MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by duncangh | 2025-05-17 03:51:18+00:00
Let's randomly summon citizens to serve brief terms as legislators. It's less crazy than it sounds and even if it weren't it still sounds better than what we've got. For the people by the people. You're already destined to be judged by such a group in the court of law. I offer that sequestered citizen legislators would perform their function radically better than our current system
by rdtsc | 2025-05-17 03:51:19+00:00
> Erlang is not as performant for heavy computational loads

Well, sure don't use it for heavy computational loads if it doesn't work for you. It works great for our use case and I think Node-RED is also not for heavy computational workload, but rather for event programming, where lots of events happen concurrently.

> how would you do multithreaded processing of a large amount of data without a shared heap in a performant way?

That's a specific workload, it's not universal, for sure. I haven't worked on cases there is a single large data structure and all million clients have to manipulate it concurrently. Not saying it's implausible, I can see a game server with an arena maybe being like that, but there are other systems that work like that.
by Spivak | 2025-05-17 03:51:44+00:00
But SS isn't a tax like the rest of our general taxes. I pay a specific SS tax on my payroll so that when I retire I'm entitled to a payout. If you take away the payout you need to take away the tax. Once you means test SS it becomes more like a welfare program for seniors and ought to be paid for out of the general tax pool like other welfare programs.
by eru | 2025-05-17 03:52:24+00:00
> The end game for this is that people in the West (and whoever they can pressure) won't be able to buy crypto to buy drugs or sell it when selling drugs, making it useless on a big scale.

I agree with you on targeting the on- and off-ramps. But I think you got your use cases wrong.

Crypto has two major use cases these days:

- speculation (aka gambling)

- ransomware payments

Buying drugs is pretty far down the list. And so are pretty much all purchases of normal goods and services.
by monkeyelite | 2025-05-17 03:52:50+00:00
Good engineering design is about making unbalanced tradeoffs where you get huge wins for low costs. These kinds of decisions are opinionated and require you to say no to some edge cases to get a lot back on the important cases.

One lesson I have learned is that good design cannot survive popularity and bureaucracy that comes with it. Over time people just beat down your door with requests to do cases you explicitly avoided. You’re blocking their work and not being pragmatic! Eventually nobody is left to advocate for them.

And part of that is the community has more resources and can absorb some more complexity. But this is also why I prefer tools with smaller communities.
Show HN: Telepipe – Send command output to Telegram with a simple pipe
by linuxmaster14 | 2025-05-17 03:54:25+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a tiny Bash script called Telepipe that lets you send the output of any command directly to Telegram using a bot.

It's very lightweight (single script, no dependencies), and useful for:

- Getting alerts from cronjobs

- Monitoring long-running processes

- Piping logs or error output when SSH'd into remote servers

Example: echo "Job completed" | telepipe

It's great for sysadmins, devops, or anyone who likes clean, instant notifications.

Would love feedback or ideas to improve it!
by csense | 2025-05-17 03:54:38+00:00
I was sure the blinking cursor was a staple of the mainframe folks' terminals years, maybe decades before Apple came on the scene, but I looked up some YouTube videos and the DEC VT52 (released 1974-1975) seems to have not had a blinking cursor. Its successor, the iconic VT100 did have a blinking cursor, but wasn't released until 1978.

Maybe later I'll do more research and look up other old terminal models, but I'm going to stop for now.

Also, I guess Apple is a little older than I thought; I always pictured the ubiquitous Apple IIe as a 1980's machine (and I saw some in the wild well into the 1990's). Seeing they were released in the 1970's is pretty interesting.
by neonsunset | 2025-05-17 03:57:09+00:00
If whatever you are doing is heavy on hashmap lookups (and you are ok with not rewriting into something more bespoke+complicated) - the faster hash function and the cheaper baseline cost of calling it - the better (i.e. XXH3 can have disadvantages, with its popular impl. for dispatching to the necessary routine).

This looks like an interesting potential alternative to GxHash. GxHash is nice but sadly I found AES intrinsics to have somewhat high latency on AMD's Zen 2/3 cores, making it a loss on short strings (but until I measured it on our server hw, M4 Max sure had me fooled, it has way better latency despite retiring more AES operations!).
by duncangh | 2025-05-17 03:57:17+00:00
Hi HN, I've been thinking about this for months now and with each pass I find myself more enamored with it as a mode of achieving representative democracy. Interested to hear your thoughts. I think this would be an entire constitutional re-write if implemented, but I am optimistic that random sequestered groups of our peers would work quite well as legislative representatives and do a decent job in earnest. Maybe each law would have an expiration date with varying lengths determined by degree of consensus. E.g foundational rights should consistently yield 100% support of Freedom of speech and would be due to renew once a decade while novel laws with smaller pluralities could be briefly trialed and discarded by default if not successful
by _delirium | 2025-05-17 03:57:17+00:00
I don't think it's been dead for 10 years. I'd place it at maybe 3? I teach at a mid-ranked university and the majority of my fresh out of college students were getting good-to-great entry level offers just a few years ago. The top 5-10% were getting well into six figure offers from FAANG or similar companies. But the entry level job market really tanked in mid 2022 when all the big tech companies did rounds of layoffs, and it's been much harder since then.
by eru | 2025-05-17 03:57:20+00:00
> I think that's not inevitable, especially in a scenario where we're left dealing with a climate collapse.

A 'climate collapse' is extremely unlikely. Look at studies on the (prospected) economic impacts of climate change. Wikipedia has an article on it, for example.

In any case, the forecasts expect something like perhaps 20% total reduction in GDP over say the next 100 years compared to the scenario without global warning. (But that's on top of our regularly scheduled single-digit percent per year regular economic growth.)

20% is a huge impact! It's bigger than Brexit. But it's also only about as big as the per capita gap between the US and the UK. And the UK is far from a collapsed nation.

And: in case you want to mention that the economy ain't everything. Yes, I totally agree. That's why my argument works in reverse: the economy can only function when the environment hasn't totally collapsed. Thus if leading experts project around a 20%-ish reduction in GDP, that means that the don't project a collapse in the environment.

As a sanity check: financial markets also don't seem to expect a collapse of the global economy anytime soon.
by iammrpayments | 2025-05-17 03:57:49+00:00
I work with Shopify apps, and we’re currently struggling with this because they enforce their design system to grant you a “Built for Shopify” badge that boosts trusts and listing rankings.

The problem is that to follow their design system, you have to turn a self explaining button into a full page with useless text, because they think your homepage should have an onboarding description to make users “excited to use your app”.

This is so company centric, no one will ever be excited to use your app, they just want to solve their problem and leave as fast as possible.
by TZubiri | 2025-05-17 03:59:30+00:00
"error, please clear and try again: Error code: 429 - {'type': 'error', 'error': {'type': 'rate_limit_error', 'message': 'This request would exceed the rate limit for your organization (67777b05-661c-4183-aa19-ec6e299f95ac) of 50,000 input tokens per minute. }}

This is a very bad idea buddy. Maybe try letting users set their API tokens.
Tell HN: What CPython Layoffs Taught Me About the Real Value of Expertise
by grandimam | 2025-05-17 03:59:59+00:00
The layoffs of the CPython and TypeScript compiler teams have been bothering me—not because those people weren’t brilliant, but because their roles didn’t translate into enough real-world value for the businesses that employed them.

That’s the hard truth:

Even deep expertise in widely-used technologies won’t protect you if your work doesn’t drive clear, measurable business outcomes.

The tools may be critical to the ecosystem, but the companies decided that further optimizations or refinements didn’t materially affect their goals. In other words, "good enough" was good enough. This is a shift in how I think about technical depth. I used to believe that mastering internals made you indispensable. Now I see that: You’re not measured on what you understand. You’re measured on what you produce—and whether it moves the needle.

The takeaway? Build enough expertise to be productive. Go deeper only when it’s necessary for the problem at hand. Focus on outcomes over architecture, and impact over elegance. CPython is essential. But understanding CPython internals isn’t essential unless it solves a problem that matters right now.
by landl0rd | 2025-05-17 04:00:19+00:00
Really? I get goofy random substitutions like sometimes from foreign languages. It also doesn't do good with my mini-tests of "can you write modern Svelte without inserting React" and "can you fix a borrow-checking issue in Rust with lifetimes, not Arc/Cell slop"

That doesn't mean it's worse than the others just not much better. I haven't found anything that worked better than o1-preview so far. How are you using it?
by landl0rd | 2025-05-17 04:02:53+00:00
I stole these graphs for a branch of that thread ffmpeg started on twitter. The one where they were flaming rav1d vs dav1d performance to attack Rust generally.

I don't like the RiiR cult. I do like smart use of a safer language and think long-term it can get better than C++ with the right work.
by qustrolabe | 2025-05-17 04:04:14+00:00
Some time ago I myself was in camp of people who preferred minimal web as opposed to all these "bloated" frameworks. But one thing that changed me is Tailwind, it improves the complicated stupid old way I wrote CSS classes so much that all people who keep hating it just because it's one of those "bloated" things of modern webdev are just ridiculous.

Then I tried React, quite liked it but preference for something as small and fast as possible lead me to Preact. And as I have no need for hosting websites with backend (I just want client-side interactivity so static pages) I found how to do prerender workflow where all necessary html is generated at build time and interactivity gets hydrated on top of that by bundled js module. It's so much better than trying to figure out pure js interactions in site made with static generator with some obscure templating.

Though for some reason people nowadays mainly focus on running site as SSR through Node rather than just hosting static pages and figuring out static build workflow in those frameworks can be very challenging.
by thundergolfer | 2025-05-17 04:05:03+00:00
It's not our only focus at Modal but it's a big focus![1] Code agents are the killer use case for LLMs right now, and this complements our GPU inference and training capabilities.

I'm quietly betting that agents increase the leverage of deterministic, reproducible devbox tech (eg. Nix, lockfiles, package mirroring), and this will end up being a huge win for us human engineers too.

1. https://modal.com/use-cases/sandboxes
by landl0rd | 2025-05-17 04:05:06+00:00
Probably but I am currently deep in the MLX weeds and finding out that though it's a well-designed framework it's much less mature in terms of example code you can steal where someone has already benchmarked the "best way" to do something.

My biggest hope for it is actually Haskell bindings believe it or not. Someone pointed out the other day its laziness makes it fit really well for that paradigm and the more or less pure-function approach to the compile graph helps too. ML in Haskell would be fun.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-17 04:05:35+00:00
> Your hypothetical 8 year old has one chance to get a cookie and had better be pretty articulate about it. This MIT-branded academic has a million other things going for them and can afford to slack off a bit on the presentation skills.

Nah, they also can explain how potential and kinetic energy works, talk about how many types of stars are out there and so on. Not hypothetical at all. They do like cookies, too!

> This MIT-branded academic has a million other things going for them and can afford to slack off a bit on the presentation skills.

Well, I posit in this case their 1st out of 1 million other worries was to sound credible, because they may be asked about their methodology. Staying consistent while making things up does take considerable amount of effort and the speech will suffer. Listen to the segment I point out and see how they act. They sort of pretended they didn't hear the question at first.
by bccdee | 2025-05-17 04:06:38+00:00
No, that's not true.

Quick, what's 51 plus 92?

Now: Did you think back to a time someone else added these numbers together, or are you doing it yourself, right now, in your head? I'm sure it's not the first time these numbers have ever been summed, but that doesn't matter. You're doing it now, independently.

Just because something isn't unique, doesn't make it derivative. We rediscover things every day.
by tptacek | 2025-05-17 04:07:19+00:00
There is no overarching system of international law, appearances to the contrary. The signatories to the Rome statute agree to assist the ICC in investigating and prosecuting cases, which may or may not involve citizens of Rome signatory countries. The ICC isn't magic. Most of the world's population resides in non-member countries. Unlike an ordinary domestic court, the ICC cannot compel testimony; it can't even host an adversarial hearing in situations (like this one) where both parties don't agree to the premise of the ICC's legitimacy.

We could get more specific about the limitations and legitimacy of the ICC, if you wanted to.
by landl0rd | 2025-05-17 04:07:29+00:00
I'm guessing it's a bit different since MLX/MPS doesn't have native 4-bit support (or even 8 if I remember correctly?) It didn't launch with bf16 support even. So I think the lowest you could go on the old type_k/v solution and apple GPUs was 16-bit f16/bf16 but not a llama.cpp internals expert so maybe wrong?
by godelski | 2025-05-17 04:09:56+00:00
Actually had a good real world example today. My TV had an update a month ago and since then most of the apps don't actually work. Netflix plays with like 3 pixels, Hulu just hangs. Luckily I use the TV as a monitor 99% of the time. But I think we all know how slow a lot of these systems get. Things getting slower over time... it works fine when things ship but like I suggested, issues build over time. One app here, another there, and before you know it you're buying a new TV, computer, phone, whatever
by gus_massa | 2025-05-17 04:10:26+00:00
I think calling it a "drive" will confuse a lot of people. I expected a device driver, and not technical people have no idea of drives, they just have documents and photos.

I tried with a text file

X Y 1 2 3 4

and for some reason the convert version has 1 2 3 4 in the same row.
by jaredklewis | 2025-05-17 04:10:55+00:00
> The real crisis is high debt loads in the private sector, not the government. Why? Because the government owns the currency it's debts are denominated in. There is zero risk the government couldn't pay it's dollar debts.

Right, but it isn't like the government controlling the money supply is some sort of get out of jail free card. If it was, why would the government even have debts? US could just pay off all the debt right now.

If the government starts printing money to pay interest on or pay off our $35+ trillion dollar debt, that will cause inflation, which is like a regressive tax. If the government doesn't start printing money, then a greater and greater share of our tax revenues go towards paying the interest. Neither of those outcomes seem particularly good to me.

Debts in the private sector have other downside like economic instability, but it seems to me that private sector lending is responsible for a lot of great economic developments (of course including our little VC funded corner of the world).
by refulgentis | 2025-05-17 04:13:44+00:00
I see, they can't figure out how to contribute a few lines of C++ because we have a link where someone says they can't figure out how to contribute C++ code only Go. :)

There's a couple things I want to impart: #1) empathy is important. One comment about one feature from maybe an ollama core team member doesn't mean people are rushing to waste their time and look mean calling them out for poor behavior. #2) half formed thought: something of what we might call the devil lives in a common behavior pattern that I have to resist myself: rushing in, with weak arguments, to excuse poor behavior. Sometimes I act as if litigating one instance of it, and finding a rationale for it in that instance, makes their behavior pattern reasonable.

Riffing, an analogy someone else made is particularly adept: ollama is to llama.cpp as handbrake is to ffmpeg. I cut my teeth on C++ via handbrake almost 2 decades ago, and we wouldn't be caught dead acting this way. At the very least for fear of embarrassment. What I didnt anticipate is that people will make contrarian arguments on your behalf no matter what you do.
Show HN: ResumeIQ – JD to Boolean Generator and Resume Matcher
by maxspyder | 2025-05-17 04:14:34+00:00
Built this for fun over 3 evenings — a small WebApp to extract keywords from JDs, generate Boolean queries, and match resumes. Drag-and-drop keyword groups, see match scores, and get suggestions to improve resume fit. Uses FastAPI + GPT-3.5 + simple frontend (HTML/JS via GPT from Figma). Would love feedback :)
by clickety_clack | 2025-05-17 04:14:38+00:00
I am a Canadian working in the US on TN status too (and yes, despite my opinion on it they call it a “status” not a “visa”). I can’t emphasize enough how light of a burden it is on employers to hire a Canadian on TN status. There’s no limit on the number of people who can come in, and it’s issued literally as you travel across the border.

The paperwork is very basic. It’s essentially just a letter signed by the employer that describes what you will be doing. I put it together myself, but an immigration lawyer can help you with it for a couple of hundred dollars if you need it. It’s issued at the border, you just tell the immigration/border guard that you’re getting a TN, then you go into the office, they review the paperwork and put a stamp on your passport. It took about 20 minutes when I did it in Toronto a couple of weeks ago.
by salimdabanca | 2025-05-17 04:15:45+00:00
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I’d love your constructive feedback; please give it a try if you have an iPhone! Click here to download Notato

Thank you for your time. Best regards, Salim

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by mindslight | 2025-05-17 04:18:21+00:00
It feels like these types of fundamental dynamics are the real underlying playing field here, and it needs to be shouted from the rooftops. Everyone keeps wondering what the Republicans' plan is for midterms, or in four years, for the obvious backlash when Trump's severe damage to our country becomes undeniable. As if we're merely going to have a "blue wave" that restores sanity [0], overcoming straightforward tactics like voter repression.

I think the actual goal is to destroy and sell off as much as possible of the government before then, turning what remains of democratic accountability into a noop - converting much of our society into foreign-owned "private property", making what core government functions remain effectively just hooks into unaccountable corporate services, and effectively cementing the corporate-authoritarian dystopia that we all thought we might have a chance of avoiding. We've been suffering the ratchet dynamic nibbling away at individual liberty for decades (alternating back and forth between corporate and government pushes), but I think "AI", cryptocurrencies, and filter bubbles have finally given these looters the gall to try kicking over the whole apple cart to divide amongst themselves.

[0] putting aside the whole Democrats talk a good game about chasing the corporate Road Runner but somehow never quite get him dynamic
by GianFabien | 2025-05-17 04:20:06+00:00
I strongly identify as an engineer. About a decade into my career I had a wake up call. In business it is all about money. First priority is to make money and second priority is to save money. That is what the P/L is all about. Unless your company's product is software, you are working for a cost-center and costs need to be managed (aka reduced as much as possible).

As a consultant, I focus on solving business problems. Technologies are the tools applied to realize the solutions. I believe that the path to career success is to develop deep domain knowledge in some industry and use your tech chops to deliver results.
Ask HN: What are the main reason(s) startups fail? How to circumnavigate?
by rblion | 2025-05-17 04:23:10+00:00
I asked Perplexity the first question and this is what I got. Now I'm curious how it compares to the HN community's real-life wisdom.

------------------------------------------------------- Main Reasons Startups Fail Within the First Five Years

Startups face a high failure rate in their first five years, with up to 70% not surviving this period. The most common reasons for these failures are:

• Lack of Product-Market Fit: The leading cause, with 34% of startups failing because their product or service does not meet a real market need.

• Cash Flow Problems/Running Out of Cash: About 16% of failures are due to running out of money or poor cash flow management.

• Poor Marketing or Lack of Market Demand: 22% of failed startups did not implement effective marketing strategies or failed to generate enough demand for their product.

• Team and Human Resource Issues: 18% of startups fail due to team problems, such as not hiring the right people or internal conflict.

• No Clear or Flawed Business Model: Many startups lack a sustainable business model or fail to plan for profitability.

• Failure to Adapt or Mismanagement of Growth: Not adapting to market changes or scaling too quickly without proper planning can lead to failure.

• Lack of Focus: Losing focus on core objectives and getting distracted by too many initiatives is a common pitfall.

• Operational and Legal Issues: Some startups fail due to operational inefficiencies, legal problems, or poor record-keeping.

These reasons often overlap, and failure is usually the result of several factors rather than a single issue. Addressing these core challenges is critical for startups aiming to survive and thrive beyond the five-year mark.