MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timr | 2025-05-24 05:21:57+00:00
Meh. While I think the broad theme is fine (more access to education is generally good -- particularly when it comes to scientific literacy amongst the general public!), I think trying to encourage "research" in this way is largely pushing on a string. I can never figure out if this whole phenomenon of "science fairs" is just Kabuki theater for everyone involved, or if there's a core group of deeply deluded organizers who really believe that they're Making A Difference (tm) in scientific research, and are just completely blind to the career prospects of actual young scientists [1].

Time and experience has shown that "scientific innovation" cannot be made to happen faster by throwing more money at it, and a promising young person would be much better off by putting their talents to use doing something less random [2]. You can produce more good research in aggregate (maybe), but only in the same way that you can find more gold by crushing more rocks. Either way, you have to crush the rocks.

For example, the US government dramatically increased grad school funding through the 80s-2000s, and the primary outcome was an employment crisis amongst PhDs in the sciences. In the 40s-70s it was fairly straightforward to establish a career in research, but these days it's Hunger Games. I sort of fundamentally believe that the reason most science came out of the European aristocracy was not due to inequity, but because only someone well-off could devote their lives to something so erratic. Science is an avocation, not a vocation.

Science fairs and the like are a weird little subculture of college-application polishers, in part because nobody in their right mind actually wants to become a scientist. I think it's a safe bet that the young woman in this article ends up doing something more lucrative with her life (and good for her, if she does).

[1] Or even more cynically: the organizers do know, and are doing it because it builds their own careers.

[2] Or at least, with a higher alpha.
Ask HN: What is the best way to master GTM?
by bubblethrow | 2025-05-24 05:24:05+00:00
We are a team of two engineers and we get stuck in engineering, missing the trees instead of the forests. I would like to sharpen my GTM skills, and I would like to learn what works, what doesn't.

1. What should I go study? 2. Teams of technical founders how do you spend time between product & GTM?

I am considering marking some days as GTM days, so that it is at least top of mind for some days of the week.
by agarren | 2025-05-24 05:24:56+00:00
I’m seeing a lot about price hikes, new service charges, and bad customer service since the acquisition. I noticed the price hike with one of my domains through them, I paid it but was close to reconsidering. Thinking I’ll try transferring it now.

https://techrights.org/n/2023/12/14/_Video_Lessons_to_be_Lea...

https://blog.cogitactive.com/website/gandi-outrageous-price/
by db48x | 2025-05-24 05:25:32+00:00
I agree with you. At most companies your manager would never even think of spending that much money on you, even if it was completely justifiable. You’re lucky if you can get permission to buy a $50 book.

That said, if you’re going to spend money on a debugger then I recommend rr + Pernosco instead. Pernosco is a completely different kind of debugger that will make you much, much more productive at debugging than any traditional debugger where you start by adding breakpoints and then stepping through your code. Costs a lot less too.
by FilosofumRex | 2025-05-24 05:25:40+00:00
> MIT as being high prestige mostly for people that actually want a science or tech-related career...

Apparently you've not been to MIT in a while - it offers degrees in business management, finance, plus 17 in arts, humanities, and social sciences, not to mention grad programs. MIT admits more than its fair share of fruit-cakes with money:

https://catalog.mit.edu/degree-charts/
by bruce511 | 2025-05-24 05:26:11+00:00
You're describing the difference between a hobby and a job. And it's perfectly OK to have a hobby. It's desirable to have a job.

In other words, a job offers you money for adding value to society. Most of us need this yo live. Adding value is usually "work" because it involves many things, most parts of which are not fun. (If they were fun, there'd be little value, people would just do it themselves.)

A hobby however is the "fun" part without the "work" part. The value added is usually marginal. For example I've been doing ceramics as a hobby. It's lots of fun and the rubbish monstrosities I create are not really valuable.

If I applied myself, I could churn out bowls that are sellable. But frankly, where's the fun in that? Making 4 identical vases for sale would rob all the joy from it.

Understanding the difference is key to your long term satisfaction. My work gets me paid, so I need to do all the boring bits, and the better I do that the more I get paid. I get satisfaction from doing the job well, and having happy customers, but there's a lot of grind involved. Maybe 80% grind to 20% fun.

My hobby is the reverse. 80% fun, 20% grind. I get satisfaction from pushing my skills to the next level, even if the results are far from perfect, and frankly not sellable. (I'll give away pieces to someone if they like it, but I won't sell it.)

So, to answer your question, yes everyone experiences this. It is quite literally the definition of "work".
by jazzyjackson | 2025-05-24 05:26:32+00:00
Hey thanks for posting this, I met Dr Barnhart and his slide-o-scope at Makerspace Urbana some 15 years ago now and was just trying to remember what his software did the other day. One of those synchronicities, glad to see it's still selling. Looks like there's a pared down hobbyist version for less than 200 bucks but can't tell if it's also a Wolfram plug-in or standalone modeling software; I'll have to send the old man an email

https://www.opticasoft.com/product-page/optica-em-for-experi...
by codeguro | 2025-05-24 05:26:56+00:00
You’ve got a severe case of TDS. I voted for Trump. I did it in 2016 and 2020 and 2024. And you don’t know anything about me.

You like to cry “fascism! Fascism!” while you turn a blind eye to ‘Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard’, to the deterioration of the economy, and to the social cohesion of the US at large. To be so blinded by your rage that you can’t look past Trump’s demeanor and actually look at his performance tells me you’re out of touch. If the egg prices aren’t concerning you, then you are in no place to talk about what is motivating commonfolk who voted for trump. By the way, this all started because elites like Hillary openly showed contempt for working class folk with her “basket of diplorables” statements. I voted for Trump because he represents my interests. Maybe if the left didn’t hate me for being a cis white male, I wouldn’t be so inclined to vote for him out of spite. But make no mistake, you’re not in the party of love and acceptance just because you voted for the other guy. You very much have a lot of hate in your heart. And if you feel like punching my face right now, just know that you are everything you claim to hate so much.
by notherhack | 2025-05-24 05:27:15+00:00
I feel like acme.sh is the kind of client she's ranting about. 8000 lines of shell code in acme.sh and more in dozens of user-contributed hook scripts, and over 1000 open issues on github?

Personally I like https://github.com/dehydrated-io/dehydrated. Same concept as acme.sh but only 2500 lines of shell and 54 open issues. You do have to roll your own hook script though.

Curiously, first commits for both acme.sh and dehydrated were in December 2015. Maybe they both took a security class at uni that fall.
by MrJohz | 2025-05-24 05:27:56+00:00
> And this cannot be done statically (i.e. your IDE can't jump to the definition), because my_function might be called from any number of places, each with a different handler.

I believe this can be done statically (that's one of the key points of algebraic effects). It works work essentially the same as "jump to caller", where your ide would give you a selection of options, and you can find which caller/handler is the one you're interested in.
by toast0 | 2025-05-24 05:29:22+00:00
If you have light usage, do you need reduced toxicity?

Acetaminophen's effective dose is pretty close to the dangerous dose, but I would take light use to mean you take something maybe once a month max and only a single dose (or maybe even just one pill when the dose is two pills). At that level of use, I don't think you're at risk of anything.

Otoh, if the title is accurate and it can be more effective at pain release and less damaging to the liver, that would be great for people who experience pain frequently.
by MJGrzymek | 2025-05-24 05:31:45+00:00
I was just thinking about how it's an underrated open problem which pairs of (number of variables, degree) are undecidable for MRDP.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think it's guaranteed to have a finite answer, as a list of the minimal undecidable pairs. You can even throw in maximum absolute value of coefficients, though if you limit all three things that's decidable by being finite.
by RugnirViking | 2025-05-24 05:34:25+00:00
sounds like fun. Perhaps a little too much fun. This sort of algorithmic thing keeps people on social media all day. So be aware folks this can only lose you time working.

(no shade to you, OP. Seems like a cool idea, great that it exists. Just that if there were the option to turn this off on most social media I would probably take it)
by BoorishBears | 2025-05-24 05:34:30+00:00
You're dealing with the full TTFT x2 + the tokens all the prompts of all your MCPs before you even get to that round trip to the DB.

And you don't have to wonder about "if designed well": the reference implementation that's getting 20k downloads a week and getting embedded in downstream editors is is not designed well and will make the round trip every time and still not give the LLM the full information of the table.

Most MCP implementations are crappy half-assed implementations in similar fashion because everyone was rushing to post how they added <insert DB/API/Data Source> to MCP.

And if you're worried about "context fatigue" (you mean LLMs getting distracted by relevant information...), you should 100% prefer a well known schema format to N MCP prompt definitions with tool usage instructions that weren't even necessarily tuned for the LLM in question.

LLMs are much more easily derailed by the addition of extra tools and having to reason about when to call them and the results of calling them, than they are a prompt caching friendly block of tokens with easy to follow meaning.
by JimDabell | 2025-05-24 05:35:17+00:00
I’ve tried using Notion for this and I really can’t stand it. There’s a long-standing bug in Notion where if you paste a link in, the focus gets captured by the bookmark and cannot be moved by keyboard. You have to switch to the mouse to click away from the bookmark before you can continue typing. That alone is a show-stopper for me. What kind of document editor forces you to use the mouse?

Beyond that, I don’t think there’s any way of conveniently pasting in a URL as a bookmark. Is the only option to paste the link, then arrow down to “Bookmark” in the popup menu that appears and hit enter? There’s no option to just default to bookmark?
by paul_h | 2025-05-24 05:35:44+00:00
Great tech - thanks for your pioneering work. I made https://vsm-book.com/app as a tool to support a meeting and leave a lasting artifact. WebSequenceDiagrams (and https://bramp.github.io/js-sequence-diagrams/ which also credits yours) was very much in my mind, though my grammer is much less elegant.
by ggm | 2025-05-24 05:36:17+00:00
This would be an instance of those mimetic "how I got to own a house at 29" stories where the first 6 steps are rational and the seventh is "have rich parents"

For most people, writing is not sufficiently lucrative to sustain a living income and supplements other income streams or is net negative.

Also: read "new grub street" by George Gissing, 1891
Should I Apply to YC'25 If IM from India?
by Akshaiy | 2025-05-24 05:37:03+00:00
Hey guys, we are three guys from India who are currently working on an AI based startup. We have the idea ready an structured found a product market fit but we dont have a fully functional prototype, the prototype works but still in the initial phases do we have a chance at request for startups with just an idea and a basic prototype or do we need an MVP and an user base to get selected?
by Glyptodon | 2025-05-24 05:40:27+00:00
Based on the process being roller driven and not involving drawing,I'd infer that it's probably similar to wrapping the bar with another layer at some point in the process and continuing to roll it. I'd also infer that they don't care about having the ends "capped" with stainless since everyone tends to assume that rebar can be cut off when needed. But YMMV, I'm mostly familiar with much smaller scale fabrication.
by bruce511 | 2025-05-24 05:41:28+00:00
Stripe's problem is that they operate inside a global banking framework which is both highly regulated and obsessively monitored.

Problem 2 is that a world of crime, and hence money laundering exists. They're expected, nay required, to detect and prevent that. Which is (of course) nigh impossible.

From your side, as a customer, you are offering only the tiniest amount of value (and obviously this product even less.)

So when you (innocently) indulge in behavior which mimics a money launderer, the system complains. There's no real motivation for a human to set the "this is not a money launderer" flag because they're then on the hook when it turns out you were deliberately setting up the account for money laundering later on.

There is a lesson here. And it's a valuable one to share. Don't purchase your own stuff with your own card. Most payment processors have defined test card numbers for this purpose.

I'm sorry you encountered this issue.
by supermatt | 2025-05-24 05:42:20+00:00
As you said - it’s not really a problem with the JSON structure and format itself, but the underlying parser, which is specifically designed to map to the initial js types. There are parsers that don’t have this problem, but then the JSON itself is not portable.

The problem with your solution is that it’s also not portable for the same reason (it’s not part of the standard), and the reason that it wasn’t done that way in the first place is because it wouldn’t map to those initial js types!

FYI, you can easily work around this by using replacer and revivers that are part of the standards for stringify and parse and treat numbers differently. But again, the json isn’t portable to places without those replacer/revivers.

I.e, the real problem is treating something that looks like json as json by using standards compliant json parsers - not the apparent structure of the format itself. You could fix this problem in an instant by calling it something other than JSON, but people will see it and still use a JSON parser because it looks like JSON, not because it is JSON.
by zdc1 | 2025-05-24 05:42:21+00:00
I've met a few people that I like to describe as "walking Reddit". Chat with them and they'll always have a story or gossip that's engaging and somewhat infuriating or rage-inducing. One was a colleague who would telling me all the questionable and unkind things the managers in other teams were doing.

I eventually realised that these interactions weren't joyful... they were easy conversations, but they were also demoralising and lowered my energy. These days I try to "manage" my conversations with people like this by steering the topics and (gently) setting boundaries on what I don't want to talk about.
by abathologist | 2025-05-24 05:43:30+00:00
> The first thing to note is that there is no indication that foo or bar can fail

I think this is a part of the point: we are able to simply write direct style, and not worry at all about the effectual context.

> how do you find the code that will run when they do fail

AFAIU, this is also the point: you are able to abstract away from any particular implementation of how the effects are handled. The code that will when they fail is determined later, whenever you decide how you want to run it. Just as, in `f : g:(A -> B) -> t(A) -> B` there is no way to find "the" code that will run when `g` is executed, because we are abstracting over any particular implementation of `g`.
by ggm | 2025-05-24 05:43:33+00:00
For a very specific subset of problems, which I believe now are the ones amenable to "simulated annealing" solutions so for example, finding local optimisation points in a complex problem which can be expressed as a surface plot in 3D optimising for height (or depth)

But not (for example) breaking RSA via Shor's algorithm.

It also appears to be a shotgun: you get "the awesome" for a brief window and then the magic pixie dust disappears and its incoherent and indistinguishable from noise for a bit again.
by ddingus | 2025-05-24 05:46:18+00:00
I do haveba problem with that.

Basically, if we are going to allow single humans to have so much buying power, that needs to come with some clear expectations.

Risks must be taken. Pick something and advance society. Or, empower others in a reasonable, non discriminatory way, with no hooks.

There are a ton of things need doing.

Why not require a real effort?

We do not need more dynasties, and other enduring signs of wealth.

We do need those people to have earned it. (That is the no dynasty part again)

I know sounds harsh, but the fact is anyone can live very well for the rest of their lives on just a fraction of that money.

May well put it to work.

And if it were me personally? I got a list. Ready?
by paul_h | 2025-05-24 05:46:35+00:00
I just used Mermaid for multiple sequence diagrams from build-steps sequences in a video talk I did on comparing build systems - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L67ri_xe2oQ (slides - https://paulhammant.com/google-style-dag-build-systems/). The new boost for me was GPT4o. It was able to quickly make what I wanted from the build logs alone, though it took some hand tweaking too. A new (or very old) problem after that was not taking sufficient save points (URL bookmarks) and sometimes making the same edit twice cos I'd lost a URL. That there was a second save of the PNG form for each (https://kroki.io/mermaid/svg/...) added to the keep-track-of-changes problem for me, especially when I'm very tired me :(
by mrandish | 2025-05-24 05:47:25+00:00
> The article was talking about the 80s

I cited that article as only one example. It focused on one artist who created graphics mainly for one platform, the Amiga, which was sold from 1985 to 1994. However, graphics were made as I described as early as 1978 by many artists on many different platforms including the Apple II (MicroPainter was popular), Atari 400/800, TI 99/4a, Radio Shack Color Computer and others. They often did detail work a pixel at a time for the reasons I described. This wasn't unique to Sachs or the Amiga.

Regarding timing: The PC-98 platform was released in 1982 and was primarily an 80s phenomenon which had peaked sometime around 1990. While it continued to be sold throughout the 1990s, it's primary growth and dominance were established in the 1980s. Please see the Wikipedia entry for PC-98 which says: "In 1990, IBM Japan introduced the DOS/V operating system which enabled displaying Japanese text on standard IBM PC/AT VGA adapters." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98). That greatly expanded and accelerated the competition against PC-98.
by BillyTheMage | 2025-05-24 05:47:46+00:00
Why would they NOT ask the teens? They're who the whole thing is about. They're the ones being affected. The child is the only one who sees the true effects parenting has on children.

How would the parents know? They're just kids that happen to have been alive long enough to gain some stupid legal rights and to have some sex and get pregnant. I've personally (anecdotally) observed that it's the person and their mindset, not age, that determines how well they understand the world around them and the consequences of their own actions. I know adults who are far more clueless than their 12-year-old children about every single thing they have ever talked about.

This idea that older people know more is absurd. You spend 50 years passively ending up with knowledge, while someone else spends 5 years doing active learning. The 5 active years wins every time. Sure there's still some deep-thinking life lessons left to be learned, but that's like "don't let your emotions get the better of you" kind of stuff, not "I understand how this works".

It's like this dude at work. Thinks he knows everything because he's worked for 50 years and so he must have gained 25 times more knowledge and experience than the new young guy. No, see, what actually happened is he spent 50 years passively learning an average of 1 bare-minimum thing per year on accident when it was absolutely required in order to complete a specific task, and the young guy spends 8 hours a day actively learning and exploring knowledge-gaps because he's just damn interested in it and has learned more in the past month than the old guy has in 25 years. So now you've got this ancient anti-intellectual with seniority power (another stupid thing) overriding good decisions just because "that aint how we done it for 25 years damn kids think they know everything why the hell would we need a damn [...]"; and so they undo the thing and productivity drops back down to where it was 25 years ago.
by abathologist | 2025-05-24 05:49:13+00:00
It seems to me that monads and effects are likely best viewed as complementary approaches to reasoning about computational contexts, rather than as rivals. See, e.g., https://goto.ucsd.edu/~nvazou/koka/padl16.pdf or https://goto.ucsd.edu/~nvazou/koka/padl16.pdf .
by muzani | 2025-05-24 05:49:46+00:00
There's the invisible foot aka bounded rationality = people act with the info they have, and often not the knowledge of delays.

People will extract all they can, and even support high prices among other extractors. They're not thinking about healing. They're thinking about their kids (who are probably doing medical school), their loans, and getting compensated for their sacrifices – the years of schooling, late nights, low initial pay.

Eventually they overextract, same with the tech bubble leading into layoffs. It doesn't take that long, but long enough for people to be blindsided by it.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-05-24 05:50:58+00:00
There are many parents who allow their kids to live rent free. First job can then DCA the near entire salary and what you save early on compounds like crazy for life.

Parents telling kids in this world to "go work 24/7 on the treadmill without being able to save" should wonder if having kids wasn't something selfish they did like having a pet.

I was always welcome at my mother's home and she told me there would always be shelter and food for me, whenever I'd come.

The selfish people who kick their kids out of their home at 18 y/o are people best let out of my life.

If a kid is working, I see no reason why parents shouldn't let them
by bosky101 | 2025-05-24 05:51:11+00:00
Yes, anyone can apply. But it's important to refrain from over engineering how it's built, what framework or what model. These are all secondary for a startup.

MVP matters.

Customer traction outweighs all.

Getting folks to pay for AI is challenging. If you manage to crack a niche and do so and pay or pre-order - that will give you an understanding and core tenant that is expected from companies to scale once they get accepted into YC.

It's tougher to get the average chatgpt free user - to pay for an unknown startup. All you need is one company to agree to pay. Because if you can get 1 (not friends & family), you get 10. And then get 100.

If I were you, my #1 focus for the entire team would be to get 1 company to pay, before starting to build or touch code. Get the initial NO's to tweak every cold call/email/pitch refining every day until you crack your first deal. I would stay away from long tail consumers.

Good Luck!