MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Vinnl | 2025-05-15 10:02:40+00:00
There are a couple of places in the Netherlands with congested bike lanes, which is a great problem to have. It's crazy to imagine all those people in individual cars; we'd have reached congestion so much sooner. (Note that this is after decades of continuously improving bicycle infrastructure; basically everywhere else won't run into this problem any time soon.)

The problem isn't so much density (I think NYC is much denser), as much as it is the existence of really popular destinations; you'll see this close to some big train stations in rush hour, for example. Solutions are smarter road layout, and providing more and more attractive alternative routes, and alternative destinations (e.g. more train stations nearby).
by olllo | 2025-05-15 10:03:34+00:00
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback!

Yes, Data.olllo uses including Polars under the hood for fast and efficient processing. A demo video is in the works and should be up soon.

Good point about the "P Core/V Core" naming—I'll simplify that to focus more on the user benefit, like scaling from small to large files smoothly.

I also like your idea of running transformations on a sample first with a one-click full run—very aligned with the vision. And subset reproduction for errors is a great suggestion, especially for things like deduping. Appreciate it!
by olllo | 2025-05-15 10:04:09+00:00
Thanks for the thoughtful take—really appreciate both perspectives.

You're right that terms like "intelligent execution" can feel vague without concrete backing. My goal with mentioning P Core/V Core was to hint at the underlying design—switching between in-memory and disk-based engines like Polars and Vaex—without overwhelming with technical detail.

I’ll look for a better way to explain the idea clearly and briefly. Thanks again!
by optician_owl | 2025-05-15 10:04:18+00:00
It's an awkward article. To answer why a query is slow you need a bit more details than just the query. Also, I reread about timeouts and didn't get it, what was the database, whether it was a database issue, how it was related to migration.

The only information I could extract was that the company made bad architectural decisions, believes in ORM (looking at the queries, there are many doubts that the data layouts in DB are adequate) and cannot clearly explain situations. But this is only interesting to their candidates or investors.

It may sound rude, so I apologise.
by citrin_ru | 2025-05-15 10:04:47+00:00
May be the problem with hiring from wider geography is that evaluation of a candidate performance is a difficult and largely unsolved problem. Hiring from a small area (like SV) an employer can rely on offline social networks (friend of my friend knows a candidate). Though I don’t understand why US companies so afraid to make a bad hire given that it is easy to fire someone who doesn’t perform well in the US.
by olllo | 2025-05-15 10:05:12+00:00
Tad is a great tool—very clean and useful for quick exploration.

Data.olllo is focused more on local data processing, not just viewing—things like filtering, transforming, merging, and even running Python code (with AI assistance coming). It’s built for both small and large files with performance in mind, using many cores including Polars under the hood.

Also, good news: the macOS version is in the works and will be submitted to the Mac App Store soon!
by RamblingCTO | 2025-05-15 10:05:20+00:00
Yeah the "update for a year"/major version thing is the only way it can work. But only if there are no ongoing costs. I'm working on something like that: https://easyscreencap.com/ for the very reason that I don't see that I need to pay for such a thing monthly. However: the "updates for a year" vs yearly subscription difference feels so minimal at times tbh.
by sigmaisaletter | 2025-05-15 10:05:21+00:00
What I am wondering about is - while Musk is as unsubtle as ever, and I guess this is a system prompt instruction - is there something like that (in more subtle ways) going on in the other big models?

I don't mean big agenda-pushing things like Musk, but what keeps e.g. Meta Inc. from training Llama to be ever so slightly more friendly and sympathetic to Meta Inc, or the tech industry in general? Even an open-weights model can't be easily inspected, so this is likely to remain undetected.
by rollcat | 2025-05-15 10:05:42+00:00
There was a story written by (IRRC?) Stanisław Lem: technology went to absurd level of complexity, yet was so important to daily lives that the species' survival depended on it. The knowledge of how everything worked has been long forgotten; the maintainers would occasionally fix something by applying duct tape or prayers.

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

We're basically headed in that direction.
by kaliqt | 2025-05-15 10:05:43+00:00
So it's a bit of tradeoffs, we may add a second DB to the compose by the time we reach v1.0, but, if we had to pick the convergence of simplicity and flexibility to start, PostgreSQL is it.

We prototyped SQLite as well. It just wasn't working in the stack like we had needed.

The idea is simple: use as few components as possible to achieve the outcome. Better to have less than more initially, because we can simply add the more and extend the API, but ripping everything out and trying to trim it down is damn near impossible, especially when the platform garners widespread usage.

The decision to do the less then more instead of more then less approach was spurred by us (the wider project) always having way too much bulk and then finding it impossible to turn the ship when we needed to (https://github.com/vircadia/vircadia-native-core).

We need to be agile to reach the milestones we have set out, hence the differed approach using off the shelf parts and only adding what we need, when we need it.
by tpxl | 2025-05-15 10:06:26+00:00
> The EU laws are indirectly hurting the small developers though by establishing frameworks of usage which are impossible to follow.

What are the frameworks of usage impossible to follow? People can't release stuff on the apple app store anymore?

Apple did not get away with their (un)implementation of DMA, they got spanked and will continue being spanked until they actually comply. What is the 'max damage' they inflicted?
by vladvasiliu | 2025-05-15 10:06:31+00:00
I get your point, but mine is that transit isn't all that bad. For my needs, it works better than private transportation. I don't have space to store a bike at work nor at home, and theft is rampant where I live. Bike sharing is nice, but it can be hit and miss, especially if you need to get somewhere at a specific time. I also sometimes like to grab a drink with colleagues after work and would rather not ride a bike afterwards.

I'm not saying there should only be transit and no bikes. I think each means has its own merits, but my point is that these should be improved such that we can take full advantage of them. Just like bikes require infrastructure, or else they're much too dangerous, so do trains require maintenance and being kept up to date, or else they're a PITA to use.
by kruuuder | 2025-05-15 10:07:15+00:00
But it's all fixed costs. I don't see how the 30% change anything.

Say you need 100k profit after Apple's cut.

Scenario A: Apple takes a third of the App Store revenue. You need to sell in-app purchases for 150k. Scenario B: Apple takes no cut. You need to sell in-app purchases for 100k.

So the claim is, scenario B would be the dream, but scenario A is "nearly impossible"? What is fundamentally different between 100k and 150k revenue, if your expenses are fixed? This doesn't make any sense.

The comparison to Uber doesn't make any sense either, their costs aren't fixed. If they want to double their income, they must double their work.
by hgomersall | 2025-05-15 10:07:19+00:00
I don't disagree with you broad statement that ads are a shitty thing on the whole, but their cost should be viewed in real terms not financial terms. That is, the cost is the people that work on the tech, the resources spent delivering them, the attention diverted to looking at them etc etc. The ad companies are sitting on huge cash piles so clearly there's a shortfall in the value of resources that can be bought if we stopped spending on ads.
by olllo | 2025-05-15 10:07:31+00:00
Thanks for the feedback! Data.olllo isn't Electron-based—it's built in Python with tkinter and custom tkinter, so the size mainly comes from the data libraries and embedded Python environment. I agree that keeping things lean is important, and I’m actively working on optimizing the package size further.

Appreciate the DuckDB comparison—great tool and definitely a benchmark worth learning from!
by kypro | 2025-05-15 10:09:24+00:00
I am just a biological neural net, not so different from the "machines" anymore, really. They can even create works of art, where I would struggle. They can even emulate human emotions to make people feel more comfortable, which is something I do often as someone with autism.

The only meaningful difference between me and the machines is that I have a subjective superiority complex. What an awful place the universe would be without me!
by tentacleuno | 2025-05-15 10:09:52+00:00
Haven't we been using electric motors and smaller turbos to get around lag? I drove a 3 cylinder MHEV EcoBoost that seemed to use the electric motor(s?) quite well. It seems like a good idea in theory, though I can understand the negatives of electrifying the powertrain. Definitely an interesting topic.

I remember hearing about the days of the early 911 Turbos (if my memory's correct) where you'd get a bunch of boost all at once... We've definitely come a long way!
by BlindEyeHalo | 2025-05-15 10:10:21+00:00
This might help: https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/ask-writer/are-words-...

In short:

When you’re referring to the collective noun as a unit, treat it as singular:

The band lost its spot in the top ten this week. When you’re referring to the individuals within the group, treat it as plural:

The jury had to sign for their ID badges.
by StevenWaterman | 2025-05-15 10:10:54+00:00
Both "has" and "have" sound ok to me here as a native speaker.

Both of these can describe the same event:

- The cows have 10 seconds to enter the field

- The herd has 10 seconds to enter the field

In the case of "crew", the word can either mean

- The people who are part of the crew (like "the cows")

- The crew as a collective unit (like "the herd")

Which is why both sound ok
by tuyiown | 2025-05-15 10:11:00+00:00
I think this is addressed with the complex vs complicated intro. Most problems with uncontrolled / uncontrollable variables will be approached with an incremental solution, e.g. you'll restrict those variables voluntarily or involuntarily and let issues being solved organically / manually, or automatisation will be plain and simple being abandoned.

This qualify as complicated. Delving in complicated problems is mostly driven by business opportunity, always has limited scaling, and tend to be discarded by big players.
by nlitened | 2025-05-15 10:13:37+00:00
But imagine the flashlight apps and mindless-tapper games that subscribe some mom’s credit card to a 9.95 USD/day charge without an easy way to cancel?

I am pretty sure that mom would be upset that her “iPhone” keeps stealing her money

Edit: my fears may be overblown, but I am so happy that since getting my mom an iPhone and iPad many years ago, any need for my “computer guy” technical support has vanished.
by dgb23 | 2025-05-15 10:14:07+00:00
Bonuses make a lot of sense in the financial sector, because the whole endeavor is about making money. Intrinsic motivation and making more money align. Historically it got introduced in order to mitigate cheating customers for personal gain. Also it helps that individual contributions are trivially quantifiable to a very large degree.

Obviously there are other professions that share some of these characteristics, like sales. Or if you narrow down a goal or task to "save us money".
by pipodeclown | 2025-05-15 10:16:17+00:00
'Crew' implies that it is a group of people doing this and therefore they have 35 seconds. You can reconstitute the sentence to check what you should use. In this case you could say in your head:" the crew as a team check the video feed. They have 35 seconds to do this." If this was referring to an individual it would be: "Peter checks the video feed, he has 35 seconds to do this."
by benterix | 2025-05-15 10:16:28+00:00
> If you care about your work enough that you're willing to come to the office every day (or even move cities/countries), then you'll be extremely engaged.

Or extremely stupid (if for the same money you get WFH without the need to move to another city or even country and waste I don't know how many hours commuting, and spending most of your life in a space that you can't really adapt to your needs).
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-15 10:16:42+00:00
> but what keeps e.g. Meta Inc. from training Llama to be ever so slightly more friendly and sympathetic to Meta Inc, or the tech industry in general?

Even if there were something the natural incentive alignment is going to cause the AI to be trained to match what the company thinks is ok.

A tech company full of techies is not going to take an AI trained to the point of saying things like "y'all are evil, your company is evil, your industry is evil" and push it to prod.
by christudor | 2025-05-15 10:18:01+00:00
If a noun denotes a group of people – even if it's technically a singular noun – it's okay (but not compulsory) to use a plural verb.

The sentences 'Real Madrid have performed well this year' and 'Real Madrid has performed well this year' are both grammatically acceptable, and probably used roughly the same amount.

A related example is the word 'none' (= 'not one'). Technically it should govern a singular verb (e.g. 'None of the players is good enough') but you'll now see it a lot with a plural verb (e.g. 'None of the players are good enough').
by modo_mario | 2025-05-15 10:20:51+00:00
The non indie dev companies often have fixed costs that are often proportionally lower. Apple has that and does not pay that 30% tax. The consumer always does tho. There may be more pressure to lower this if there were more alternatives to these walled gardens. For obvious reasons there's only 2.

Consider it similar to supermarkets or amazon. anticompetitive market practices and other dynamics make it so they are dominant. Now it's almost unfeasible to not sell your product in these places. They can now dictate you can not sell your product cheaper in your own store if you sell in theirs or the like. At any given time they might notice your success and decide to compete with you kick you to the curb with all advantages they can be expected to use.
by Lio | 2025-05-15 10:21:04+00:00
I think we have quite a way to go yet.

We already have TruffleRuby and JRuby using advnaced JITs courtacy of the JVM. Whilst both show that amazing things are possible I think Crystal is still ahead of both in terms of raw performance.

The best reason to use either Ruby or Crystal is because you want to and leave it at that.
by Joker_vD | 2025-05-15 10:21:39+00:00
"Three-act storytelling, three-act storytelling everywhere — especially if you squint hard enough to ignore parts that don't fit into the three-act storytelling framework".

After all, if there is some clump of tension/action in the middle of the story, and less of that at the story's ends (which is almost always true), then it quite naturally slices into three parts; does it mean it is a three-act narrative? Not necessarily.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-05-15 10:22:58+00:00
As fun as the opportunity to reminisce about the likes of line rider was, I'm disappointed to see the omission of clippy, the wayback machine, livejournal, yahoo answers, something awful, google groups, xkcd, temple OS, stumbleupon, lycos, activex, toolbars, ytmnd, hypercam, winrar, Ted Stevens, slashdot and doubleclick.

Some of them are more deserving of a slot than others.
by sulam | 2025-05-15 10:23:17+00:00
Fwiw I think this is not true right now. It might be true in the future, I guess. Today you have to learn some pretty specific techniques and they don’t come naturally to most engineers I think. They are accustomed to one-shot Google searches, not prompt engineering. Yes, you can learn how to prompt engineer, but it takes trial and error. A lot of my co-workers today still believe the LLM is useless because it hallucinates API definitions. They very much are not used to tools that require the level of hand-holding you need today.

Either teaching them is going to get easier, which is somewhat plausible actually — or you think LLMs are going to get dramatically easier to prompt with more reliable output. I actually think that’s somewhat implausible. Log(compute) is a pretty hard number to move past a certain point and it seems we’ve hit that point already. RLHF is great, but it doesn’t scale well and the result is that some tools are hard to build. Giving me millions of context tokens is neat, but if it’s wildly expensive and confuses the model on top of that, it’s not actually useful.

I do think there is room to improve and of course there are new techniques to be discovered. The models may even help discover some of them, although I am skeptical that they will find Everest by hill climbing when they’re currently on Pike’s Peak. Or maybe we really need to find Olympus Mons.

Tl;dr — maybe!
by sshine | 2025-05-15 10:25:21+00:00
> Normally a bug tracker would basically be a SQL application. When you move it into a Git repo you lose that and now you have to think about how to represent all that relational data in your repository. It gets annoying.

> just not try to maintain referential integrity but instead suck up the issues from Git into a local SQLite3 DB

Applications with SQL backends tackle the problem “how can we express our CRUD datastructures so they fit the relational model?

When you replace SQL with a file-based serialised format, you mainly lose ACID. This is arguably easier than SQL.

You are a single user locally: as long as your IDE plugin doesn’t fight with your terminal client, your need for ACID are low: you handle conflicts like git conflicts, but you may apply domain-specific conflict resolution; while conflicts in source code has no general resolution strategy, merging issue comments can be easy; changing issue status when people agree can be automatically resolved; handling conflicts manually can be tool-assisted.

So losing SQL is not that big of a deal, assuming you’re in a highly decentralised, highly async environment.

The answer to “Why though?” should be forge interop, keeping knowledge in-repo, and because it may fit the organisation (or lack of), e.g. just like you can commit code changes offline, you’re not prevented from updating issues when you’re offline.
by serhack_ | 2025-05-15 10:25:39+00:00
The real secret of an effective captcha-like system is to identify/collect lots of data, identify suspicious patterns, validate them (checking what kind of data exposes a bot-like system) and then use this for serving dynamic challenges based on a couple of information.

Example: if the system identifies the user as a bot, it tries to give a less performant solution in terms of PoW.
by valkzkr | 2025-05-15 10:26:18+00:00
Hey folks,

After months of building, I’m excited to share Halgorithm — a free, hands-on course platform to help anyone get started with machine learning (even without a math or CS background).

The goal is to fix what I felt was missing in many intro ML resources:

Too much theory, not enough doing

Overloaded with math, too little intuition

Toy datasets, no real-world messiness

The first course is called Machine Learning Foundations. It’s designed to be:

Beginner-first — written like I’m teaching a smart friend

Practical — you work with real datasets, in notebooks

Builder-oriented — you build a working prediction system from scratch

100% free

Everything is written from scratch (no scraped MOOCs), and designed to be intuitive, visual, and incremental. If you've been curious about ML but got turned off by linear algebra walls or half-baked tutorials, this might help.

Would love your feedback — especially from non-ML devs or curious builders trying to learn.

Thanks!
by llm_nerd | 2025-05-15 10:27:33+00:00
It should not be flagged. This ham-fisted application of a system prompt to mirror Elon's personal beliefs and agenda is a critically important lesson about these tools.

I thought it was newsworthy and earned criticism when Google performed "white erasure" and forced laughable diversity in its models, and similarly it's newsworthy when Elon is forcing his fringe beliefs on his model.
by imtringued | 2025-05-15 10:27:38+00:00
What you're talking about has absolutely nothing to do with the paper. It's not about jumps in context. It's about LLMs being biased towards producing a complete answer on first try, even when there isn't even enough information. When you provide them with additional information, they will stick with the originally wrong answer. This means that you need to frontload all information in the first prompt and if the LLM messes up, you will have to start from scratch. You can't do that with a human at all. There is no such thing as "single turn conversation" with humans. You can't reset the human to a past state.
by Koshima | 2025-05-15 10:28:20+00:00
I totally get where you’re coming from. One thing that has helped me is not just counting lines of code, but also using tools like Cursor (YC-backed) to get a sense of how my productivity stacks up against other developers. It’s a neat way to avoid the “just ship more code” mindset and focus more on efficient problem-solving.

I also find it useful to break projects into smaller, well-defined milestones. Instead of just aiming for a certain line count, I set targets like “implement the first API endpoint” or “get the first integration test passing”. This way, you’re not just pushing code but actually moving the project toward completion in a more structured way.

Curious if anyone else has tried using tools like Cursor or something similar for this?
by gf000 | 2025-05-15 10:29:18+00:00
Well, they are a generation ahead in many perspective than desktop UIs, so.

E.g. android/ios has better security than Windows/GNU Linux/MacOS, much more reliable suspend/wake functionality, much better battery management, etc.

Like it's a 50/50 chance my laptop with Win 11 will wake up fully charged or fully discharged in the morning, and whether it will be kind enough to actually be ready for work, or I can go brew a coffee before it's ready..
by michalu | 2025-05-15 10:29:18+00:00
For B2B I manually research ideal customers and manually reach out via cold email. I'd send a few hundred. If you don't get any buys from 200 emails sent to your target market you probably don't have a business.

Once I validate and start getting traction only then I start automating cold email, ads etc. Do not validate with automated cold email agency. You can't automate something well what aren't doing with success already manually. Nothing beats manually researching your prospects and writing up personalized email - only when you understand this process and you know how, where and when to find your ICP and what to look for and what to tell them only then you can automate this process.

You want to automate processes that work already. Not the other way around.

Built a few businesses with this approach and still works today in 2025.