MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by runlevel1 | 2025-05-26 03:04:42+00:00
> but he has earned the cred and walks the walk.

One of the lessons I wish I'd learned earlier is that indulging bombastic behavior neither benefits them nor you.

Strong opinions, weakly held are good. Well-reasoned opinions to the contrary are even encouraged. Provided, of course, that they're smart enough to know when to persist and when to disagree and commit.

If you just indulge it, they end up with the engineering equivalent of Nobelitis. And if they're on your team, you end up with more burden than asset no matter how brilliant they are.
by wolfoftheweb | 2025-05-26 03:05:53+00:00
I’m building https://TaleTwister.com – an AI tool that generates and narrates bedtime stories based on a kid’s interests, a specific moral lesson, age, and optional specifications. The product was born out of necessity (a stint of bad behavior that comes with age).

It uses GPT-4 for story generation, ElevenLabs for narration, and a simple Next.js + Supabase stack for the app layer. I’m experimenting with story memory (so kids can revisit recurring characters) using vector embeddings, and building a “choose-your-own-adventure” mode with dynamic audio rendering.

Biggest challenge so far: aligning narration, ambient sounds, and story pacing without sounding janky or robotic. Solved it by tokenizing and chunking the story for synchronized audio stitching via ffmpeg.

Another challenge was the inconsistent image illustrations via Dall-E 3. I’ve adopted a dynamic prompting method that includes as many details about the scene, character details, and other visual elements which should remain consistent on each of the storybook pages.

If your kid ever demands “one more story” after a long day, I built this for you. It’s had a meaningful impact on my son’s behavior.
by Calavar | 2025-05-26 03:06:40+00:00
I don't have a degree in linguistics, but I took a few classes about 15 years ago, and Chomsky's works were basically treated as gospel. Although my university's linguistics faculty included several of his former graduate students, so maybe there's a bias factor. In any case, it reminds me of an SMBC comic about how math and science advance over time [1]

[1] https://smbc-wiki.com/index.php/How-math-works
by dangus | 2025-05-26 03:07:29+00:00
You’re right, money isn’t everything.

Let’s say you’re in a collectivist community. No money is involved. Everyone contributes to the community by providing both needs (infrastructure, maintenance, etc) and wants (culture, arts, beautification, etc).

Would the person who chooses to contribute to community duties 1/10th the time and effort of the amount the rest of the community puts in face social consequences?

I think in most tightly-knit communities of this sort, they would. Money is just the exchange mechanism we use to enable more complex exchanges.
by OfflineSergio | 2025-05-26 03:07:47+00:00
Of course. Its very early days of doing this. I released the early access last month and then spent some time compiling it for Windows as well (before that it was only Mac arm). I'm promoting it again. At the moment I have 5 customers that are not friends and families by posting on Reddit audiobooks subreddit. My plan is to just keep promoting on social media, or communities like study groups or students for a while. I believe I should be able to get first 100 customers without paying for ads. It might be too naive but I think it not being a subscription can be a very good selling point and also it being local.

I'm a dev, I'm very much new to sales and marketing world. I think its fair to say I have no idea about next steps after dev work is finished (enough to attempt to sale). Mostly trying to figure that out.
by jmyeet | 2025-05-26 03:07:53+00:00
You're not wrong that AI is hyped just like crypto and VR were. But it's also true that automation will increasingly impact your job, even for jobs that we have considered to be highly technical like software engineering.

I've noticed this over the last decade where tech people (of which I am one) have considered themselves above the problems of ordinary workers such as just affording to live. I really started to notice this in the lead up to the 2016 election where many privileged people did not recognize or just immediately dismissed the genuine anger and plight of working people.

This dovetails into the myth of meritocracy and the view that not having enough money or lacking basic necessities like food or shelter or a personal, moral failure and not a systemic problem.

Tech people in the 2010s were incredibly privileged. Earnings kept going up. There was seemingly infinite demand for our services. Life was in many ways great. The pandemic was the opportunity for employers to reign in runaway (from their perspective) labor costs.

Permanent layoff culture is nothing more than suppressesing wages. The facade of the warm, fuzzy Big Tech employer is long gone. They are defense contractors now. Google, Microsoft or Amazon are indistinguishable from Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

So AI won't immediately replace you. It'll start by 4 engineers with AI being able to do the job that was previously done by 5. Laying off that one person saves that money directly but also suppresses the wages of the other 4 who won't be asking for raises. They're too afraid of losing their jobs. Then it'll be 3. Then 2.

A lot of people, particularly here on HN, are going to find out just how replaceable they are and how aligning with the interests of the very wealthiest was a huge mistake. You might get paid $500K+ a year but you are still a worker. Your interests align with nurses, teachers, baristas, fast food workers and truck drivers, not the Peter Thiels of the world.
by xwolfi | 2025-05-26 03:08:23+00:00
They are really not neuronal analogs, reasoning is far from what they do. If they reasoned, they'd stick to their guns more readily, but try to contradict an LLM and it will make any logic leap you ask it too.

If you debate with me, I'll keep reasoning on the same premises and usually the difference between two humans is not in reasoning but in choice of premises.

For instance you really want here to assert that LLM are close to human, I want to assert they're not - truth is probably in between but we chose two camps. We'll then reason from these premises, reach antagonistic conclusions and slowly try to attack each other point.

An LLM cannot do that, it cannot attack your point very well, it doesn't know how to say you're wrong, because it doesn't care anyway. It just completes your sentences, so if you say "now you're wrong, change your mind" it will, which sounds far from reasoning to me, and quite unreasonable in fact.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-05-26 03:08:45+00:00
import Data.List (intercalate) fizzle :: Int -> String fizzle n = let ws = [(3,"Fizz"), (5,"Buzz"), (7,"Bazz")] a = [s | (d,s) <- ws, n`rem`d == 0] in case a of [] -> show n otherwise -> intercalate " " a ++ "!" main = mapM_ (putStrLn . fizzle) [1..110]
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-26 03:08:47+00:00
Why do you think Sweden decided to raise the retirement age instead of raising taxes to keep the current retirement age?

Another idea: Allow people to retire early, but they receive lower monthly payments from national pension. Most national pensions have the reverse: You can retire later and receive higher monthly payments.

> I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself.

The problem is that huge number of people live way longer than 75, like to 85 or 95 and such, which imposes a huge financial burden on the state (pension and healthcare costs).
by const_cast | 2025-05-26 03:08:48+00:00
> Are you implying you will make someone liable for doing nothing wrong?

This leaves out an important part of liability and the concept of trust as a whole - neglect. Simply doing nothing wrong is not the end-all be-all. If you did nothing wrong, it's possible you should have been aware of potential things that could have gone wrong, and prevented them.

If the company and procedures are such that illegal things can happen in tandem that's something that should have been caught, and prevented. This is why we have, for example, licensing for engineers.

A civil engineer does not only need to consider his part, his bridge. He must consider the conditions, the inspectors, the wind, the future. He may be wrong, and of course we require some slack. But still, that expectation is there.

If, hypothetically and arbitrarily, a CEO claims to not be responsible for some company's evil action, I can turn around and argue that by being CEO it is his job to assume that responsibility, and that his apparent ignorance of the situation is not a defense, but rather proof of his own neglectful conduct.
by tonyhart7 | 2025-05-26 03:08:50+00:00
algo trading already there for decades but addition with AI that can process corporate performance, trends etc can make it to another level

but if we do this, does this good for market??? since if everyone have access to this tool. meaning that market would get optimized to the ground and what happen to daily trader etc ???

does that mean everyone just win/lose money equally???
by redtaperat | 2025-05-26 03:08:50+00:00
This is one of several shortcomings I’ve encountered in all major LLMs. The llm has consumed multiple versions of SDKs from the same manufacturer and cannot tell them apart. Mixing up apis, methods, macros, etc. Worse is that for more esoteric code with fewer samples, or more wrong than right answers in the corpus means always getting broken code. I had this issue working on some NXP embedded code.
by latchkey | 2025-05-26 03:09:09+00:00
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. This is clearly better than having no tests at all. It’s not like I’m flying blind, the tests are right there, and I can read through them. If the coverage isn’t good enough, I can always add more. And let’s not ignore the fact that the presence of tests in the first place means someone gave a damn.
by Noumenon72 | 2025-05-26 03:09:13+00:00
"One medical debt away from being destitute" is socialists trying to make common cause between the upper and lower class. We have great insurance and big piles of savings, there's nothing in common with people who can barely afford their deductible and lose their job for missing too much work.

The boundary between working class and not working class is not at the 99th percentile where you would have it. The diminishing marginal utility of money means you get 90% of the security of being wealthy at 0.1% of the net worth of a billionaire.
by aristofun | 2025-05-26 03:09:26+00:00
My point is that it's not a privilege at all.

Office work can be just as good/bad/meaningful/useless/hard/easy etc. as manual or almost any type of work these days.

It's very ignorant (and outdated by 50 years in a first world country) to look down on software engineers like they are spoiled children whining about their little naive problems.

(I'm exaggerating to illustrate the point).
by swells34 | 2025-05-26 03:09:52+00:00
The focus here on "tariffs good vs tariffs bad" is missing the point. Tools can be used in a productive way or an unproductive way. I think anyone with even a basic understanding of global economics knew what the outcome would be when he started putting out blanket tariffs for no fucking reason, and the way he did it is objectively unproductive; we will live with the damage from this action for decades.
by cyberax | 2025-05-26 03:10:09+00:00
> Correlation is not causation. People happily raised children in dense cities for centuries.

London is an example of such a city. Its population in 1750 was 750000 people. It was not a "large city" at all by current standards.

> Those old houses look great in instagram photos but they're not very fun to actually live in.

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

> Young people are rightly prioritising places that are good to live instead of the boomer square feet fetish.

Yeah, like "microapartments" where you can cook food while sitting on a toilet. Very well suited for hikikomori, great for raising 3 children!

> Killing the most economically productive parts of the country is not going to magically make other parts more productive, it's just going to destroy the whole country's economy.

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.

> amilies that want to give their children a good future having few children, mainly because of the cost of education.

Europe has free (or cheap) education. Yet birth rates are even lower than in the US.

> Those are the things you need to address if you want to change it.

Then why people moving out of cities have a greater fertility rate?
by alibova | 2025-05-26 03:10:36+00:00
Absolutely! I'm working on a proper write up but high level I broke the code up into two parts: 1) Sending text messages from the device 2) Receiving text messages

For sending text messages I have a raspberry pi hooked up to an arcade button and an off the shelf document scanner (you can see it in the last pic). When kiddo pushes the button it takes a picture, uploads to s3 and then sends via Twilio API.

For receiving the text message I have a Lambda script that receives the text message (via Twilio webhook) and it publishes it to a Pubnub channel, the raspberry pi monitors the pubnub channel and prints via thermal printer when a new message is received.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-26 03:11:41+00:00
I think people give training data too much credit. Obviously it's important, but it also isn't a database of knowledge like it's made out to be.

You can see this in riddles that are obviously in the training set, but older or lighter models still get them wrong. Or situations where the model gets them right, but uses a different method than the ones used in the training set.
by its-summertime | 2025-05-26 03:12:13+00:00
> that they are unfeeling Cartesian rationalist automata

And what, they aren't allowed to be happy with that identity? They need to feel the author's brand of happy only? Ick.

Not allowed to appreciate garbage collection in Lisp because Python has it? And the author feels the need to class such appreciation as a side effect of a neurological disorder?

- - -

> If you pursue things out of pure obsession, you might wake up and realize you’ve spent years labouring in obscurity on a dead-end

but

> You are allowed to use weird, obscure, inconvenient, obsolescent, undead things if it makes you happy.

[apparently not, considering the insistence of insulting anyone's reason for enjoying doing so]

but

> We are all going to die.
by stephenr | 2025-05-26 03:12:24+00:00
> what's the use-case?

The use-case I always remember people presenting for JWTs was mostly part of the "serverless" fad/hype.

The theory was presented like this: If you use a JWT your application logic can be stateless when it comes to authentication; So you don't need to load user info from a session database/kv store, it's right there in the request...

The only way that makes any sense to me, is if your application has zero storage of its own: it's all remote APIs/services, including your authentication source. I'm sure there are some applications like that, but I find it hard to believe that's how/why it's used most of the time.

Never underestimate this industry's ability to get obsessed with the new shiny.

I had an eye opening experience many years ago with a junior dev (I was significantly more experienced than he was then, but wouldn't have called myself "senior" at the time).

He had written an internal tool for the agency we both worked for/through. I don't recall the exact specifics, but I remember the accountant was involved somewhat, and it was a fairly basic CRUD-y PHP/MySQL app. Nothing to write home about, but it worked fine.

At some point he had an issue getting his php/mysql environment configured (I guess on a new laptop?) - this was before the time of Docker; Vagrant was likely already a thing but he wasn't using it.

From what he explained afterwards I believe it was just the extremely common issue that connecting to "localhost" causes the mysql client to attempt a socket connection, and the default socket location provided in php isn't always correct.

As I said, I heard about this after he'd decided that connection issue (with an app that had already been working well enough to show off to powers-that-be and get approval to spend more paid time on it) was enough to warrant re-writing the entire thing to use MongoDB.

As I said: never underestimate this industry's ability to get obsessed with the new shiny.
Show HN: I built an AI image tool solo in 1 month
by WenbinFan | 2025-05-26 03:12:44+00:00
Hey HN!

Over the past month, I built Styleloop, a solo side project that uses AI to transform images into stylized artworks. The primary focus is image-to-image transformation, with curated styles like Ghibli, pixel art, Animal Crossing, and more.

It’s my first real SaaS project, and honestly, the process changed how I think about building and shipping products. From backend to payments to UI polish — doing it all solo was exhausting and incredibly rewarding.

Styleloop was built with Next.js, Supabase, Stripe, and Cloudflare. I plan to keep improving it and add more creative modes.

I'd love your feedback on whether you’re into AI x creativity or solo hacking projects!

Thanks for checking it out!
by gus_massa | 2025-05-26 03:13:46+00:00
Make a repo in github [1] [2], write a blog post and post it in HN to farm some karma [3]. Assuming they are interesting, you gain some street credit. Not every project deserves to be continued for years.

[1] I prefer MIT licence that is a polite version of the WTFPL. But if you are worried about Amazon hosting it without paying you, try AGPL.

[2] Add a disclaimer that the project is not maintained, so you don't get PR. Can it be archived?

[3] Assuming one (or a few?) projects per month. Not a daily project.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-26 03:14:58+00:00
I prefer the old system because it's simpler (the last thing I want to do is manage investments) and it doesn't run out like a personal pension does. You just get the monthly amount as long as you live. Because it's a group scheme. Some people are luckier than others.

Unfortunately Holland has become very neoliberal and everything collective or social is frowned upon. That's really why they changed it.
by Varqu | 2025-05-26 03:15:12+00:00
Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension.

Currently, it's the worst of both worlds: you get taxed quite a significant portion of your income, and then, in the middle of the game, someone changes the rules and tells you to play longer in order to get the prize.
by lisper | 2025-05-26 03:15:35+00:00
> arguably achieves the worst of both worlds

The author makes a number of unfounded claims, including:

> there is huge benefit in throwing away the prototype

This is at odds with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

And this is the problem, in response to which I hereby formulate Ron's Third Law (*): For any position regarding the proper design of a programming language there exists an authoritative-sounding aphorism to support it.

> good type inference ... good language design

This is begging the question. Of course* you want good type inference and good language design. Who in their right mind would advocate for bad type inference and bad language design? The problem is specifying what the word "good" means* here.

---

(*) Ron's first two laws are: 1) All extreme positions are wrong, and 2) The hardest part of getting what you want is figuring out what it is. (The difficulty of defining "good" is a corollary to this.)
by timschmidt | 2025-05-26 03:16:52+00:00
> It can and does, albeit in slower motion (ie Japan, South Korea)

Read what he wrote again. The scenario he created (everyone works, then everyone retires) has never and will never happen. Humanity is more likely to be wiped out by a meteor.

> Humans took care of THEIR elderly.

Point me toward the non-human elderly being supported by the social safety net. We're all related. You just have to look back far enough.

> Pretty sure most people don't want to see old people begging for food on the street but also prefer not to pay much to have it resolved (varies by country and culture)

I agree with you here. People don't want to help others, and don't want to suffer the consequences of not helping others. People are conflicted creatures who suffer from a long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
by const_cast | 2025-05-26 03:17:33+00:00
> How is closing the business better than hiring people at shitty wages they are happy to accept?

Because it brings down the market value of said person, basically ensuring they can't make a livable wage. These companies are cheating, in a way. They're paying well below market value for the labor because of asymmetrical power. Those people are working two or three jobs to make ends meet - so, their employers aren't paying what the labor actually costs. They just get the labor at a discount because employees have zero negotiating power.

It's sort of like getting a vacuum for 15 dollars because when the vacuum salesman rang my door, I held him a gunpoint.
by I_am_tiberius | 2025-05-26 03:17:41+00:00
I previously worked in Finance, where collecting forecasts and internal data from colleagues - often using Excel - was a recurring pain point. Existing systems sometimes covered part of the process, but their inflexible data structures made it difficult to adjust them for new use cases. Therefore I’m building a flexible internal data collection platform: it supports multidimensional data, custom workflows, a rules engine, automatic consolidation, and a range of configurable widgets.
by carpo | 2025-05-26 03:17:43+00:00
Thanks! I have been thinking about opening it up, but not sure, as I've never done any open source stuff and don't know how useful others would find it - there's some clunky bits!

I also have the whole Aider/Claude prompt history in the repo too, as I started this on a platform & framework I'd never used, and used the AI to scaffold much of the app at the beginning. Thought that might be useful to go back and see what worked the best when AI programming.
by ummonk | 2025-05-26 03:18:06+00:00
Plenty of engineers prefer the appearance of code with heavy use of curly brackets. I thunk aesthetic tastes in the programming community are rather split and doubt there is a clear preference for Python style appearance over Zig style appearance.

The failure of Zig to catch on is simply because it’s in a harder space to catch on (low level / systems programming). Whereas new web languages frequently catch on, Rust and Go are the only ones that managed to break through against the C/C++ monopoly with Zig, Nim, D etc. failing. And Pascal and its derivatives also have fallen by the wayside so it’s not an appearance issue.
by agarren | 2025-05-26 03:18:20+00:00
> [Harper Reed] cautioned against being overly precious about the value of deeply understanding one’s code, which is no longer necessary to ensure that it works.

That just strikes me as an odd thing to say. I’m convinced that this is the dividing line between today’s software engineers and tomorrow’s AI engineers (in whatever form that takes - prompt, vibe, etc.) Reed’s statement feels very much like a justification of “if it compiles, ship it!”

> “It would be crazy if in an auto factory people were measuring to make sure every angle is correct,” he said, since machines now do the work. “It’s not as important as when it was group of ten people pounding out the metal.”

Except that the machines doing that work aren’t regularly hallucinating angles, spurious welding joints, etc.