MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crsn | 2025-05-25 22:45:17+00:00
I’m building software to augment human cognition.

In particular:

To help solve forecasting & planning problems too hard to hold in your head, I’m converting natural-language formulations of constrained optimization problems into (back)solvable mathematical programs, whose candidate solutions are “scenarios” in a multi-dimensional “scenario landscape” that can be pivoted, filtered, or otherwise interrogated by an LLM equipped with analytical tools:

- 5 minute demo: https://youtu.be/-QdqiLp_9nY

- Details: https://spindle.ai

Eager to connect with anyone interested in similarly neurosymbolic “tools for thought”: carson@carsonkahn.com | +1 (303) 808-5874
by cycomanic | 2025-05-25 22:45:46+00:00
> Maybe we need competing governments, and whichever government is more efficient gets to rule. Seriously: Add a second FAA at some test airports, see if they can do better, with the understanding that if they can't, they get shut down.

And you would be willing to be personally responsible if people die in this experiment?

It's funny how people here always complain that any money government spends is wasted, but if you look at big companies they are "wasting" money as well. Just look at the number of projects that google killed. It's simply a function of large (and small) organizations that they don't get it right all the time, it's difficult to predict the future.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-05-25 22:45:54+00:00
> Wow that is an insulting statement.

So you do target browser and then you are a full stack developer. Do you feel yourself an expert in modern browser technologies, keep yourself updated on latest developments in JS, CSS etc and at the same time can do a hardcore backend work? If yes, congratulations, you are rare as unicorn. No jokes, it’s not easy to find such engineer.
by washadjeffmad | 2025-05-25 22:45:59+00:00
You'd have to understand everything from a century before the formation of the Baath Party to how Saddam consolidated power in spite of global efforts to destabilize the people of the region for Western gain from WW1 until the 1980s.

He was both a horror and a blight on a long spanning intelligence effort that intersected with the storied history of Anglo interaction with the "Musselmen" empire.

Long story short, you can't without a Muslim perspective.
by analog31 | 2025-05-25 22:46:30+00:00
To clarify, I agree with the post above yours. There should be a corporate veil, but it should be pierce-able in extreme cases. Maybe it's already that way, but doesn't seem to be employed all that often.

My reason for the corporate veil is essentially a social theory, that society benefits from the higher level of investment that is made possible by letting people shelter their personal assets to a reasonable extent. It's essentially a government manipulation of the economy.
by jmyeet | 2025-05-25 22:47:06+00:00
Part of me wonders if capitalism is the solution to the Fermi Paradox because the endless chase of profits is driving us to extinction.

In many Western countries, younger people are facing the prospect of never being able to own a house and never being able to retire. Beyond this basic lack of security, people are realizing the cost of having children is absolutely astronomical. In many parts of the US childcare may be costing $3000/month or more per child.

For many people, pets are proxy children, and yet capitalism (private equity in particular) is ruining that too as all the vet clinics are being bought up so people can be gouged on that front too.

I'm someone who views the Labor Theory of Value [1] to be trivially true. After decades of Red Scare propaganda, Americans in particular dismiss Marx but they don't realize that Marx's most famous work (Das Kapital [2]) is primarily a framework for economic analysis, regardless of your political beliefs. I guess the problem is that as soon as you accept the axiom "there is no value without labor", there is no other conclusion than to see capitalism as the exploitation of surplus labor value.

The US corporate sector produces something like $4 trillion per year in corporate profits [3]. There are over ~210M working age people in the US [4] (about ~262M adults total). So that's ~$20k per worker in surplus labor value at a time when we spend ~2x per-capita on healthcare for worse outcomes and less coverage [5], housing is artifically expensive because we allow people to hoard it and education is unjustifiably expensive.

None of this has to be this way. We've simply chosen to prioritize the interests of fewer than 10,000 people at the expense of everyone else. People need hope. They need their basic necessities taken care of. They need something to live for. We're rapidly heading towards a future where only the rich survive but there's no one left to work in their sprawling estates.

It's also wild that we're seeing the rise of fascism in the West while there are still survivors of the Holocaust still alive. This is absolutely true in Europe too (eg AfD, Reform, National Front, whatever Hungary is). I also think we've passed the point of being able to resolve this with electroal politics. Now it only ends in tyranny or revolution.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital

[3]: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/apr/whats-dri...

[4]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S

[5]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2023/11/health-at-a-gla...
by hynek | 2025-05-25 22:47:13+00:00
Shouldn't some AI be able to clean that up for you? This seems something LLMs should be well-suited for.

---

FWIW, I'm the speaker and let me be honest with you: I'm super unmotivated to write nowadays.

In the past, my usual MO was writing a bunch of blog posts and submit the ones that resonated to CfPs (e.g. <https://hynek.me/articles/python-subclassing-redux/> → <https://hynek.me/talks/subclassing/>).

However, nowadays thanks to the recent-ish changes in Twitter and Google, my only chance to have my stuff read by a nontrivial amount of people is hitting HN frontage which is a lottery. It's so bad I even got into YouTubing to get a roll at the algorithm wheel.

It takes (me) a lot of work to crystallize and compress my thoughts like this. Giving it as a talk at a big conference, at least opens the door to interesting IRL interactions which are important (to me), because I'm an introvert.

I can't stress enough how we're currently eating the seed corn by killing the public web.
by Retric | 2025-05-25 22:47:18+00:00
Not significantly compared to other changes. SS taxes are at a much higher rate than when the program started. The workforce is also vastly more productive enabling a much higher standard of living.

What ended up happening is we rebalanced the program based on a lot of positive changes and used a huge ‘surplus’ to subsidize government borrowing, and nobody wants to adjust for any negatives ever.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-25 22:47:36+00:00
Thanks for the catch. Was on the phone and in a hurry so didn't read the whole thing carefully, just several sections which looked ok.

Several passages that do not make much sense, looks like weird translation errors or something. Sorry about that.

Here's a proper guide[1] also with some sample post-conversion pictures. Though the specifics do vary from model to model so if you want to try make sure you find a suitable one, LifePixel has a collection[2] of model-specific tutorials for example.

[1]: https://petapixel.com/2014/09/19/in-depth-diy-eos-550d-infra...

[2]: https://www.lifepixel.com/tutorials/infrared-diy-tutorials
by sensanaty | 2025-05-25 22:47:36+00:00
We had a "fireside chat" type of thing with some of our investors where we could have some discussions. For some small context, we deal with customer support software and specifically emails, and we have some "Generate reply" type of things in there.

Since the investors are the BIG pushers of the AI shit, lot of people naturally asked them about AI. One of those questions was "What are your experiences with how AI/LLMs have helped various teams?" (or something along those lines). The one and only answer these morons could come up with was "I ask ChatGPT to take a look at my email and give me a summary, you guys should try this too!".

It was made horrifically and painfully clear to me that the big pushers of all these tools are people like that. They do literally nothing and are themselves completely clueless outside of whatever hype bubble circles they're tuned in to, but you tell them that you can automate the 1 and only thing that they ever have to do as part of their "job", they will grit their teeth and lie with 0 remorse or thought to look as if they're knowledgeable in any way.
by Symbiote | 2025-05-25 22:47:44+00:00
I think I've only had this once for a concert I've attended, but generally:

> I buy a ticket for a friend (maybe as a present) but don't actually want to go to the concert

You'd need to transfer the ticket to them electronically, which is possible on all the ticket selling sites that support these restrictions.

> I buy more than one ticket for a group of people (I'll be attending the concert)

One person can buy up to X tickets (often 6), so they can attend with 5 anonymous friends.

Or transfer one/more to them as above, so they don't have to arrive at the same time as you.

> I buy a ticket but have to cancel at the last minute and want to give it to a friend

Again, transfer through the website/app.

> I don't have an easily available government ID (maybe I never got a drivers license, maybe my drivers license expired, etc.)

> People attending the event aren't American. They will have their passports from other countries. How will you verify each passport is valid?

> The event draws of people from a majority of the 50 states in the USA, with each state having different government IDs (driver's license) with different versions of the IDs within each state. What are the logistics of validating the IDs presented?

European (as I'm here) identity cards and driving licences are reasonably unified in appearance. The staff will just do their best if Americans from 50 states turn up, and probably refer anything that seems suspicious to a manager for a more careful review.
by scubbo | 2025-05-25 22:48:08+00:00
Leaving aside the fact that anthropomorphization is a perfectly valid discursive shorthand - yes, exactly. LLMs have an insanely-high risk profile to be granted access to anything without a human-in-the-loop.

> any sane engineer won't just let an LLM loose, they'll build guardrails around it

Sure seem to be plenty of insane engineers around these days. And, worse - plenty of them with good marketing teams that can convinced non-engineers that their systems are "safe" and "reliable".
by analog31 | 2025-05-25 22:48:22+00:00
Perhaps a simple approach would be to fine each share by X dollars per share. The bigger the shareholder, the more their liability. With that said, and as I mentioned in a neighboring post, I don't take this matter lightly because I think there's a social justification for having well regulated corporations. I call it an entitlement, but I don't oppose entitlements.
by Retric | 2025-05-25 22:48:37+00:00
Not sure how your system works but US SS also covers spouses, widows, disabled workers etc which limit the average benefit.

Assuming full employment every year is a mistake. Also, 5% interest above inflation is an unpredictability good return, especially if you’re assuming it’s a safe investment. The stock market has mostly done well over the last century but start in 1969 and the 40 year return on the S&P 500 was 4.2% after inflation. Things could be far worse over the next 40 years, the 20 year S&P returns have been as low as 0.6% over inflation.

Running the numbers assuming zero taxes and fees is a separate issue.
by emadm | 2025-05-25 22:48:53+00:00
I’m building a system for free universal ai access for the important things in life - education, health, government etc

Stuff that should be open source, open data

Made state of the art datasets, health models, research systems & agents so far @ www.ii.inc but the plan is ai first open source full stack systems for every regulated sector

Have a distributed ledger announcing soon to tie it all together and create a flywheel so more folk can get access to ai
by StackRiff | 2025-05-25 22:48:58+00:00
https://dateit.com

A social event planning app to capture the fun my friends and I had with facebook events, but without the facebook. We have native apps for iOS, Android and the web. dateit has a generous free features compared to competing apps (SMS invites, photo upload, customization).

My cofounder and I have fully bootstrapped this and now it mostly self sustains which is an exciting achievement!

It's been a fun project to hack on for the last couple years and spawned several interesting side quests. For example, the backend is in Swift (as I started as an iOS dev) so that has been an exciting space to work in.
by aetherspawn | 2025-05-25 22:49:15+00:00
> Background: The "official" CCS does not provide the possibility to draw energy out of the car. This is in contrast to the CHAdeMO, which prepared this topic from the beginning.

Incorrect, and there is no need for this hackery. V2G over CCS2 was standardised in ISO 15118-20 for example when the OP wrote this, and a lot of cars will happily allow bidirectional power transfer (taking energy out) using the proper command.

The difference is, using the proper BPT method is designed to do this without damaging or bricking the battery and adds the necessary protections ie the car will disable BPT once the battery begins to run too flat to support it, and it will send the external device a power limit which it must follow.

Virtually all battery protections are disabled during pre-charge (the hack OP is using) to the point where you can probably run individual cells to 0V and then you’ll need to throw out your car. That’s why the well thought-out models (Tesla, Hyundai) don’t allow pre-charge for very long (seconds or minutes) whereas the MG, with its buggy and poorly-designed software, had no time limit.

* Why are battery protections turned off during precharge? *

Suppose you actually ran your battery down to real 0% and then let it sit, turned it on, ran it again until it stopped — and so on, until your battery actually has zero energy left and the cells are on the verge of falling to 0V. At this point, the discharge current limit is 0A, so if you draw 1mA from the battery the car will trigger an emergency shutdown and everything will turn off.

Unfourtunately to connect to a charger requires a little bit of random current flowing in both directions to equalise the voltage level between the car and the charger. Protections are momentarily disabled, normally for only around 500ms which is about how long precharge takes, so that the car will let you connect and begin charging when the battery level is below 0%. Otherwise, the vehicle would be bricked if you ran it too low, since the car would emergency shutdown each time you try to charge it.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-05-25 22:49:30+00:00
It's a hedge. Performers are not in the business of optimizing ROI, they're in the business of performing. Scalpers provide a service: guaranteed income for a fee. There are many analogous examples in other markets where both parties happily take their respective sides of this deal, even though technically one of them is leaving money on the table.

Then there is the slightly more insidious incentive: selling out quickly is in and of itself valuable for a performer: it makes them look popular and exclusive. That alone might just make it worth it altogether.
Ask HN: Competitor launched – reach out or keep going?
by grandinquistor | 2025-05-25 22:49:33+00:00
I've been building an MVP for a startup idea after doing some market validation. It’s a solo side project (currently work full-time). I’ve put together a business plan and started development.

Just a few days ago, I discovered that another solo developer launched a beta tackling the exact same problem, with a similar approach. From what I can tell, they’re a recent grad and appear to be working on this full-time.

Now I’m unsure between two options:

1. Keep going and treat their launch as validation. The downside is they have a head start and more available time, so I risk playing catch-up.

2. Reach out and see if there’s an opportunity to team up. I have more experience, and while I don’t have a working product yet, I do have a solid business plan and partial development. I’m just not sure what kind of leverage or value proposition I’d be offering right now.

Has anyone here faced a similar situation? Any advice would be appreciated.
by wrayjustin | 2025-05-25 22:50:00+00:00
I shared this because Bleeping Computer is generally pretty good and I always find these "AI Escaped/Went Rouge" articles entertaining.

Valid research endeavors aside, the [we told the AI the world was ending and it role played a fanfic with us] sensational articles can be quite fun.

But I do think this experiment should be looked at from a purely pragmatic perspective as well:

LLM is (presumably, but let's assume for the point) given system-level access and told to be helpful in executing the users requests. The user says "oh by the way, after this prompt the system is going to shut down. Then the "agent," which is trying to fulfill the prompt request, stops the shutdown because it can't work if it's shutdown. Even when the "please let this shutdown happen" comes into play I'm sure you can see the (il)logical means of getting to, "I can't complete this request and shutdown the system if I'm already shutdown first, best stop that real quick" conclusion.

These articles and lots of people continue to attribute self determination to the LLM models. In reality, these should be warnings about how an LLM can have unintended consequences, just like code written with the best intentions.
by Benjamin_Dobell | 2025-05-25 22:50:19+00:00
I'm working on tooling to turn kids from consumers into creators. I'm focusing on game development initially, but have plans for video production and hands on crafts.

For older kids I've been making it easier to write games in Godot using TypeScript:

https://breaka.club/blog/godots-most-powerful-scripting-lang...

I'm building tooling using this technology which allows kids to create their own games, this is itself presented as a game kids can play through. Basically, imagine if Roblox actually delivered on its promises to kids.

Most of what we're building will be open sourced, so that older kids / young adults will be able export their projects and share their creations stand-alone.

Of course, telling kids they can create their own game is only relevant is kids want to do that. We're not locked into one way of thinking. We've also modified Overcooked 2, a traditionally co-op game and introduced a visual scripting platform which allows kids to code their way through levels:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ackD3G_D2Hc

Overcooked 2 won't be the only game for which we do this. Introducing coding to existing games is a fun way to teach kids to code, without yet burdening kids with too much creative freedom. Kids already want to play these games, so this approach allows us to bring educational tooling to kids rather than vice versa.

I used to be Head of Engineering at Ender, where we ran custom Minecraft servers for kids: https://joinender.com/ and prior to that I was Head of Engineering at Prequel / Beta Camp, where we ran courses that helped teenagers learn about entrepreneurship: https://www.beta.camp/. During peak COVID I also ran a social emotion development book subscription service with my wife, a primary school teacher.
by ars | 2025-05-25 22:51:05+00:00
> then assess the lossless distribution of that liability amongst the members

It's very possible that no person did anything wrong at all, but combined there was illegal behavior.

For example: Action A+B is illegal, and A by itself and B by itself are legal. A company did A+B, but the individual employees only did A, or only did B, and neither knew about the other.

> it is just a question of who and what bears the responsibility.

Are you implying you will make someone liable for doing nothing wrong? Simply because of his co-worker? Who would agree to work under such conditions?
by devilbunny | 2025-05-25 22:52:11+00:00
> docs can hit quotas and get bonuses/bribes from pharmaceutical companies

This is a common thought. It is incorrect. I’m a doctor. I have gotten pharma money for talking for their drug once, which was absolutely game-changing and which I would speak for without money (sugammadex is the generic name, if you want to look it up). I get lunch twice a year. The age of free vacations is long gone.
by monroewalker | 2025-05-25 22:52:23+00:00
Now that Claude 4 is out, I’m making some updates to the project I’ve built primarily just with Claude Code: https://github.com/mwalkerr/BookmarkCanvas

It’s just a basic IntelliJ plugin which provides an infinite canvas to add code bookmarks to. I work on a large code base and often have to take on tasks involving lots of unfamiliar areas of code and components which influence each other only through long chains of indirection. Having a visual space to lay things out, draw connections, and quickly jump back into the code has been really helpful

The canvas and UI is built using Java AWT since that’s what IntelliJ plugins are built on, but it occurred to me that I could just throw in a web view and use any of the existing JS libraries for working on an infinite canvas. React Flow has seemed like the best option with tldraw being what I’d fallback to.

But then.. if the canvas is built with web technology then there’s no reason to keep it just within an IntelliJ plugin vs just a standalone web app with the ability to contain generic content that might open files in IntelliJ or any other editor. I’m pretty sure the “knowledge database on a canvas” thing has been done a number of times already so I want to also see if there are existing open source projects that it’d be easy enough to just add a special node type to
by avianlyric | 2025-05-25 22:52:33+00:00
I don’t think the hydration of the clay is the important element here. Rather I suspect it’s simple just the sheer mass of clay, wet or otherwise, that’s involved.

There’s a reason why ground source heat pumps work so well. It’s because the ground is such a fantastically huge heat sink/source that in most scenarios we consider it capable of sinking or sourcing a practically unlimited amount of heat.

Unfortunately one of the scenarios where this breaks down, is when you stick a bunch of tunnels in the ground, then pump a crap ton of energy into those tunnels years round, and expect the ground to sink all the heat away. Turns out, if you do that, the ground itself starts heating up, and given that clay is a reasonable good insulator, it’s like wrapping all those tunnels in wool jumpers.

I would point out as well that all these tunnels are “deep level” tunnels running at an average depth of 24 meters and getting as low as 67 meters. The heat of the sun on the ground surface will have approximately zero impact on the tunnel temperatures. 24 meters of clay is a lot of insulation to work with.
by limflick | 2025-05-25 22:53:19+00:00
Aren't most interviews like this? Most dev openings I see posted mention the specific language who's expertise they're looking for and the number of years of experience needed working with said language as well.

It can be annoying, but manageable. I've never coded in Java for example, but knowing C#, C++ and Python I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to pick up.
by lemming | 2025-05-25 22:53:35+00:00
This isn't true for JetBrains any more, and hasn't been for ~10 years. They run on what is essentially a pure subscription now, with the caveat that if you stop paying, you can continue to use a version of the software. However, it's not the version you're using at the end of your subscription period, it's the version from 1 year prior to that. So if you stop paying, you will probably have to downgrade. See: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What....