MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drivingmenuts | 2025-05-12 01:36:28+00:00
I'm just not sure I see where AI has made my search results better or more reliable. And until it can be proven that those results are better, I'm going to remain skeptical.

I'm not even sure what form that proof would take. I do know that I can tolerate non-deterministic behavior from a human, but having computers demonstrate non-deterministic behavior is, to me, a violation of the purpose for which we build computers.
by doodlebugging | 2025-05-12 01:37:18+00:00
> They go for cheapest component they can spec for a given feature cutting 4MB memory will save 5 cents per car, we sell half a million cars, that’s big savings!

I'm tired. Been out in the sun all day. Explain this to me please.

When I do the math I get 500000 * $0.05 = $25000

That's a small drop in a large bucket of their gross income or net profits.

EDIT: Harsh sun must've burned a few of my processors. I see now that this would only be one small change that saved an inconsequential amount of money. But each group is incentivized to produce minor changes like this that save small amounts and that those amounts do add to substantial savings and help complete the process of enshittification of the ownership and driving experience for those who choose to buy one of these vehicles.
by travisgriggs | 2025-05-12 01:38:14+00:00
This hits a nail on the head for me.

I have nuanced/mixed feelings about X, Tesla, and SpaceX. They are all products that have moved past the “because it’s different” disruption stages. But in each case, I’m intrigued and supportive by certain aspects still, especially SpaceX.

But the “Brand of Elon Musk” I want nothing to do with. Just absolutely nothing. The man is unhinged and attached to way too much unchecked power.
by ajmurmann | 2025-05-12 01:39:21+00:00
I am currently planning adding monitoring to some toy apps I hosted on a raspberry pi cluster. The intent is that this might safe me time and stress further down the road. If a new version makes performance worse, I want to see that in the data. If resource needs go up, I want to know that before it's time to move, so that I can plan without any kind of scheduling stress. (I also want to do this in part as an exercise which is partial motivation for the cluster and most things I built that run on it. But don't tell anyone!)

Am I misguided?
by 0_____0 | 2025-05-12 01:39:28+00:00
At a prior gig we stepped up a machine shop and ended up hiring a stinky kid who I thought was someone's homeless brother. Extremely talented, after our program wound down he started his own machine shop and now does multiple millions of dollars of revenue yearly, has staff etc, in his mid 20s now.

He's a special case sure, but if you have business sense you don't have to top out at the high end of the hourly scale.
by parineum | 2025-05-12 01:39:49+00:00
I'm not talking about height, I'm talking about rate if change.

The height is concerning regardless but the rate of change is the link to anthropomorphic climate change. If it's shown that this rate of change is not unprecedented, the link to human causes is less solid.

I'm not here to say CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas and that humans aren't likely responsible for current and future warming, I'm pointing out that there are plenty of people who believe the same as me but to a degree that is not supported scientifically.

The data fits the co2 hypothesis great but Baysian reasoning also must account for other models that fit the data as well and must even include the prospect that there are other unknown causes that could produce the effect, as there clearly are given the thoroughly precedented nature of our current situation.
by mikepurvis | 2025-05-12 01:40:33+00:00
I’m in a loaner 2025 Volvo right now and I’ve honestly been pleasantly surprised with the Android Auto setup. I thought I’d never again use anything other than phone projection, but nope — I can install Google Maps and Spotify and sign into both, and then my profiles and everything are right there including search history, and it’s actually more seamless and integrated than switching between CarPlay and the native/outer car UI.
by t-writescode | 2025-05-12 01:40:49+00:00
Thankfully, there's a bunch of great and "easy to get going" languages now that __also__ have types (or optionally encourage them) that the "don't have types" thing isn't as much of a forced issue anymore (though engineers can still choose to go type-free and eventually face the wrath of lack of types in a large-scale project)
by mmmBacon | 2025-05-12 01:41:27+00:00
If you’re making very low end HW maybe this is true. Because HW is something that you put into the real world there are other constraints such as power, cooling, space, security of supply, ability to ramp, cost, reliability, etc. The calculus for HW selection is much more involved than simply SW. Good SW/FW can be performant on much less capable HW but it does mean that SW engineers need to understand more about the HW. This is a very rare skill in 2025. Most SW engineers I’ve encountered cannot explain stack vs heap. Furthermore even fewer understand how to use malloc correctly.
Show HN: Parsie – A Google Sheets Add-On to Extract Data from Any Documents
by alicele27 | 2025-05-12 01:42:10+00:00
I just launched a Google Sheets Add-on called Parsie, which helps you extract structured data and tables (like names, emails, invoice totals, etc.) from unstructured documents directly in your Google Sheets — including PDFs, screenshots, and more.

Unlike basic OCR tools that just dump messy text, Parsie understands documents like a human would. It uses a template-first approach:

1) You define what data you need

2) Parsie extracts only that

3) You get clean, consistent output.

Under the hood: – Powered by GPT models + Microsoft Azure OCR (top-ranked since 2018) – Understands context and relationships between data points – Works in 100+ languages – Handles scanned PDFs, images, DOCX, handwriting, and complex layouts

Use cases: – Invoices, receipts, and bank statements – Insurance and legal docs – Form submissions – Any workflow that turns messy documents into structured data

Advanced features: – AI-assisted custom schema – Multi-row extraction – Batch document processing – Metadata (file name, Drive URL, etc.)

Try it here: https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/advanced_ocr_ex... Website: https://parsie.pro/ Would love your feedback or ideas for improvement. AMA!
by fsckboy | 2025-05-12 01:42:41+00:00
>It won't null terminate the string if the buffer is filled, which will cause you all sorts of problems.

if you don't know how to solve/avoid a problem like that, you will have all sorts of other problems

pound-define strncopy to a compile fail, write the function you want instead, correct all the compile errors, and then, not only move on with your life, never speak of it again, for that is the waste of time. C++ std:string is trash, java strings are trash, duplicate what you want from those in your C string library and sail ahead. no language has better defined behaviors than C, that's why so many other languages, interpreters, etc. have been implemented in C.
by theamk | 2025-05-12 01:42:54+00:00
No, not really. If a single HR person is fired, there are likely others to pick up the slack. And others will likely learn something from the firing, and adjust their behavior accordingly if needed.

On the other hand, "firing" an AI from AI-based HR department will likely paralyze it completely, so it's closer to "let's fire every single low-level HR person at once" - something very unlikely to occur.

The same goes with all other applications too: firing a single nurse is relativel easy. Replacing AI system with a new one is a major project which likely takes dozens of people and millions of dollars.
by typedef_struct | 2025-05-12 01:43:35+00:00
Some good patterns here. An Event with a callback (what you're calling [context protocol](https://github.com/webcomponents-cg/community-protocols/blob...)) I think will prove useful.

My main gripe with web components is that while they expose the first half of the tree traversal (from the outside in, via connectedCallback), they don't provide access to the second half, after child elements have been created. (akin to Initialize and Load events from ye olde .NET)
by teleforce | 2025-05-12 01:46:25+00:00
It's really a shame isn't it? It's 2025 and we still have no programming languages that have impeccable GC for automatic memory management rather than forcing programmer to wrestling and fighting for manually managing the memory [1].

Auto industry kind of solved this automation mechanism for example with the new high performance Toyota GR Corolla has a new automatic gear transmission that's proven as fast if not faster than the manual version [2]. The same goes to F1, the epitome of car racing performance.

[1] Understanding Memory Management, Part 5: Fighting with Rust (101 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43882291

[2] 2025 Toyota GR Corolla's New Automatic Gearbox Democratizes Fun:

https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a62672128/2025-toyota-g...
by Const-me | 2025-05-12 01:47:59+00:00
> such as time.h and string.h

In Windows, the APIs provided by the OS are IMO better than these C standard headers.

WinAPI date/time is more precise, the kernel keeps int64 number of 100 nanosecond ticks. WinAPI supports arbitrary timezones, has functions to convert between timezones, has functions to deal with daylight saving.

About strings, WinAPI can convert strings between encodings, case-insensitive comparisons (including a version to use arbitrary locale), Unicode normalization, etc.
by PNewling | 2025-05-12 01:48:42+00:00
I've only flow Southwest a couple times, but that is basically it. Usually someone comes in and places items on the other two seats in a row.

They're not actually reserving them, they're just trying to cause enough of a fuss that no one wants to deal with that they will get their way.

Edit: You could be strong-willed enough to spar with them on it, but it is so draining most opt to just not engage.
by tikhonj | 2025-05-12 01:50:32+00:00
This has not been my experience at all. I worked on a team with substantial autonomy and agency for a few years, and most people—not everyone, sure, but almost—naturally rose to the occasion.

People want to do good work and people want to feel like they're doing good work. If you create an environment where they feel trusted and safe, they will rise to your expectations.

I had way more trouble with people working too hard but with misaligned ideas of what "good" meant—and stepping on each other's toes—than with anyone slacking off. It's easy to work around somebody who is merely ineffectual!

And, sure, a bunch of stuff people tried did not work out. But the things that did more than made up for it. Programming and quantitative modeling are inherently high-leverage activities; unless leadership manages out all the leverage in the name of predictability, the hits are going to more than make to for the flubs.
by jccc | 2025-05-12 01:51:53+00:00
> Tesla was able to fix this with a software update over the air, something no one else could do for a braking system. That was impressive, but the example presented a worrying question: Did engineers not do stopping-distance testing before they shipped the car to customers?

I wonder if anyone here can think of an example (or six) of other more worrying questions about this. Before cradling your head in your hands and asking where you can get a decent new car that's just a goddamn car.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-12 01:52:04+00:00
You hold contempt for teachers, who will probably never make more than 250k a year at their career height, for railing against elites who make millions, or even billions? Most teachers are adjuncts anyway, and are not tenure-track, and are lucky to make over 80-100k in any market.

And you hold this contempt because you believe that these teachers are actually elites in disguise trying to hoodwink our kids?

Have you considered the possibility that you’re wrong about them being elites, or at least to what degree and in what context and sphere of influence? Who benefits from misdirecting legitimate ire away from wealthy elite society and toward middle class intellectual elite society?
by rtpg | 2025-05-12 01:52:54+00:00
A thing that still stands out to me is that even in this work we're looking at Lean as a way of verifying a proof, but I do not know how much exploratory work is possible in Lean.

In Rocq/Coq, I've found myself often lost in the weeds when exploring a problem just through tactics mode (half expecting it to handle the more boring machinery), and really do have to think pretty hard about how I get from A to B.

Some of this is, quite simply, me just walking in the wrong direction (if you have multiple things you can induct on, the choice can greatly affect how easy it is to move forward!). I just wish that the computer would be a bit better at helping me realize I'm in the wrong direction.

Stuff like Quickchick[0] helps, but just generally I would love the computer to more actively give me counterexamples to some extent.

[0]: https://github.com/QuickChick/QuickChick
by strogonoff | 2025-05-12 01:54:10+00:00
> Family game server going down can be very stressful, especially if you have kids.

Telemetry does not address this, though. Shoving it into a container and assigning it a simple “restart if down” rule does. Minecraft is a flaky beast, if you run snapshots and/or mods. Metrics or not, often “start again” is all you need.

Furthermore, this is a game that adds new gameplay features multiple times per month. If you do not update it frequently and your kid misses out on a new mob, you run into the same stress. Containerizing it makes the upgrade very straightforward, and once you run a couple of containerized instances… Do you not struggle to see the value of detailed system monitoring?
by bluGill | 2025-05-12 01:54:28+00:00
In india if you hit someone after sounding your horn you are not at fault as you gave warning and they didn't move. (It is far more complex than that but as always the real truth is too complex for a comment box - if you are trying to drive safe it is close enough, but this isn't a license to murder), As a result all drives will honk their own if there is any possibility someone might cross in front of them.

India is getting a lot stricter about driving rules, and I hven't been there for a few years. I would expect the above to change as people realize that the horn doesn't really work for that purpose anyway. But change is always slow.
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-05-12 01:55:02+00:00
A lot of financial schemes sound like they could be above-board on paper, but in practice degenerate out of control. Securitization is a classic here. It's not that securitization is inherently bad or wrong, but it creates a lot more surface area for incentive misalignment and outright abuse.

Consider the United States subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. I'm actually willing to accept that broadening the borrower base had the potential to be a social good. In particular, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, home equity was a very real way for middle-class Americans to accumulate family wealth, and expanding access to that at least had potential for positive impact. But the actual way that the mortgage industry went about it was maximally wrong. Every layer was incentivized to finagle the numbers to work out, despite that the fundamentals never did. Every layer, from the loan officers to the underwriters, all the way on up, were incentivized to look the other way while they took their own cut. Loan officers fudged numbers, underwriters fudged numbers, and so on. At the core of this conflux was the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) machine. A lot of the financial engineering involved may have been valid on paper, with some set of constants. But it was clear, at least in hindsight, that the banks, ratings agencies, and brokers worked together to stack too many bad assumptions on top of each other, until the whole thing burst. We all know how that story ended.

Is BNPL, and the securitization thereof, the next big trap? It's too early to say with confidence, but certainly the signs are there. I only hope that, if it's going to blow up, it does so early, before regular people's pensions start buying into BNPL-derived securities.
by dwattttt | 2025-05-12 01:55:05+00:00
A cursory browse says there's no Linux-isms in the code base, so the Windows-y way to build that (without going into licensing) would be to use the Visual Studio Build Tools. They're the CLI toolchain you get for Visual Studio, but free when compiling open source projects (as of recently: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/updates-to-visual-stu...)

They still notionally need to run on a Windows machine, although I recall people have managed to run them under wine before.

EDIT: It took me a few reads to parse what the link is saying, so: using the toolchain to compile open source dependencies is fine, even if your codebase is closed source, so long as the closed source part isn't being built with the Build Tools.
by crq-yml | 2025-05-12 01:55:24+00:00
We're on the cusp of an indie software boom.

The reasons why exist in Taleb's antifragility thesis: the antifragile will gain from disorder.

The nature of the tech industry, in the decades roughly since the Cold War ended(which put to rest a certain pattern of tech focused on the MIC and moved SV forward into its leadership position), has promoted fragility along several of Taleb's dimensions: it aims to scale, it aims to centralize, and it aims to intervene. The pinnacle achievement of this trend is probably the iPhone, a convergent do-everything device that promises to change your life.

But it's axiomatic(in Taleb's view, which I will defer to since his arguments are good enough for me) that this won't last, and with talk of "the end of the US empire", and a broader pessimism in tech, there seems to be popular agreement that we are done with the scale narrative. AI is a last holdout for that narrative since it justifies further semiconductor investment, stokes national security fears of an "AI race" and so on - it appeals to forces with big pocketbooks, that are also big in scale, and also in a position of fragility themselves. But eventually they will tap out too, for the same reasons. Whether that's a "next year" thing or a "twenty years" thing is hard to predict - the fall of the USSR was similarly hard to predict.

The things that are antifragile within software are too abstract to intentionally develop within a codebase, and are more a measure of philosophy and how one models the world with data - CollapseOS is at the extreme end of this, where the viewpoint is bacterial - "all our computing infrastructure is doomed if it is not maintainable by solo operators" - but there are intermediate points along it where the kinds of software that are needed are in that realm of a plugin to a large app or an extension to an existing framework, and development intentionally aims not to break outside that scope. That thesis agrees with the "small niches" view of things.

Since we have succeeded in putting computers into every place we can think of, many of the things we need to do with them do already have a conventional "way of doing it," but can exist in a standard and don't need to be formalized behind a platform and business model - and LLM stuff does actually have some role in serving that by being an 80% translator of intent, while a technical specialist has work in adding finish and polish. And that side of things agrees with going deeper into the stack.

I believe one pressing issue that's faced with this transition is the inclination brought from the corporate dev environment to create a generalized admixture of higher and lower level coding - to do everything as a JS app with WASM bits that are "rewritten in Rust" - when what indie software needs is more Turbo Pascals, Hypercards, and Visual Basics, environments that are tuned to be complete within themselves and towards the kinds of apps being written, while being "compatible enough" to deploy to a variety of end-user systems.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-12 01:56:51+00:00
This website covers a fair bit of React - in particular, it seems Web Components can be used to create components with both state & props.

One can imagine a cross-compiler so you could write React, but have it compiled to React-free javascript - leaving no React dependency in production.

Would be a lift, but looks superficially possible.

What are the blockers to this?
by sweeter | 2025-05-12 01:57:54+00:00
This is why I think we need publicly funded open source projects with paid leads. There are so many basic things we've failed to do for ourselves and our fellow human beings.

For example, the best non-AI TTS system is still Ivona TTS that originated at Blizzard in like 2007. The best open source solution is espeak and it's permanently stuck in 1980... Ivona was bought up by Amazon and now they don't even use the original software, but do charge money per word to use the voice via Amazon Polly. They could open source it, but they don't.

We don't even have something as basic as text to speech freely available, whether you are disabled or not. That is a problem. You have this amazing innovation that still holds to this day, squandered away for nothing.

Why can't we just have an institute that develops these things in the open, for all to use? We clearly all recognize the benefit as SysV tools are still used today! We could have so many amazing things but we don't. It's embarrassing
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-12 01:58:01+00:00
In addition to the other answers, when it comes to the Mac they’re not as worried about bringing new people aboard as they are with keeping existing users happy. Keep in mind that some of these users have been on board since the 80s or 90s and so the Apple way of doing things is as natural to them as the Microsoft way of doing things is to the masses. The benefit to suddenly wholeheartedly aping MS all of the sudden is questionable — most Windows users still aren’t going to switch for various reasons (e.g. there’s no Billy’s Bargain Basement $200 Macs or there’s some Windows-only software they need). They’d only be alienating their existing users.
by vagab0nd | 2025-05-12 01:58:45+00:00
How do folks deal with Pi-hole unintentionally breaking normal websites? I used it for a couple of months until one day I spent 30 minutes trying to log in to a payment website with no success. Then I remembered I had Pi-hole running. I know the solution was probably to whitelist certain URLs, but at the time I just gave up and disabled Pi-hole.
by simonw | 2025-05-12 01:59:20+00:00
Came here to say exactly that. The use of "AI" as a weird, all-encompassing boogeyman is a big part of the problem here - it's quickly growing to mean "any form of technology that I don't like or don't understand" for a growing number of people.

The author of this piece made no attempt at all to define what "AI" they were talking about here, which I think was irresponsible of them.
by bluGill | 2025-05-12 01:59:29+00:00
I have tried that (not on a Mazda). The radio is still there playing whatever and if there is a valid station the now playing song has to be shown on the other useful screen. On I got the system to default to radio off, but that means I can't control my heated seats w=ithout turning the system on - there are several seconds of noise between getting the system on and it responding tol the volumn knob.