MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by latexr | 2025-05-02 15:09:08+00:00
> Recall the discussions during Covid of Sweden's approach to lockdowns.

I don’t recall those. Do you have a link? Preferably more than one, since there’s bound to have been more than one discussion.

Every time I’ve seen someone giving examples of HN agreeing on a stance of some contentious topic, I went back to the discussions and could find plenty of comments supporting either side.

Nevertheless, one example doesn’t prove a rule, and agreement on one subject doesn’t demonstrate a hive mind. I’m feeling confident that if a Flat Earth topic were to be posted, most people here—like most people in the rest of the internet and the world—wouldn’t agree with it.

Furthermore, there have been plenty of issues which have been flagged in which I disagree with the flagging, and they still contain plenty of conversation supporting either side. Sometimes it’s even reposted at a later point and it becomes a highly-voted front page article. It often depends on the day and time something is posted. There are simply too many humans on HN.
by Ygg2 | 2025-05-02 15:09:11+00:00
> switching to Rust + Unsafe will only reduce but not eliminate those issues

Except in practice the code written in Rust experiences no safety issues[1].

I've seen this argument before a million times it is one part FUD (by making actual memory issues bigger than they are) one part Nirvana fallacy (argments that make so Java isn't memory safe because it will have to call into C).

[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-research2023-media/pubto...

> is actually worth it compared to other efforts to improve memory safety in C

As I aluded before, I am sure Linux Kernel Maintainers are aware of sel4. Which begs the question, why they didn't do it? It's in C, proves everything, and solves even more than Rust, why isn't it in kernel?

I'm going to hazard a guess, the effort of going full proof for something like Linux would be through the roof. You would need lifetime of LKML dedication.
by m-s-y | 2025-05-02 15:09:11+00:00
> Most customers are probably going to assume your a con artist if you don't use the official IAP.

and this is apple’s reasoning for why their strict control over the app store is warranted. they want it to be seen as trusted and infallible and that can’t happen if 3rd parties have free reign.

for me, the correct way forward isn’t external referrals. it’s allowing multiple app stores on devices. if you don't want the “untrusted” 3rd party store with more lax dev rules than Apple’s, just don’t use them.
by mystified5016 | 2025-05-02 15:09:37+00:00
Cute. This is one of those websites that disables selecting text.

They explain that the DC injection must be scaled down to keep current through the neutral conductor at safe levels when the AC is under load.

That's worse than useless. Nobody wants their lights to dim when they plug in a toaster. Most people would rightly assume that's a dangerous overload condition and their wiring is faulty.

All DC loads must be capable of actively responding to DC brownouts without spiraling the system to collapse. That means every single item on your DC bus needs complex electronics and software. Every lightbulb every phone charger, every widget must be able to safely handle unpredictably variable levels od DC power and all loads need to agree on what they're doing so that no one device sees the voltage creep up and suddenly draw more power than is available.

I don't think this concept is at all feasible.
by ammmir | 2025-05-02 15:10:23+00:00
Location: Bangkok, Thailand

Remote: Yes (unless local to BKK, or somewhere nearby like Singapore)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust, Lua, JavaScript, Next.js, OpenResty, Nginx, PHP, Docker, Podman, CRIU, Linux namespaces, Firecracker, Express, Deno, Bun, Node.js, HTTP, X.509, TLS/SSL, SMTP, OAuth, OIDC, JWT, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, MySQL, AI agents, LLM, RAG, vector databases, FastAPI, MCP, Streamlit, ELK, Terraform, OpenTelemetry, DevOps

Résumé/CV: https://amirmalik.net/resume

Email: amir@amirmalik.net

Hey HN! I'm a seasoned software professional with 15+ years of experience across the stack, from low-level systems and protocols to web and mobile apps to modern AI/LLM/agentic workflows. I like solving real business problems using the latest tools, without introducing too many shiny new toys.

If you want a taste of how I think and work, check out this blog post I wrote on building secure code sandboxes for LLM agents: https://amirmalik.net/2025/03/07/code-sandboxes-for-llm-ai-a... -- also, I'm building a self-hostable, open-source sandboxing server based: https://github.com/ammmir/sandboxer -- Show HN coming soon!

I'm looking for short-term consulting gigs (open to long-term), so whether you're looking to prototype something new in order to catch the AI hype train, or something more traditional, please reach out ASAP!
by hackbotone | 2025-05-02 15:10:46+00:00
A Kafka Manager is a Python utility class that simplifies Kafka interactions by providing a high-level abstraction for managing Producers, Consumers, and Topics. It provides a user-friendly interface for developers to implement Kafka effectively in their applications, encapsulating the complexity of the Kafka-python library. This abstraction allows quicker development and more manageable maintenance of Kafka-related applications.
by tuyguntn | 2025-05-02 15:10:58+00:00
You forced me to stand up and write the code. Here is your cross-platform desktop app in 10 lines, pretty sure others can do better than me:

package main import ( "fyne.io/fyne/v2/app" "fyne.io/fyne/v2/widget" ) func main() { w := app.New().NewWindow("One Button App") w.SetContent(widget.NewButton("Do Nothing", func() {})) w.ShowAndRun() }
by surgical_fire | 2025-05-02 15:11:15+00:00
Eh, US is threatening to annex Greenland, part of Panama and Canada, which may be more relevant for EU actually.

I can produce quite a list of human rights violations from the US too, if we are playing this game.

I was not trying to paint China as a happy friendly country. I was just saying that right now China is less of a threat to EU than the US, when those in power in the US numerous times voiced their ideological hatred for Europe
by ladon86 | 2025-05-02 15:11:35+00:00
They don’t always grant refunds for App Store purchases, I’ve heard from many customers whose refund requests were denied after we referred them to Apple. As a developer I would love to be able to refund them myself, but we can’t refund IAPs at all, it’s entirely up to Apple.

If the customer requests too many refunds (say 3-4 within a few months) their Apple ID is likely to be banned from making further purchases.
by asford | 2025-05-02 15:11:49+00:00
The benchmark results presented in this page are extremely misleading; you're not comparing to the actual baseline gpio performance available in micropython.

Micropython already exposes "viper", which transpiles byte code to machine instructions for highly timing or performance critical code paths. This is reasonably well explained in the micropython docs, which has an example explaining how to ... trigger a gpio and very rapidly.

https://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/reference/speed_pytho...

Viper runs on device and directly emits native machine code for decorated micropython functions. If you have serious timing requirements for gpio, then this is how you do it.

Of course, this is restricted subset of the language compatible with direct native code gen, notably just supporting integer datatypes. However, I would be shocked if this project wasn't also restricted to a subset of the language functionality for your transpilation pipeline.

The benchmark should be rewritten to compare against a baseline in micropython using viper. Though this project is pretty neat, the over inflated performance claims would rapidly deflate against a strong baseline.
by motorest | 2025-05-02 15:11:50+00:00
> The problem here is that Amazon is in a position where they can fork and sell it for a loss in order to crush the competition.

Everyone can fork any FLOSS project. That's by design. There are also no restrictions on random people selling services directly or indirectly using said FLOSS projects.

If a corporation changes their mind and decide it was a mistake for them to release software as FLOSS, they have the right to do what Redis just did. What they can't do is feign ignorance or do a bait-and-switch to try to coerce their userbase to cough up licensing fees for FLOSS projects.
Show HN: Interactive Cellular Automata Demo
by thearn4 | 2025-05-02 15:11:51+00:00
Going back to a very old school notion of "AI" : just updated a demo I did a few years back on efficiently computing cellular automata forward steps using convolution operations. Added a huggingface demo too. https://github.com/thearn/game-of-life

for fun, I let users swap rules dynamically in the app, try letting it run Conway for a short bit, pause the simulation, switch to Maze and start from there.
by SansGuidon | 2025-05-02 15:12:16+00:00
I mostly focus on text based content so PDF and webpages are easily supported. for PDFs I thought about using https://github.com/phiresky/ripgrep-all or pdfgrep https://pdfgrep.org/

For images, what do you want to grep for? for exif data -> https://exiftool.org/ if you want to find image based content, you might need something smarter. I think maybe it is a place where tools such as https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5 can shine for me. simple enough to work with most of my images and tag them according to some preferences, and I would save such tags in a txt file.

Anyway, all metadata I store about images, links etc are all persisted in txt files. summaries, tags, etc, incoming/outgoing links etc, each has its own file. There are folders per link/content. Under each folder, one file per type of metadata. So it is very easy to know if some metadata is missing for a file, no index needed, it is just as simple as checking the presence of a file. everything is compatible with grep then.

for docx and xlsx it is out of my plate at this time, I didn't experiment enough to judge what works well enough. I hate those things.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-05-02 15:12:17+00:00
Nothing. They could be literally Hitler or literally Gandi for all I know. I'm not in Germany and I don't follow them. The only contact I have is reading French newspapers about how some "far right" party is gaining traction over there. I did note that now that they're gaining more votes, they've become more extremist (according to the same French media). Bonus points for them being considered somewhat "close" to the French RN (which the latter have denied – don't know what that's worth).

My point was rather to note that similar things happen in France, with incumbent politicians trying to convince voters that the French RN is the more extreme the more they gain traction. But pretty much everybody who says anything else than "we should abolish borders and allow any and all immigrants who wish to come" or even "maybe we should do something about crime" is labeled "fascist", "extreme right", etc.

This has been confirmed to me when a French party (LR) which is absolutely not "far right" or anything like that and is actually one of the old "governing" parties, was labeled as such by the left when one of their ministers tried to broach the subject of immigration.

So, I'm skeptical when I see some random mainstream politician, who's party is sinking, call this or that party "extreme right", "fascist", or other loaded terms.

To me this just looks like posturing and name-calling. Nobody tries to prove that this or that party's programme sucks big time on concrete metrics (and they'd actually have a point about the RN). They just appeal to voters' sentiment. Which, after a while, gets old.
by _bin_ | 2025-05-02 15:12:38+00:00
Except those are choices they made knowing full well the consequences. Here's what people miss: the fact that it's a social norm is reason to care, not reason to ignore it.

If you were a brilliant lawyer strongly committed to your craft, you would not get tattoos or dye your hair purple. The reason is simple: too many people would see it and think less of you. As such, it makes you less able to effectively defend your clients. When your job involves appealing to society on behalf of someone, you do not make a middle finger to that same society an immutable part of your appearance unless you are very thoughtless, also not a characteristic I want in a attorney.

There's also the fact that law, more than most disciplines, is premised on adherence to old, old forms of tradition and ritual. In britain they still wear powdered wigs, for goodness' sake. The law still uses Latin terms though it's decades to centuries since educated men learned it in school. Our legal tradition in America is old, with Common Law in some ways tracing back to William the Conqueror. The other major legal tradition on which I've read, Justinian's Codex and its evolution into the Napoleonic Code, dates back to the 500s AD. Discarding old customs, even if you think them outmoded, trampling social niceties because you find them outmoded, is a really bad sign for a capable attorney.
by arnaudsm | 2025-05-02 15:12:40+00:00
The biggest impact Generative Music had on my life was for wedding skits. Families that wanted a funny song about the bride filled with anecdotes didn't need talent anymore.

The first time I heard it, it was incredible. The 2nd wedding that did it, it started to feel boring. The 3rd time, everyone hated it.

Similar to image-generation, we're getting tired really fast of cookie-cutter art. I don't know how to feel about it.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-02 15:12:47+00:00
It doesn’t seem that much like doublethink to me. More like, common sense. It would be convenient if everyone who was trying to trick us was required to follow their ideology to a silly logical conclusion and provide obvious tells. But, even fanatics are full people.

The Knight Templar is working for a being that can read his mind. Surely it can see through any duplicity that he needs to engage in, in that being’s service.
by hnlmorg | 2025-05-02 15:13:04+00:00
> The itunes store predates the iphone.

As does thousands of other online stores but that doesn’t mean they are App Stores too.

> The lack of native apps was resolved within a year of the iphone launch with the second generation. Probably they weren't ready for native developers and freezing APIs.

You’re basically just reiterating what I said here but in more favourable language.

At the end of the day, public demand was for native apps and the App Store was born from that. So all I’m doing is making a throw away comment about how times have changed.

> And in fairness, Safari was pretty capable on iphone.

Oh it really was. At the time it was heads and shoulders above anything else’s available for portable devices.
by natdempk | 2025-05-02 15:13:24+00:00
v4.5 is a lot better at adherence with detailed descriptions!

Still not totally adherent, but if you can steer it with genre, detailed descriptions of genre, and elements of the genre it's way better than v4. Some descriptions work better than others so there's some experimentation to figure out what works for what you're trying to achieve.

You can also provide descriptions in [brackets] in the lyrics that work reasonably well in my experience.

Disclaimer: I work there as a SWE.
by bluGill | 2025-05-02 15:13:25+00:00
Nothing ends at philosophy. They reach there, but they can reach lots of different places. Without scrolling on philosophy I can see more than 50 other links from that page that are thus reachable from anywhere by at most one more step.

Pick a random thing and see if it is reachable from anywhere. A lot of them are. I suspect most are, but I don't know how to run this study (other than a brute force algorithm that will use more compute than I would want to dedicate)
by leakycap | 2025-05-02 15:13:35+00:00
Writing Tools

Here's what it output as cleaned up text:

The Writing Tools work better than I expected and are available in almost every text field. Since most of us don't proofread before sending messages, Apple Intelligence Writing Tools help me quickly improve my writing before others read it.

What I wrote myself:

The writing tools are available almost everywhere & do a better job than I expected in cleaning up and making sentences more concise. Few of us read our own writing before we hit send or submit, and Apple Intelligence Writing Tools have been helpful in getting me to quickly improve what I write before I make someone else read it.
by aidenn0 | 2025-05-02 15:13:41+00:00
1. I'm sure if I were to ask an LLM for opinions on Dylan and Petty, it would provide them.

2. I don't know if this was the point the original was making, but I personally think Dylan is a bit overrated as a songwriter (and the one time I saw him live, he was only so-so as a performer, but I don't think that's exactly a hot take).
by mikestew | 2025-05-02 15:13:46+00:00
Heck, even iPhone battery was upgradeable while he was still in charge.

Eh, wot? iPhone battery has never been easily replaced. Yeah, you could do it, but it still involved tiny screws and fiddly bits; you’re not popping a new one in while waiting at a stoplight.

But I do miss the days of throwing some cheap RAM at a MacBook.
by deeThrow94 | 2025-05-02 15:13:59+00:00
I highly recommend reading Schumpeter, both "Business Cycles" and "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy".

He discusses how motivations fundamentally change after profit margins peak and argues that profit after this point necessarily produces less economically efficient processes (in terms of the flow of demanded goods and services, not the shareholder, who does receive further productivity gains). In this context, undesired market advantage (legal or illegal) is just a symptom of profit, but it can be analyzed like any other sort of inefficiency. The core prescription is to nationalize the process or otherwise remove the profit motive around peak profit (which is, to be clear, not always easy or possible to identify... but in the worst case, this would open further opportunity for private capital to invest in the next generation of improvements).

He also discusses how failed investment cycles can resonate into market crashes faster than capital can rationally reallocate. Both of these above observations seem very very relevant to our current situation in the US today, and should cause everyone to look askance at people who aren't concerned about how healthy our political economy actually is.

> fundamentally undermined by science and technology creating a new market that upends the old one.

The kicker here is that there's no reason to expect either to continue yielding the same rewards. Some industries have projectable, plannable, investable growth patterns; others do not. Almost all the industries with predictable growth rely on consumption driven by yields from the lucrative exploitation of frontiers, mostly technological recently as you point out. I suspect that the market is going to get incredibly volatile as capital sees this frontiers dry up and adjusts expectations. ideally by cannibalizing itself and not eating us, but it might need a little help in that regard....
by dangus | 2025-05-02 15:14:13+00:00
Yes it is evil, considering how the advertisements are made in ways that makes it difficult for parents to escape them.

The only way to escape kids TV shows that have advertisements between shows and advertisements within the shows themselves as product placements is to only watch public television (which is generally funded way less and has way fewer programs than commercial television).

Hell, shows like Transfomers have the toys as the stars of the show.

So now all your kids have the peer pressure of all their friends consuming popular media and owning toys and now you have to be the bad guy saying no to literally everything to escape.

You go to any store and the toys and sugary cereals are right here at eye height of your kids with cartoon characters and promises of prizes, toys, and sweepstakes.

So you’re basically between a rock and a hard place, either you are the “weird kid with the weird parents” or you buy into at least some of that consumerism, trying to approach it with some level of moderation.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-05-02 15:14:24+00:00
We don't have waymo in France and I am not sure it wrote work well.

Streets in France are full of entitled people. Drivers, bikers (both bikes with pedals and the ones with an engine) and pedestrians.

Everyone thinks that they have all the rights but ultimately some kind of order emerges from the chaos.

Pedestrians will walk on red lights, but are also careful.

Cars will park anywhere, but usually in a way that is just really frustrating but not blocking.

Bikes will slalom, but to a point.

This does not always work, but it is so much driven by culture that somehow we are statistically alive when moving outside.

Personally I hate it with all my heart. I dream of the dystopian world where everyone will follow the rules.
by cyral | 2025-05-02 15:14:59+00:00
This is sorta what customers expect. When they want a refund or have a problem, they ask the developer. They don't understand the payments are all going through apple AND that apple is responsible for all billing support. There is no way to even look up a customer or get a list of your customers with IAP, aside from using something like RevenueCat that tries to link your user accounts with the device receipts to figure out who is subscribed. Customers find it ridiculous that you can't help them with any billing questions at all.
by bluSCALE4 | 2025-05-02 15:15:00+00:00
Well said. Streaming services are finally getting the kinds of commercial content we did in the 80s and 90s. It's refreshing as I feel those years were the golden era of toys. Many toys of the era didn't even have commercials but we still wanted them. X-Men toys for example. If I was a kid, I'd of loved to have seen weekly commercials of the newest line up of X-Men toys.
by ryzvonusef | 2025-05-02 15:15:19+00:00
Mr Smith's previous technological solution:

> Brad communicated to me through a device called the Tobii made by Dynavox, a company that specializes in computing systems for people with illnesses and disabilities. It used infrared eye-tracking technology to follow Brad’s gaze and help him select letters, phrases, software and internet services on a computer screen affixed to his bed or a motorized chair. Brad would stare at a spot on the screen for a couple of seconds, and the letter or word he’d highlighted would be selected, and then he’d head on to the next letter or word. It was a slow process that only made it possible to eke out words, and they arrived via a robotic-sounding computer voice. “I used to type 100 words per minute,” Brad said. “Now I am lucky to get five.”

> The eye-tracking technology he relied on did not work well in bright light either indoors or outdoors.

> Communicating with the Tobii went so slowly that Brad could not have a typical back and forth conversation. People would ask him a question and then wait and wait and wait for his reply.

> If Brad needed his ventilator tube cleared, he’d stare at the “cough” button on the Tobii, and it would bark out, “I NEED TO COUGH!,” in the funny voice, and one of the boys would run over and fix the tube and then head right back to playing.

> Brad had been reluctant to leave the house because he could not talk to people or use his device to read or peruse the internet when outside or any place with normal lighting. More pressing, he couldn’t tell Tiffany when he was thirsty, needed help with his respirator or needed to use the bathroom.

> “I want to move my cursor without looking at it constantly,” Brad said. “I want to click and drag. I want to scroll and read at the same time. Do you know how hard those simple things are with eye gaze? I hope you never have to find out. And, if Neuralink succeeds, maybe nobody will have to learn that again.”