MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by miki123211 | 2025-05-21 16:11:54+00:00
Regex syntax helps you understand what a regex does, not necessarily why it does it.

You can't decompose it into parts, you can't give those parts human-friendly names, you can't re-use parts in other regexes, you can't (easily) write functions that return or manipulate regexes (like that "list with separator" function shown above).
by dblohm7 | 2025-05-21 16:11:56+00:00
The post should have included an asterisk next to cooperative multitasking: _Windows_ applications were cooperatively multitasked. DOS applications were run in V86-mode VMs that were preemptively multitasked.

As usual, there's a Raymond Chen post: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100517-00/?p=14...
by andix | 2025-05-21 16:11:57+00:00
I'm creating all those tiny shell helper scripts now with AI. One of the things AI is really good at.

prompt: create a bash command to sort a text file of ipv6 adresses per line. sort numerically (128 bit representation) but keep the full line as originally formatted

result:

while read -r ip; do printf '%032x %s\n' \ "$(python3 -c 'import ipaddress,sys; print(int(ipaddress.IPv6Address(sys.argv[1])))' "$ip")" \ "$ip" done < ipv6.txt | sort | cut -d' ' -f2-
by gjm11 | 2025-05-21 16:12:23+00:00
This submission is currently marked as [flagged] but I can't see what is supposedly wrong with it: it's an interesting article about an interesting idea, and while it's kinda politics-adjacent it's not the sort of party-political that tends to induce rage and stupidity, and the comments here seem pretty reasonable.

I guess there's a sizeable contingent of HN readers who don't want anything having anything to do with politics on HN, but I think some politics-related things -- including this -- fall into the category of "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
by angry_moose | 2025-05-21 16:12:54+00:00
I don't see any reason its not theoretically possible but I doubt it would be that beneficial.

You'd have to map the results back onto the traditional model which has overhead; and using shaky results as a precondition is going to negate a lot of the benefits, especially if its (incorrectly) predicting the part is already in the non-linear stress range which I've seen before. Force balances are all over the place as well (if they even bother to predict them at all, which its not always clear) so it could even be starting from a very unstable point.

Its relatively trivial to just use the native solution from a linear solution as the starting point instead, which is basically what is done anyway with auto time stepping.
by krisoft | 2025-05-21 16:13:14+00:00
:D Good point. I was thinking about unanimous votes and how they would leak information. Didn't want to over-complicate my comment, but I have a proposal for those too.

What I think we should do, is if the votes are close to unanimous as a matter of policy we report them only as "close to unanimous" without going into numbers. So for example if we have 100 delegates, and 95 voted for, and 5 against we just say "the vote was close to unanimous". And we do the same thing if the true vote was 100/0. All which would get published is that "the vote was close to unanimous", and the actual tally would get destroyed.

Maybe the threshold could be 10 people. So if the vote was 89/11 we would still publish that, but anything more one sided would just get reported as "close to unanimous" up to and including real unanimous votes.

It would still communicate the same thing: an overwhelming majority of delegates agreed on the thing being voted on. But would keep a fig-leaf of deniability for those who might otherwise be pressured.

That being said. I don't think people would vote unanimously on raising the minimum wage. Especially if the number of delegates is high (100 or above). You would get some people who either own a small business, or worry about the economy.
Ask HN: How are you using LLMs for research on a library of journal articles?
by jopizio | 2025-05-21 16:14:13+00:00
Does anyone have a nice setup for using LLMs to perform queries on their personal library of papers? It seems there are countless ways to do this sort of thing nowadays, but I can imagine that some approaches are far superior in terms of cost, speed, accuracy, etc. Are you using any of the proprietary solutions and getting nice results? Any ways to minimize privacy concerns while keeping things simple, ideally plugging something into my Zotero library?
by StackRanker3000 | 2025-05-21 16:14:20+00:00
I feel like it’s pretty clear that chabska was saying that China does more manufacturing per capita, creates more stuff, whereas the US captures more value.

If a paralegal at a fancy law firm works 9 billable hours at $200/h, and a senior partner then spends one hour adding some finishing touches for which he bills $2000, the paralegal has likely produced more work, but the partner’s output is more valuable (and sometimes it might not even be that useful, maybe the paralegal could’ve done the whole thing himself, but the oversight is part of the package and that’s what a senior partner costs).

Which metric is more useful probably depends on what you’re trying to find out.
by lhecker | 2025-05-21 16:14:42+00:00
That's a fair workaround for my specific example. But I believe it's possible to contrive a different example where such a solution would not be possible. Put differently, I only tried to convey the overall idea of what I think is a shortcoming in Rust at the moment.

Edit: Also, I believe your code would fail my second section, as the `convert` function would have difficulty accepting a `[u8]` slice. Converting `[u8]` to `[MaybeUninit<u8>]` is not safe per se.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-21 16:15:00+00:00
On the contrary, life peers have made it more obvious that non-political "talent" can be brought into the upper chamber, and people you'd never see out campaigning can bring their expertise to scrutinize legislation. "People's Peers" can't take a political whip, and there is more scrutiny over cash for peerages now than there ever was.

It's deeply flawed how the PM can appoint, and there isn't enough diversity, but they can pause legislation (if not actually stop it), to cause a rethink. That's happened most recently on the assisted dying bill. Many are glad it's happened because it's improved the outcome, albeit at the cost of a delay.

I do think there is a better way than the current system, but I'm not entirely sure I can describe it, yet.
Enrichx AI transaction and merchant enrichment
by ahmedashraftaha | 2025-05-21 16:15:13+00:00
Hey everyone! I’m part of the team behind enrichx.io, a platform we built to solve a problem we constantly saw in the fintech space: raw transaction data is messy, inconsistent, and borderline useless for real analytics or customer-facing experiences without heavy lifting.

So we built an API that enriches financial transaction data in real-time. It identifies the merchant, categorizes the transaction, and cleans up ambiguous strings like “POS 123456 CAIRO EG” into something readable and insightful (e.g., “Starbucks - Coffee Shop”).

Some cool stuff we’ve implemented: • Real-time enrichment with >95% accuracy • Local merchant recognition (especially useful in MENA) • Easy REST API integration • Scalable for banks, PFM apps, and analytics platforms

We’re already seeing great results with partners, and would love feedback or thoughts from the Reddit community. Whether you’re building a personal finance app, running data science at a neobank, or just curious about how this works — I’d love to chat or give you access to test the API.

Ask me anything — or hit me up if you want a demo!
by IG_Semmelweiss | 2025-05-21 16:15:13+00:00
I will make you a deal.

I will accept this premise of "choice" with 1 condition.

I will personally advocate for tariffs at 0% worldwide in 2030, if in the interim, ALL permits required to have or work as :

- an accredited university

- work in national security,

- or in university professors (economists!),

- accountant

- lawyer

- pharmacist

- insurance brokers

- any other white-collar profession, etc

Are rescinded. All of them.

So, anyone from abroad can open a university tomorrow, and get student loans, grants etc money. Or, anyone from china can come and become an accountant, if E&Y wants to hire them , either remotely, or in person. Up to E&Y.

Yes, those in person workers would use temporary (seasonal visas) for those jobs. So someone from China can come and teach econometrics at Stanford if Stanford wishes to hire them for 8 months (the undergrad season). Or someone can start a new Stanford in Bangalore, or whatever.

In other words. You don't need a license or some kind of permit to practice as a professor, or at a desk job at Raytheon.

Do you accept ?

My point. White collars are are protected by the state.

In the real world, i've come to learn that "free trade" doesnt actually mean "unrestricted free trade" .

Its just an excellent sleight of hand to say "free trade" when in the real world, the position you actually advocate is to sacrifice the have nots, while leaving the elites untouched
by nhecker90 | 2025-05-21 16:15:30+00:00
We just launched Big Idea Intel, an AI-powered reporting engine that turns public data into actionable IP intelligence — no uploads, no integrations, no friction.

In just 24 hours, you’ll get a full assessment of any company’s IP portfolio, including:

-Patent and trademark summaries -Trade secret and licensing insights -Competitive threats and whitespace -AI vulnerabilities and key person risk -Signals for investors, acquirers, and legal teams

We built this because traditional IP audits are too slow, too expensive, and completely inaccessible to most founders and investors.

This is meant for: Startups preparing for a raise VCs and PE firms doing diligence M&A teams screening targets Legal and IP advisors supporting growth strategy

We’d love feedback, especially from the HN community. Ask us anything or try it out — We made our 2025 Q2 NVIDIA Assessment report free on our website.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-21 16:16:05+00:00
> The whole discourse of "stochastic parrots" and "do models understand" and so on is deeply unhealthy [...] So instead we have lots of arguments where people project meaning onto very fuzzy ideas and the argument doesn't ground out to scientific, empirical claims.

I would put it this way: the question "do LLMs, etc understand?" is rooted in a category mistake.

Meaning, I am not claiming that it is premature to answer such questions because we lack a sufficient grasp of neutral networks. I am asserting that LLMs don't understand, because the question of whether they do is like asking whether A-flat is yellow.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-05-21 16:17:48+00:00
> they are able and willing to pay me a well-above median salary in exchange.

AI is what they're doing to try to stop this, when we work on AI we're enabling it.

They are making much more money for themselves than they are for you. Your salary is overhead. They will stop paying you if they can and they are trying to use AI to do it.

In a fair agreement you would have more time to spend with your family because you would earn a higher share of the profit and need to work less for it.
by ysavir | 2025-05-21 16:17:54+00:00
A Discover server's status isn't permanent. Any invite-only server can be into a discoverable, public server, and any public server can be taken private. The public/private distinction isn't a permanent reflection of access but is just a reflection of the current permissions. There's no guarantee that users in a public server were in a public server when they joined and engaged.
by chriswarbo | 2025-05-21 16:18:03+00:00
Using a git hash still has the problem of a co-worker's changes (which alter the git commit) causing an unrelated property to fail.

Hypothesis has a nice option, to pick the seed for each property by hashing that property's code. It's a nice idea, but relies on Python's highly dynamic nature; so may not be easy/possible in other languages (especially compiled ones).
by bluGill | 2025-05-21 16:19:00+00:00
If you lock your seed you are worse than unit tests - odds are you are not testing some interesting cases ever. The whole point of PBT is there are some properties that hold in all cases (well technically in the domain of the function inputs), so try random examples to see if I missed something. Generally the domain of all possible function inputs is a very large set such that exhaustive testing is impossible. The more different random seeds we try the better the odds we eventually catch some case that we didn't handle correctly.
by throwpoaster | 2025-05-21 16:19:09+00:00
I think this type of question is, roughly, backwards.

If you start by building a project _for_ some group of people you do it by talking to them, getting requirements, building, demoing, iterating, etc. Promotion, in this model, is a continuous process of community interaction. You're building distribution.

To build and _then_ begin promoting, which is how I have historically done it too, is to rely on marketing and advertising spend to define and drive a value prop for a market that is, hopefully, well-defined. You're buying distribution.

In that context, the answer in this case is to simply start talking about your project and showing it to people and asking for feedback (as you have done), and be conscious that what you're looking for is signals of user interest -- little sparks that you can convert into tiny flames so that you can start a fire.

Assume that you are still at user experience iteration zero. Everything you've done so far is sunk cost and still needs iterative user validation.
by treyd | 2025-05-21 16:19:37+00:00
Go is in a much worse situation here since the toolchain doesn't give you any help with C dependencies.

In Rust you can mostly just wrap the C library as a crate and the end developer doesn't need to care very much. If you want to use their system headers then you need to let them know, but that's not an issue if the headers are bundled. Cargo knows how to absorbs any C-built object files into the final binary and it just works.

In Go, in every scenario, the end developer needs to go through the effort of managing all the necessary the cgo calls when any of their dependencies use C libraries, the whole way up the dependency tree. It's really really not supported.
by brewtide | 2025-05-21 16:19:42+00:00
Similar here in Maine under CMP. Something like 12.5 cents/Kwh, but with the delivery aspect factored in it's basically 28 cents/Kwh.

I always assume when people on here are talking their 'rates', that they are usually NOT factoring in the delivery fee unless stated.

But maybe some places are just really THAT cheap.
by encom | 2025-05-21 16:19:45+00:00
How to fix ChatGPT:

System Instruction: Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user’s present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered — no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.
by Walf | 2025-05-21 16:19:51+00:00
Their reproductive lives are so drawn out that surely there's intense pressure to stay healthier for longer. They reach sexual maturity as late or later than us, gestate for at least twice the duration, care for their young for a long time, have relatively few offspring, and can keep going, sometimes, till their sixties. All that extra time to raise few children means evolution must select those who can keep ahead of attrition, and it's a marathon not a sprint.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-21 16:20:34+00:00
I'm not sure what you mean by "prevent". A TOS is a legal document designed to put down rules and a legal basis for the service.

I don't know what a "guild" is, if it's some Discord thing, and you don't say whether this is a good-faith human who joins, or a bot operator, intending to scrape. The hypothetical is irrelevant here; what is germane is that the expectation of privacy by the individual participants, and the terms which bind people who use that service.

The TOS clearly didn't prevent the use of API, but it may indeed prohibit such scraping, or threaten repercussions for people who break the terms, especially for someone who republishes the data. Your example of a simple download dump doesn't seem to involve republication, and that seems to be the major issue with scrapers.
by BugheadTorpeda6 | 2025-05-21 16:20:40+00:00
HackerNews is driven by a particular kind of radical libertarian philosophy believing person. You don't come up with the sorts of pump and dump start up ideas that typically come out of Y Combinator without being either sociopathic or delusional in the above way.

Anybody who thinks this place represents the average working or middle class programmer hasn't been paying much attention. They fool a lot of people by being social liberal to go along with their economic liberalism.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-05-21 16:21:10+00:00
Kind of makes me wish that there were recognizable shapes for primes bigger 2 (pair), 3 (triangle), 4 (square) and 5 (pentagon) that didn't just look like circles. Because my favorite part about this is how you can see at a glance what the factors are. Except for primes 7 or greater I find myself cheating and looking at the top left for which prime it is.

Is there some non-regular polygon that would be more distinctly recognizable to use for 7, 11, etc?
by taylodl | 2025-05-21 16:21:13+00:00
Betting against? No.

Going all-in? Also no.

What I've seen across several companies is they're familiarizing themselves with the technology and understanding how they may utilize it to enhance workflows, augment the productivity of existing staff, and even replace some staff.

It's wise for companies to start doing this assessment because the technology is poised to improve dramatically over the next 5-10 years and if you wait until then to start your analysis then it'll be too late: your competitors will be passing you by. You want to establish an AI impact analysis practice now because you're going to be turning the crank on that handle a few times over the next few years.
by terts | 2025-05-21 16:21:17+00:00
Hi! Author here. You could try but there are some fundamental limitations.

The biggest limitation is that we don't have access to the full type system of Rust. I don't think we can ever support registering generic types (e.g. you can register `Vec<u32>` but not `Vec<T>`) and you don't have access to traits. So it would work if you can reduce your API to concrete types.

Otherwise - apart from some missing features - you could probably write big chunks in Roto if you wanted to. You could also prototype things in Roto and then translate to Rust with some simplified types.

Also you'd have to accept that it gets compiled at runtime.
Ask HN: How to Make Friendster Great?
by ca98am79 | 2025-05-21 16:21:46+00:00
I bought the domain friendster.com because I loved the old Friendster and wanted to bring it back. I built a social network on the site and have started to invite people from the waitlist. I'd like to make Friendster great again - do you have ideas on what I should do?

I'd like it to be about connecting with and making new real friends. I'd like it to be positive and do something positive for people. I don't want it to have the addictive behaviors and negativity that are prevalent in current social networks.

It is currently self-funded.
Show HN: I built a tool that found me 1k users when my past launches got zero
by abilafredkb | 2025-05-21 16:22:19+00:00
I'm a technical founder who kept building products no one ever saw. After my third "ghost launch," I finally built something for my biggest pain point: not knowing how to market what I create. Smarketly is a marketing assistant that:

Finds actual potential users in specific communities Creates personalized outreach that works (no spam) Gives you step-by-step marketing plans based on your stage Generates content that sounds like you, not generic marketing

I've used it to grow from 0 to 1,000+ users without ads, and it's helped several other technical founders who were stuck in the "if you build it, they'll ignore it" trap.
by OutOfHere | 2025-05-21 16:22:44+00:00
That is pre-algorithm thinking, and that style of thinking has logically been obsolete since home computers came along in the 1980s. If the purpose of homework then is to get the students to devise a high-level algorithm for a text problem, then such homework shouldn't be tied to grades, and grades shouldn't be tied to a school year. It should be a continuous process for everyone at their custom pace. The simpler motivation then for them to practice, to do the homework by themselves, is to ultimately pass a test on-site at a testing center. If they pass, they move forward. If they fail, they remain stuck in place. With AI available, one doesn't need school to learn the basics. School is not free - people like me have paid taxes to fund its inefficiency.
by lolinder | 2025-05-21 16:23:25+00:00
That sounds like an enormous flaw in Discord's permission model, not something that should be patched over with "shame" on researchers for archiving data that Discord made public.

The fact remains that if you post something in a private discord channel that someone takes public, it's now public information. All these researchers did is expose that fact—the fact that private messages can later be made public is Discord's responsibility and Discord's shame.
by bluGill | 2025-05-21 16:23:40+00:00
When I searched for what does BGP mean, and DDG's LLM said "border gateway protocol". Even though I gave zero context and there are other possible meanings. The correct answer is probably something like "BGP can have multiple meanings depending on the context. The most common use of BGP is in networking where it means Border Gateway Protocol. If you provide more information on the context a better answer can be given." Or possibly it could link to the Wikipedia page.
by ndriscoll | 2025-05-21 16:23:40+00:00
Everywhere I've worked has been strictly on-prem for source code (even when using Github), but I imagine company lawyers get involved with any kind of SaaS procurement? Like as an individual I'm not authorized to agree to any terms with anyone on behalf of my company. I know I've been in sales calls with suppliers where we had to wait for NDAs to be in place on both sides before we could talk.
by ronsor | 2025-05-21 16:23:46+00:00
The authors can presumably update the dataset on the site; however, I think past versions remain. Besides that, the GDPR is at odds with the fact that public posts and data almost never goes away. I don't think that reality can be legislated away, try as politicians might.

In all honesty, it's better to reserve the effectiveness for private, personal data, for the sake of practicality.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-05-21 16:24:07+00:00
Maybe don't bag on an entire country without examining your own prejudices.

Nautical miles are used in this article by an aviation magazine presumably because they are the global standard for marine and aeronautical navigation, and have been since well before the metric system was a global standard. It is also worth noting that the US does not use nautical miles as a standard, they use statute miles.

FYI, nautical miles are a useful standard for global navigation since they are referenced to the size of the earth itself.