cycle), but the land intensive approach wouldn't scale to meet the heating needs of a significant portion of the population. Additionally it ignores the carbon required to grow, harvest, process, and transport the trees or the alternative uses the wood might find elsewhere.

My point is for others to take their local climate into consideration before thinking that 5kw/14kWh would be enough for them to go off grid.
by julienchastang | 2025-05-03 21:19:21+00:00
I’ve traveled to NOLA for work over the years and have fallen in love with the city. The first time I went there, I just thought it would be a tourist trap which, of course, it partially is but you have to go beyond that to find all the wonderful things NOLA has to offer. What draws me to NOLA is the “grit” which is both good and bad. You can eat delicious and unique meals but there are other restaurants where you’ll get ripped off. The live music is simply second to none. My favorite by far is Frenchman street. Some memories I cherish is seeing the New Orleans Jazz Vipers at the Spotted Cat Cafe. I was sitting so close to the band once that I was basically sitting among the musicians. It’s the authenticity of NOLA I adore. But you’ve got be careful, and to be honest I don’t always feel safe there. When walking back to my hotel through the French Quarter at 2am, I walk as fast as I can and in the middle of the street so I am not mugged. Anyway, it is a place I’ve grown to love despite and perhaps because of the rough edges. Edit: Also the NOLA locals are fantastic people!
by Animats | 2025-05-03 21:19:28+00:00
"The Intelligent Investor", by Benjamin Graham. He was Buffett's mentor, and contributed to that book. It's straight value investing. Never buy a startup.

There are biographies of Buffett. I read one of them years ago. It goes into great detail about the early deals that got him started. I never did quite understand the deal that moved him into the big leagues, the takeover of GEICO insurance.
by tomnipotent | 2025-05-03 21:19:31+00:00
You have to be comfortable with the ORM in every layer - it lives inside your domain models, rather than in another layer shuffling DTO's to presentation/rendering. It also makes it easy to avoid separation of concerns and stuff all your logic in a controller method and call it a day.

The upsides is that by not trying to hide the database and pretend it doesn't exist you can avoid a whole class of work (and the safety abstractions provided) and be incredibly productive if the requirements align.
by humbledrone | 2025-05-03 21:20:39+00:00
My RTX2080Ti (admittedly not a cheap card) supports 768 physics objects (masses) per each of 16 voices. And I think that beefier cards can do 1024. There are other limitations for performance depending on how the system is constructed, and I certainly don't want to claim that I know it can simulate a piano, but...
by IshKebab | 2025-05-03 21:20:43+00:00
You have to program it using Ruby which is not a good language. It's slow. It doesn't have good static type annotations (as far as I can tell the community "gets it" even less than in Python).

Rails also uses way too much magic to dynamically construct identifiers and do control flow.

The over-use of magic and the under-use of static types makes it extraordinarily difficult to navigate Rails codebases. It's one of those things where you have to understand the entire codebase to be able to find anything. Tractable for tiny projects. For large projects it's a disaster.

Rails is a bad choice (as is Ruby).

My favourite web framework at the moment is Deno's Fresh. You get the pleasure of TSX but it's based around easy SSR rather than complex state management and hooks. Plus because it's Deno it's trivial to set up.
by boomskats | 2025-05-03 21:20:53+00:00
> Your typical SPA has loads of pointless roundtrips

This is an implementation choice/issue, not an SPA characteristic.

> there's probably ways to build a 'SPA' experience that avoids these too

PWAs/service workers with properly configured caching strategies can offer a better experience than SSR (again, when implemented properly).

> The high compute overhead...

I prefer to do state management/reconciliation on the client whenever it makes sense. It makes apps cheaper to host and can provide a better UX, especially on mobile.
by qq99 | 2025-05-03 21:20:56+00:00
If you're thinking about going back to SSR, I think you owe it to yourself to check out Phoenix LiveView (Elixir) and play with it for an afternoon.

I've built a few apps in it now, and to me, it starts to feel a bit like server-side React (in a way). All your HTML/components stream across to the user in reaction to their actions, so the pages are often very light.

Another really big bonus is that a substantial portion of the extras you'd typically run (Sidekiq, etc) can basically just be baked into the same app. It also makes it dead simple to write resilient async code.

It's not perfect, but I think it's better than RoR
by rorylaitila | 2025-05-03 21:21:00+00:00
I'm a full stack developer. I do server side rendering. I agree that this is a 'solved problem' for that case. However there are many times I don't want to run a server or a static site generator. I manage a lot of projects. I don't want more build steps than necessary. I just want to put some HTML on the net with some basic includes, without JavaScript. But currently I would go the web component route and accept the extra JS.
by Terr_ | 2025-05-03 21:21:59+00:00
> That’s when it dawned on me: we don’t have a vocabulary for this.

I'd like to highlight the words "counterfeiting" and "debasement", as vocabulary that could apply to the underlying cause of these interactions. To recycle an old comment [0]:

> Yeah, one of their most "effective" uses [of LLMs] is to counterfeit signals that we have relied on--wisely or not--to estimate deeper practical truths. Stuff like "did this person invest some time into this" or "does this person have knowledge of a field" or "can they even think straight."

> Oh, sure, qualitatively speaking it's not new, people could have used form-letters, hired a ghostwriter, or simply sank time and effort into a good lie... but the quantitative change of "Bot, write something that appears heartfelt and clever" is huge.

> In some cases that's devastating--like trying to avert botting/sockpuppet operations online--and in others we might have to cope by saying stuff like: "Fuck it, personal essays and cover letters are meaningless now, just put down the raw bullet-points."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41675602
by SahAssar | 2025-05-03 21:23:43+00:00
Sure (which is why I included it as an example of an alternative to learning HTML), with a few caveats. The problems with it are that the HTML output is usually very bad, it'll probably not be well parsed by google or others (for SEO, integration with maps and opening hours) and it will almost definitely not be usable on mobile.

The second two of those are pretty important for local restaurants.

A proper local WYSIWYG, well made, with integrations to accounts on traditional shared hosting would be a viable option for many WP/squarespace/similar sites. I just don't know of any that actually are well made.

My start in this industry was copying CSS zen garden, modifying in dreamweaver and uploading to a shared FTP host, which is not that different.
by cardanome | 2025-05-03 21:23:43+00:00
Because the CCP under Mao liberated China from foreign oppression.

Now whether you might argue that it was thanks to or rather despite Mao being in leadership is another matter and believe me I am in the "despite" camp but it still makes sense that he would have strong symbolic importance for the Chinese people.

People that will argue "oh he killed millions of people" need to get their head out of the cold war propaganda. I do believe his economic policy was criminal and was done against the advice of Soviet advisors but it is still not murder. His policy was idiotic, he was neglectful maybe but he did not purposefully cause a famine.

Saying it is the same or even worse are the purposeful, planned industrial scale mass murder that Hitler was responsible for under the Nazi regime is pure holocaust apologia. Plain and simple.
by xandrius | 2025-05-03 21:25:38+00:00
Handwritten letters are still better than typed. That's why we still get authors to actually sign their book and not just put a print of it.

So, no, there is no evidence that AI will change stuff. We had canned responses and template answers for a long time but people still like talking to a real human being.

P.S. I think you should have told them to write a thank you letter themselves as a fun game to compare with the AI one and send that one instead.
by cj | 2025-05-03 21:26:18+00:00
I don't think the GP meant to say that AI doesn't make products more useful.

I read it as them being frustrated with the over-use of "AI-powered X" -- when everything is AI powered, is anything AI powered? Favorite quote from Garry Tan: If everything is bold, nothing is bold!

"AI-powered" as a descriptor is incredibly overused to the point where it no longer elicits the same excitement that it used to 1-2 years ago.

I think everyone agrees that AI incorporated into a product can definitely make the product more useful. But let's stop describing our products as "AI-powered" and replace it with a descriptor that actually communicates the value the product is providing.

Marketing for AI products would be more successful IMO if they stop using the words "AI-powered" and "LLM" and "agents" and "tokens", etc... users are overwhelmed with AI overload. Throw away the buzz words and use messaging that communicates the specific value that the AI adds.

I think the days of consumers seeking out "AI" for the sake of AI is coming to an end. Consumers want to know what the AI will do for them. They don't care that it's AI-powered.
by crazygringo | 2025-05-03 21:26:43+00:00
Of course it's going to be cheaper.

If a truck has a lifetime of 20 years, that's 20 years' worth of paying a security guard for it.

You really think it could take 20 years' worth of human effort in labor and materials to make a truck more secure? The price of the truck itself in the first place doesn't even come close to that.
by xg15 | 2025-05-03 21:27:01+00:00
> Section 31 angle is tricky, because the writers unintentionally[1] made them literally save the entire alpha and beta quadrants, and possibly the entire galaxy, from slow-burn genocide.

I mean, Jack Bauer, too, saved America from all kinds of unspeakable evil by his clever use of torture. I'd say it's not tricky at all. The morally gray "it's bad but we'd be even worse off without it" justification is kind of the point of those narratives.