MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Am I making something people want? (OpenRouter with prompt A/B testing)
by stillatit | 2025-05-01 18:34:31+00:00
I've realized I spend a lot of time hardcoding LLM prompt tweaks and trying to determine their effectiveness from a bit of personal testing. I spend a lot of time fiddling and making not informed decisions.

I've been working on an API that runs one of X number of prompts, and can be sent back a good or bad score based on some user interaction. I can see which prompt wins and make them the dedicated prompt, or add new test ones.

This has been big for me, but does anyone else want this? I'll probably continue to scratch my own itch, but is it worth making it accessible with user accounts, billing, etc?

Lmk: https://form.typeform.com/to/WXibpEkA
by not2b | 2025-05-01 18:34:33+00:00
I'm now seeing this all over the place, and if it worked up to now then that's over. NK will just give people a recommended way of answering the question, and if they follow the script they won't get in trouble. Like perhaps, Kim who? Oh, the North Korean leader? Sorry, I have no idea. Further questions about NK can just be deflected with "I don't follow that stuff, sorry".
by Alupis | 2025-05-01 18:34:44+00:00
In my opinion, the spirit of open source goes beyond just tossing code over a wall for people to look at. In my opinion, it means accepting engagement from your users, their inputs and their contributions when/where warranted.

In my opinion, for something to be truly open source, I should be able to fix a bug I ran into, or implement a feature from the backlog and contribute it back upstream. If upstream is just going to ignore my contribution, pretend it doesn't exist, or reject it just because - then that codebase is just pretending to be open source.

That's not to say you are required to accept all contributions - I'm saying you should be open to contributions that A) save you time B) enhance the codebase or C) fix confirmed bugs.

In Microsoft's case - I don't see a lot of that going on. I see lots of Issues (bug reports), some PR's, but mostly opaque decision making, and complete silence on things the Corporate side of Microsoft doesn't want to comment on yet. Which is the beef - it's a corporate project run like it's proprietary but you can go look at the code. Again, better than nothing, but it's not really what I consider true open source.
by riehwvfbk | 2025-05-01 18:35:02+00:00
I guess there are military aptitude tests. And I am curious about which big companies administer an undisguised IQ test to applicants.

It appears that an IQ test can be administered if it can be argued that a certain score is required to do the job, and the test is not simply a way to discriminate. It sounds like a court case waiting to happen though: how does one prove what score is required? Easier if your defense is "we never administered an IQ test, tour honor".
by xpe | 2025-05-01 18:35:06+00:00
> Companies are revenue maximizers, period.

This explanatory model explains a lot of what companies do but not all. It is a useful first approximation for many firms.

Still, the conceit of modeling an organization as a rational individual only gets you so far. It works for certain levels of analysis, I will grant. But to build more detailed predictive models, more complexity is needed. For example, organizational inertia is a thing. One would be wise to factor in some mechanism for constrained rationality and/or “irrational” deviations. CEOs often move in herds, for example.

> The ones that aren't quickly get displaced by ones that are.

Theory, meet history. But more seriously, will you lay out what you mean by quickly? And what does market data show? Has this been studied empirically? (I’m aware that it is a theoretical consequence of some particular market theories — but I don’t think successful financial modelers would make that claim without getting much more specific.)
by mbrumlow | 2025-05-01 18:35:36+00:00
Sure. But I think the notion is that a huge group of people also had that same level funding and privilege, but did nothing with it.

Like why did these guys neighbors not end up billionaire. Or the other people in their class or school.

While they may have had some money it’s not like they took fathers 500 billion and turned it in to a nice 200 billion for them self.

They clearly did something different out of the very large common group they belonged to.
by anonymars | 2025-05-01 18:35:36+00:00
I agree with you. I feel like it becomes the nebulous question of, "how do you change a culture?"

Honestly I think part of that historically came from "shame", but that's certainly out of fashion these days, plus people can just go to their social media bubble to escape it.

I'm starting to think religion was a useful ingredient too: "because God said so" has its uses. "God doesn't want you to mix fabrics, eat pork, or use social media"
Show HN: Sheetdoku – A logic puzzle where Sudoku meets spreadsheets
by ymichael | 2025-05-01 18:35:43+00:00
hi! I've been working on a logic puzzle game called Sheetdoku and would love some feedback on it. The game is inspired by Sudoku and spreadsheet formulas and the puzzles use formulas like SUM, MIN, MAX, RANGE etc to constraint the 5x5 grid further.

Game Rules: - Fill the grid with numbers 1 through N. - Each number must appear exactly once in each row and column (similar to Sudoku). - The grid also includes regions with mathematical constraints that must be satisfied.

You can try it in the browser here: https://sheetdoku.com

Thanks for checking it out!
by joshstrange | 2025-05-01 18:35:47+00:00
I guess it will depend on your definition of "extinguish" and a few other things but:

gestures wildly at the MIT-licenced VSCode codebase

Yes, they are not rug pulling the VSCode source but by locking down the marketplace (and never giving a truly open source VSCode, what developers think of as "VSCode") they are in the processes of locking out forks.
by the_snooze | 2025-05-01 18:35:57+00:00
Silicon Valley itself came about in no small part due to direct government support: Fairchild Semiconductor selling chips for weapons targeting, ARPANET leading to the Internet, Sergei Brin and Larry Page's PhD's very likely funded by NSF and other federal funders.

And now you have Silicon Valley "leaders" looking to tear down the public institutions that seeded the place.
by wtallis | 2025-05-01 18:36:01+00:00
No, but I think it's incredibly naive and shortsighted to suggest that we should impose a legal requirement that any platform adopt such an obviously imperfect approach. Your memories of Windows Vista may have faded, but UAC prompts were certainly not rare when UAC first showed up, and they're still common enough to cause consent fatigue and undermine their effectiveness as a security measure.
by manmal | 2025-05-01 18:36:27+00:00
I‘m a heavy user and really happy with the speed and stability I‘m getting, running Linkwarden on my Hetner VPS. Only problem was in the beginning, importing a lot of existing links from Pinboard, the available RAM of my meager VPS was exceeded multiple times by metadata resolution. But once that‘s been overcome, it’s a zero effort tool.
by avinassh | 2025-05-01 18:36:34+00:00
this lwn article supports the argument that many cloud providers contributed back to Redis: https://lwn.net/Articles/966631

> It is also hard to reconcile the claims that cloud providers do not contribute with the actual commits to the Redis repository. A quick examination of the commits since the 7.0.0 release using gitdm shows 967 commits over that time period:

Top changeset contributions by employer (Unknown) 331 34.2% Tencent 240 24.8% Redis 189 19.5% Alibaba 65 6.7% Huawei 50 5.2% Amazon.com 50 5.2% Bytedance 19 2.0% NetEase 13 1.3%

> Binbin Zhu, of Tencent, is responsible for nearly 25% of the commits to the project. Some of the contributors without a readily identifiable employer surely are Redis employees, but it's clear that the company has not been working alone.
by bbartlomiej | 2025-05-01 18:36:42+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Dublin, Ireland | Remote only

I design and build real-time platforms, full-stack apps, and embedded systems - from cloud dashboards to drones. I've led engineering for a cloud-native analytics platform in regulated pharma (real-time visualization of plant data), developed autonomous delivery systems at Manna Aero, built BMC firmware for enterprise storage at NetApp and designed automated warehouse robots at Eiratech Robotics.

I also help startups go from zero to launch in a week - taking rough ideas and turning them into clean, performant, production-ready tools.

Looking for freelance work in early SaaS teams, integrations, infra-heavy builds, or high-conversion marketing sites.

What I bring:

• Full-stack product delivery (TypeScript, React, Next.js, Python, PostgreSQL, MongoDB)

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If you're building something ambitious (or just broken and messy), I can help.

Portfolio: https://www.bartekbaran.com

GitHub: https://github.com/BBato

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Fme-hI1aOzxM_t844pHHZQN08Hb...

Email: contact@bartekbaran.com
by ryandrake | 2025-05-01 18:37:06+00:00
Business education has taught everyone that spending $100 to earn $120 that you can live confortably on, is for suckers. The real goal is to then spend $80 to earn $200 the next year, and then spend $60 to earn $1000 the following year, and then to spend $40 to earn $10,000 the following year, and then to spend $20 to earn $100,000, and so on. Growth for no other purpose than growth.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-01 18:37:13+00:00
I'm not impressed with the complexity of Uber as a business, at least not to first order. You could hire out contractors in India to make a ride hailing app for $20k with maybe a 20% chance of success. Before Uber came out I knew people solving much more complex problems like routing a fleet of trucks to refill vending machines. I'd also say making a web site like AirBNB is not difficult at all -- being at ground zero for startups might have gave them a year and a half lead technologically.

Uber, AirBNB and such were really remarkable because they could fight city hall and cartels like taxis and hotels (for better and for worse.) Also those businesses have a huge amount of "dealing with bullshit" in the sense of the Uber driver assaulting a passenger, a passenger assaulting the driver, the people who have a party and trash your apartment, etc. If I'd tried to pitch businesses like that anywhere outside the bay area any investors would be like "are you kidding?"
by bpowell | 2025-05-01 18:37:54+00:00
NowSecure | Senior DevOps Engineer | US Remote | Full-time

We are leading in cutting edge mobile security and sponsor a number of open-source tools such as radare (https://github.com/radare/radare2) and Frida (https://github.com/frida/) that are widely used by security researchers. Unfortunately we can’t offer sponsorship at this time and candidates must be located in the continental US. We are looking to fill a senior devops position.

When applying please put in you found this on Hacker News!

=========== What we are looking for ===========

- You've done Kubernetes the hard way - or better yet, you know what it is, but you've spent more time working with Kubernetes in production than reading about it.

- You have development experience. We write code on top of the Kubernetes API so being able to dive deep into code is extremely valuable!

https://nowsecure.applytojob.com/apply/oiwPgGyOoR/Senior-Pla...
by dleary | 2025-05-01 18:37:58+00:00
“A Deepness in the Sky”, by Vernor Vinge. Excellent book, with a concept very close to this as an element.

You don’t need to read “A Fire Upon the Deep” first… the stories are more or less unrelated except for setting. (There is one character who is sort of in both, but going into detail about what that means would spoil it too much).

Both are excellent and worth the time. Skip the other Vinge books until you are sure you want to read everything he wrote, they are “merely” 8/10 instead of 10/10.

Vinge was a CS professor who really made sure everything “fit” together in his works. Although “A Fire Upon the Deep”, started in the late 80s and published in 1992, posits that civilizations much more advanced and capable than ours would be communicating primarily through something like Usenet, which feels a little quaint.

NB that Vinge was the one who popularized the concept of “the technological Singularity”. His books have interesting authors notes where he talks about coming up with ways to write about a far future when he believes that the Singularity is right on track for 2050-2100.
by preisschild | 2025-05-01 18:37:58+00:00
> Should I assume that this statement also applies to Redis?

I dont think it applies to clients using the API at all. It just specifies that the modified source should be offered to clients connecting over the API, but not that the client itself has to be open source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_Lice...
by Aloisius | 2025-05-01 18:38:03+00:00
This level of applicant checking at a financial institution does not inspire confidence.

At a previous remote job for a financial institution, they required a full background check with fingerprinting, reference checking, past employment verification, drug testing and in-person verification of identity and employment authorization. This was done for everyone, not just people they found "suspicious."

Frankly, the laws against applicant discrimination also makes having different processes or demanding different information from candidates because of national origin/ancestry/accent/etc. legally questionable.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-01 18:39:13+00:00
> Fortune 500 companies, including a top-five television network, a premier Silicon Valley technology company, an aerospace and defense manufacturer, an American car manufacturer, a luxury retail chain, and a US-hallmark media and entertainment company.

Wonder what those companies are, any guesses?

https://www.justice.gov/archives/usao-dc/media/1352191/dl

> JOHN DOE 1, alias 한지호 Jiho HAN (HAN), was an individual residing overseas who opened accounts with a foreign money service transmitter (“MST”) that conducts U.S. dollar transactions through a branch in New York (hereinafter “MST-1”). HAN would then forward the funds to an individual in the People’s Republic of China (“China”). HAN also received funds from CHAPMAN for an overseas IT worker that CHAPMAN first deposited into one of her U.S. financial accounts.

> JOHN DOE 2, alias 浩然 徐 Haoran XU (XU), was an individual residing overseas who registered for financial accounts with U.S. MSTs. XU provided his name, date of birth, and a Chinese National ID to U.S. MSTs to register for these accounts.

> JOHN DOE 3, alias 春姬 金 Chunji JIN (JIN), was an individual residing overseas who registered for financial accounts with U.S. MSTs. JIN provided her name, date of birth, and a Chinese National ID to U.S. MSTs to register for these accounts

Aha so it's not just NK, China is involved as well. I would guess the Chinese govt is quite happy to look the other way here.

> On or about November 15, 2022, CHAPMAN messaged with an overseas IT worker using the screenname “Alexander The Great” (“AT”), wherein AT asked 21 CHAPMAN for assistance creating a background story for a stolen U.S. person identity, “Daniel B.” AT noted that the real Daniel B. had a criminal record and employers were asking for more information as to what offenses were committed. CHAPMAN provided a cover story and asked “What information do you know about Daniel B[.]?? Do you know his race?” AT responded that the real Daniel B. was “a black man” but that he (AT) was Asian. AT then gave CHAPMAN his “real full name,” which was a Chinese name

"Alexander the Great" - one can image a poor child, wanted to be a history major, but through an ugly twist of fate, they ended up as a hacker stealing identities and having to solve leet code puzzles with ChatGPT /s
by ppenenko | 2025-05-01 18:39:26+00:00
I commiserate with your frustration with developers writing things suboptimally all too often. However, I disagree with the assumption that it's a JS/Python vs C issue.

Example: when VS Code came out, it was much, much faster, more responsive and stable than Visual Studio at the time. Despite being based on Electron, it apparently was much better on architecture, algorithms and multithreading than VS with its C++ and .NET legacy codebase. That really impressed me, as a C++ programmer.

Overall, it feels like folks who idealize bygone eras of computing didn't witness or have forgotten how slow Windows, VS, Office etc. used to feel in the 90s.
by wpm | 2025-05-01 18:39:39+00:00
> . If Apple really cares, they could provide a switch that allows users to disable installing "unverified" software.

This exists on the Mac. You can configure Gatekeeper to always allow unsigned executables and packages to run, and skip the "You should move this to the Trash it could damage your computer" BS prompts. You can only do this with a Configuration Profile.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-01 18:39:44+00:00
People who talked about how 24 and Jack Bauer showed that torture was good actually included a goddamned supreme court justice and I think the SecDef? The Bush Jr admin was openly fans of the show.

Oh, and the cast were invited to have a panel at a conference for the fucking Heritage Foundation!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P52G4Kyq5M A look at the 24 world and it's insane violence by Jon Bois
by Root_Denied | 2025-05-01 18:39:52+00:00
I think you have a good point, but I think the paradigm shift here is that people are chasing careers and money using LLM tools in a way that wasn't possible with calculators, and enforced differently within well-paying, white collar engineering professions.

For example, there's actual liability (legal and financial) involved in building a bridge that subsequently falls apart - not so with small bits of code block. Similarly there's a level of academic rigor involved in the certification process for structural/mechanical/etc. engineers that doesn't (and maybe can't?) exist within software engineering.
by daniel31x13 | 2025-05-01 18:39:52+00:00
> There aren't any examples in the demo site of this

This is because we haven't updated the demo to the latest version.

> but can it capture the highlighted text snippets and show them in the link details page?

That's a good idea that we might implement later, but at the moment you can only highlight the links[1].

[1]: https://blog.linkwarden.app/releases/2.10#%EF%B8%8F-text-hig...
by xp84 | 2025-05-01 18:40:02+00:00
I had a candidate who said he lived in San Francisco, so I asked him what neighborhood, and he responded "Uh, by the Golden Gate Bridge." Cool.

Later I looked more closely at the resume and saw some more red flags, like, he had a degree from "CA State University" -- like, which of the 23 CSUs bro?

We did have a couple fake people make it to the final round, the last one was cheating and still bombing -- I sent a picture to the guy who did the second-round interview like "is this the Jason Smith you interviewed?" and he said "Lol, no"
by ceejayoz | 2025-05-01 18:40:29+00:00
> A bacterial infection doesn’t care what we think it is.

Neither does autism.

> Anyway it feels almost like the crux of what you’re saying now is “cases of autism have increased because we define autism differently now”.

Yes. I've been saying that all along.

The increase in case numbers - and the inferred conclusion that something environmental has changed to cause that - is an illusion.

See also: CVEs per Pope. https://infosec.exchange/@SecurityWriter/114397760184324654 "Autism epidemic" is like claiming Pope Francis is responsible for a huge rise in insecure code.
by hajile | 2025-05-01 18:40:39+00:00
Then we should just eliminate all the laws and instead pass one law that says "don't be evil" and just let the judges/juries make it up as they go.

The truth is that you don't believe your own argument. You want LOTS of laws specifying all kinds of unacceptable behaviors in great detail. You only differ from me in where that line should be drawn.
by tracfox | 2025-05-01 18:40:45+00:00
Tracfox | Software Engineer | REMOTE (UK) | Full-Time/Flexible

Tracfox is building an AI-native compliance platform focused on financial markets and regulatory compliance automation. We are an early stage start-up, looking for software engineers to join our technical team as we bootstrap our product development and grow the company from scratch.

We believe in elegant design and clean code, and are seeking to build a culture focused on kindness, collaboration, and technical excellence, while avoiding office politics, unnecessary meetings, and corporate BS. We want to work with friendly and clever people, build interesting things, and share our successes across a hard-working team.

Current stack:

* Backend - Python (FastAPI, Pika, LangGraph)

* Frontend - Typescript (React, MUI, Vite)

* Infrastructure - Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis, OpenSearch

We are remote first, accommodate flexible working, and can offer both salary and equity.

Email: whoishiring[at]tracfox.com
by lolinder | 2025-05-01 18:41:05+00:00
It's a win for the community over and against the corporations that are Redis and Elastic. They're not the good guys for giving in to the pressure. They tried to ride FOSS to prominence and then extract wealth on the backs of the community and found that the community mattered more than they did.

So sure, let's celebrate, but celebrate the community, not those who tried to pull the rug out from under them.
by dtnewman | 2025-05-01 18:41:11+00:00
> the fact that their empires are now all they'll ever be

Eh, Mark Zuckerberg is 40. Facebook is planting seeds in some pretty ambitious places (VR/AR + AI). To put that into perspective, Elon Musk is 53 now, but he was ~40 when the Falcon 9 first launched for SpaceX and the Model S was released at Tesla. In June 2012, when the S was released, Tesla was worth about 0.7% of what it is now. Elon Musk was certainly rich, but no where close to the wealthiest folks at the time. Similarly, at 40 years old (21 years ago) Jeff Bezos was worth about 100th of what he is now. Rich, but it wasn't clear that Amazon would ever come close to, say, Walmart, in terms of market cap.

Mark Zuckerberg's empire still has plenty of time to grow.
by weinzierl | 2025-05-01 18:41:13+00:00
If you do not enable "Web Search" are you guaranteed it does not access the web anyway?

Sometimes I want a pure model answer and I used to use Claude for that. For research tasks I preferred ChatGPT, but I found that you cannot reliably deny it web access. If you are asking it a research question, I am pretty sure it uses web search, even when "Search" and "Deep Research" are off.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-01 18:41:19+00:00
By the time someone gets to the on-site interview, the job should be "theirs to lose." You wouldn't be spending the cost of an on-site trip for every candidate that shows some promise during the distance interviews--you'd do it for those very few you're ready to give offers to already, but just want to double check a few in-person soft-skills things (and now, want to double check that he is who he says he is).