MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrweasel | 2025-05-21 10:04:56+00:00
Thanks.

No the import of notes is not what I had in mind :-) I always want to be storing files locally, or on a network share. Having this being intended as a collaboration tool makes sense, but if I'm the sole user, then it's just another place to store my files, which can't be shared or accessed by any other tool. That's my objection, and why I question the usefulness of something like this. You're siloing of data, which makes no sense to me (well it doesn't, it's the only way this can really work in the browser).

My question about the usefulness is sincere. I truly don't get why anyone would want to work in the browser like this, but I also dislike Google Docs. I'm just not the target audience, so I struggle to see how or why something like this would be useful.

The functionality is really well done, I'd just wish it was a desktop application, and stored files on my hard drive.
by lhecker | 2025-05-21 10:05:42+00:00
Abstracting away the `assume_init` is a great idea! I think I could use something like that for the editor. The only concern I have is that the `read` function is templated on the parameter type. I'd ideally _really_ prefer it if I didn't need two copies of the same function to switch over `[u8]` and `[MaybeUninit<u8>]` due to different return types. [^1] I guess the approach could be tuned to avoid this?

Personally, I also like the simpler approach overall, compared to the `BorrowedBuf` trait, for the same reasons outlined in the article.

While this possibly solves parts of pain points that I had, what I meant to write is that in an ideal world I could write Rust while mostly not thinking about this issue much, if at all. Even with this approach, I'd still need to decide whether my API needs to take a `[u8]` or a `Buffer`, just in the mere off-chance that a caller may want to pass an uninitialized array further up in the call chain. This then requires making the call path generic for the buffer parameter which may end up duplicating any of the functions along the path, even though that's not really my intention by marking it as `Buffer`.

I think if there was a way to modify Rust so we can boldly state in writing "You may cast a `[MaybeUninit<T>]` into a `[T]` and pass it into a call _if_ you're absolutely certain that nothing reads from the slice", it would already go a long way. It may not make this more comfortable yet, but it would definitely take off a large part of my worries when writing such unsafe casts. That's basically what I meant with "occupy my mind": It's not that I wouldn't think about it at all, rather it just wouldn't be a larger concern for me anymore, for code where I know for sure that this requirement is fulfilled (i.e. similar to how I know it when writing equivalent C code).

Edit: jcranmer's suggestion of write-only references would solve this, I think? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44048450

[^1]: This is of course not a problem for a simple `read` syscall, but may be an issue for more complex functions, e.g. the UTF8 <> UTF16 converter API I suggested elsewhere in this thread, particularly if it's accelerated, the way simdutf is.
by ta1243 | 2025-05-21 10:06:00+00:00
That bridge is 4-rail, not 3-rail

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torne_River_Railway_Bridge#/me...

Even if you were to 4-rail every line, you'd potentially run into loading gauge issues (you would have to offset the current centre of the bogies, go too far one way and you collide with platforms, too far the other way and you collide with oncoming trains)
by oblio | 2025-05-21 10:06:48+00:00
The problem, as usual, is one of scale. Quantity has a quality all its own, and all that.

We maybe needed to go from 1 artist in 1 million people to 1 artist in 10 000 people. We do *not* need to go from 1 artist in 10 people.

And regarding "cheap fine clothes", that was sort of fine.

But what about when cars drive themselves (16.2 million persons - 10.3% of the U.S. labor force works in transportation)?

AND

What about when software mostly writes itself (4,4 million persons)?

AND

What about when stuff mostly manufactures itself (13 million persons)?

AND

... ?

(repeat ad-nauseam for every field upended right now by AI)

If you think MAGA was bad (MAGA being mostly caused by manufacturing jobs being moved away/automated) what do you think will happen when 40% of the population is unemployed and unemployable, forever?
by ryzvonusef | 2025-05-21 10:07:00+00:00
Arnaud Bertrand (creator of HouseTrip (sold to TripAdvisor)) explains in a twitter post that:

____

> At first, when I created the company and before Airbnb was even a thing, I used to pitch the company to the media and the general response I would get was almost one of contempt, as in "why would I belittle myself to write about your startup? And furthermore, who would be stupid enough to stay in an apartment when there are hotels? You guys have no future..." > And then Airbnb got launched and the American media started their thing, hyping the company like it was the greatest innovation since sliced bread, like they were national heroes, giving them hundreds of millions in free publicity. > That's when European media started to take notice. Not of us, god forbid, but of Airbnb. The concept was promoted by Silicon Valley, see... so now it was valid. > So I went back to pitch HouseTrip to European media. This time around I was met with a different kind of contempt: "So you guys are like Airbnb? Why would we cover a European copycat when we can just write about the real American original?" Luckily I'm not violent but lets say those moments really tested my civility > All in all, we arrived in the absolutely grotesque situation where, despite Airbnb not having yet set foot in Europe, they were already a cultural phenomenon there, promoted by European media, for free, when the European original - yours truly - had to spend millions on paid marketing (mostly to Google and Facebook, American companies) to achieve a small fraction of the brand recognition. > So there you have it, the dirty little secret behind Europe's lag. We're essentially witnessing a "colonization of the minds" whereby Europe has structurally internalized its technological inferiority, celebrating American startups while dismissing its own homegrown companies.

____

It's a long post, this was just the relevant snippet, i suggest people read it, they get into more detail regarding US/EU/China startup scene
by 000ooo000 | 2025-05-21 10:07:36+00:00
>It’s the same thing as an assembly programmer saying that OOP programmers don’t learn from OOP coding.

Not the same. Whether you are writing Assembly or Java, you have to determine and express your intent with high accuracy - that is a learned skill. Providing problem details to an LLM until it produces something that looks correct is not the same type of skill.

If that is the skill that the business world demands in 5 years, so be it, but arguing that it's simply the next step in the Assembly, C, Java progression makes no sense.
Show HN: Phare: A Safety Probe for Large Language Models
by dberenstein1957 | 2025-05-21 10:08:05+00:00
We've just published a benchmark and accompanying paper on arXiv that challenges conventional leaderboard-driven LLM evaluation.

Phare focuses on factual reliability, prompt sensitivity, multilingual support, and how models handle false premises like issues that actually matter when you're building serious applications.

Some insights:

- Preference scores ≠ factual correctness.

- Framing effects can cause models to miss obvious falsehoods.

- Safety metrics like sycophancy and stereotype reproduction show surprising results across popular models.

Would love feedback from the community.
by pona-a | 2025-05-21 10:09:15+00:00
Really? I recall installing it 3 years ago, and aside from some oddities with popups, it worked just fine. I think it was this script [0]. I don't know if they broke it, I switched to OpenSCAD, which meets my needs.

[0] https://github.com/cryinkfly/Autodesk-Fusion-360-for-Linux
by oblio | 2025-05-21 10:10:14+00:00
Ukraine wasn't in NATO and NATO members Baltics have not been attacked, even though they're a lot smaller and more vulnerable

The Western alliance is doing some horrible things worldwide, but your point of view regarding Eastern Europe is horribly mistaken. I'm fairly sure you have no idea what you're talking about, and you're probably not from there. I'd basically classify you as a tankie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

I'm doubly going to classify you as a tankie as you're dodging the question of WHO Eastern Europe was running from (and WHY).

Also another quick essay for 40 points: who has voluntarily joined Russian led alliances (except for Armenia, which is currently reconsidering its life choices).
by panstromek | 2025-05-21 10:11:51+00:00
It sure seems like that to me. I was pretty impressed by how easily I could run small Gemma on 7 year old laptop and get a decent chat experience.

I can imagine that doing some clever offloading to a normal programs and using the LLM as a sort of "fuzzy glue" for the rest could improve the efficiency on many common tasks.
by raddan | 2025-05-21 10:12:28+00:00
It is most definitely a thing, and that is how my job worked when I was at Microsoft, in three different roles. All of the senior people I worked for definitely could code (one of them was well-known in the memory management research space), and they would occasionally do so. But largely, they focused on the big picture, and virtually all of my interactions with them was over a whiteboard. I was very surprised when I first got there that they basically never wanted to put eyeballs directly on my code; they preferred to talk to me about it. As a junior person, developing the fluency to have whiteboard conversations was difficult. But when we’d leave the meetings I would have a much clearer idea about what I should do, and perhaps more importantly, what I should not do. In all of those projects, 100% of the code was written by me and other junior people.
by mrlkts | 2025-05-21 10:12:47+00:00
That specific question is not great for this purpose. 4o model with web search enabled: "As of May 2025, there is no ISO 9002:2023 standard. The ISO 9002 standard was officially withdrawn in 2000 when the ISO 9000 family underwent significant restructuring. Since then, ISO 9001 has been the primary standard for quality management systems (QMS), encompassing the requirements previously covered by ISO 9002."

tl;dr: It knows
by Ukv | 2025-05-21 10:13:20+00:00
The recent high level of funding (Stargate, HUMAIN, ...), seemingly prompted mostly by LLMs, could plausibly be an emperor's new clothes fear of missing out among investors - will have to wait and see how it pans out.

But for 2010s-era machine learning this article is talking about, I feel it largely already has been validated - from shunned and unfunded at the start of the decade to being the almost universal go-to for any NLP or computer vision task by the end. The article itself lists a few use-cases (protein folding, weather forecasting, drug discovery), and I think it's unlikely you've gone through the day without encountering at least a few more (maybe search engines query-understanding, language translation, generated video captions, OCR, or using a product that was scanned for defects).

Not that every ML method will work out first try when applied to a new problem, but it's far from the case that we're waiting 15 years hoping for someone to maybe find a use-case for the field.
by syrusakbary | 2025-05-21 10:13:42+00:00
Hey!

I'm Syrus, from Wasmer. I think the people from the Bytecode Alliance are still working on WASI, but are currently fully focused on WASIp3.

WASIp3 faces the same issues as normal WASI when compiling C libraries and apps: no thread or signals support, lacking compatibility with most of POSIX, with the added challenge that it also breaks compatibility with the original WASI.

At Wasmer we have been working on WASIX, which is a superset of WASI and adds support for the mentioned features: threads, signals, forking, subprocesses... and makes most of programs compile to Wasm easily (like Emscripten). The only con is that Wasmer is currently the only runtime that supports it (although we would love to have integration in more!).

We have been able to compile bash, CPython, PHP and many more running successfully without limitations.

Feel free to take a look here: https://wasix.org/
by baobun | 2025-05-21 10:14:30+00:00
It's been one day? There is some possibility of extraordinary circumstances (of which you can't possibly be aware at this point) explaining the situation that could paint things in a very different light.

Would you send a similar email to any of your other coworkers being missing with no contact for one workday?

BTW you need to blackbox names in te future, those green squiggles look reversible.
by virgilp | 2025-05-21 10:14:31+00:00
In chatgpt, it hallucinates an answer for me, but indeed both Phind & Perplexity identify the problem. It may take a few tries and of course there's no question that's guaranteed to work in getting any LLM-based service to hallucinate - but the ingredients are asking "a trick question" about something highly technical where there are plenty of adjacent search results.
by gloxkiqcza | 2025-05-21 10:15:23+00:00
> One can be confident that they wrote correct Java code without knowing what the JVM machine code output is

I'm sure there're some pretty major bugs in production code because someone used some Java functionality intuitively without understanding it fully and in some edge case it behaves differently than anticipated.

Of course this issue is much more prominent in LLM assisted coding but we're back to square one. The higher the level of abstraction provided by the tool, the more room for mistakes it leaves but the higher the productivity is. It's easier to avoid bugs of this type when using assembly vs when using Java.
by matsemann | 2025-05-21 10:17:59+00:00
Yes, Google is so, so, so bad at this. I even struggle with gemini often telling me it can't make images, until I tell it that it can, and then it does. I have no idea what's really supposed to be supported or not in gemini.

It is so confusing. Ok, I got gemini pro through workspace or something, but not everything is there? Sure, I can try aistudio, flow, veo, gemini etc to figure out what I can do where, but so bad UX. Just tried using gemini to create an image, definitely not the newest imagegen as the text was just marbled up. But I can't see which version I'm on, genious.

Edit: After clicking through lots of google products I'm still not able to find a single place I can actually try the new imagegen, despite the article claiming it's available today in X,Y,Z
by palmfacehn | 2025-05-21 10:18:05+00:00
I did this in the past, but I found that templates simplified the process. The same functions I use to populate/update elements can be reused on existing elements and newly cloned template elements. It can be done in JS by returning strings of unpopulated elements, but then my display is further mixed with logic.

I like to create the HTML and CSS as I'd like it with test data, then just wrap that with <template> tags. Easy to preview without triggering function calls or pasting it into code.

Probably not important, but as I recall I think there was some minor overhead in translating from a JS String to an Element.
by shmeeed | 2025-05-21 10:18:09+00:00
>I tried plugging these in and it still comes out as a 6-wheel commercial bus has several times the tire wear as a 4-wheel light truck, rather than being the same.

Pardon me if I ask the obvious question, but did you divide your result by the average number of people moved? Because that's the actual utility of mass vs. individual transport. I would find it rather surprising if tire wear was the one measure were buses didn't win out.
by ta1243 | 2025-05-21 10:18:43+00:00
The wealthiest 10% of America have increased the ownership of wealth from about 40% in the 1970s to 70% today, with no sign of slowing.

A typical HN techbro may not care because they're likely in the wealthiest 35 million, but the only way for the top 3 million / 1% to continue growing at the same rate once the bottom 90% have nothing more to lose is to take the wealth from the 32 million between 1% and 10%.

It took 50 years for the bottom 90% to halve the ownership of wealth in the US. Once they are fully tapped out the only way the 1% will continue to increase their wealth is taking it from the 10%. Then the 0.1% from the 1%.
by JustFinishedBSG | 2025-05-21 10:19:09+00:00
Kind of expensive but there isn't actually a lot of choice for fonts with matching math fonts so for my PhD thesis I used Minion 3 + MinionMath.

For mono fonts there are a lot of nice choices but I used PragmataPro for no other reasons that I own it and it provided a nice readable contrast.

Otherwise for the free options, Palatino+mathpazo or StixTwoText + StixTwoMath are quite good options. Honestly anything but ComputerCM is a good option; it's imho not a very good font nowadays; it's way too thin. It was designed with the assumption that it will be printed on old, fairly bad, printers with significant ink overspill.
by uecker | 2025-05-21 10:19:34+00:00
I do not find it so easy to accidentally run into UB in C if you follow some basic rules. The exceptions are null pointer dereferences, out-of-bounds accesses for arrays, and signed overflow, all those can be turned into run-time traps. The rules include no pointer arithmetic, no type casts, and having some ownership strategy. None of those is difficult to implement and where exceptions are made, one should treat it carefully similar to using "unsafe" in Rust.
Show HN: We saw a lot of issues with Stripe so we built an alternative
by saasgtmguy | 2025-05-21 10:20:11+00:00
Stripe is often seen as the gold standard for international and cross-border payments.

But in reality, many founders, especially those outside the US, have a different experience: Merchants are frequently offboarded without much explanation. Stripe isn’t available or fully supported in many countries. Even when available, setting up a legal entity, handling tax compliance, or managing FX fees can be a huge overhead.

We built Dodo Payments to solve exactly this. (https://www.dodopayments.com)

It’s a Merchant of Record (MoR) platform designed to help digital founders and indie hackers sell globally without worrying about regulatory complexity, payment infrastructure, or compliance headaches.

What we offer: Global payment gateway access (even in Stripe-restricted regions) One-click tax compliance (VAT, GST, sales tax, etc.) No need to set up local legal entities Revenue settlement in local currency Checkout stack optimized for global conversions

We’ve seen rapid growth in the last few months, and it's clear this is a problem affecting thousands of small, independent builders trying to scale from non-Western countries.

Our early adopters love that they can now “just sell” while we take care of everything else. The community has been amazing in supporting us so far, and we’d love to hear feedback from more indie devs, product builders, and global SaaS founders on HN.
by vintermann | 2025-05-21 10:20:21+00:00
Just shows the futility of this approach. Yes, you can find words, but do you use them? Is that a filly to you, or is it really just a horse?

An extreme example is the "it's called a zygyzgy of ptarmigans"-type alternative words for flocks of specific birds in English, which are basically made up and unused.
by amalcon | 2025-05-21 10:20:27+00:00
> It isn't ignoring the problem, it's describing a solution to it: Enlightened self-interest.

"Everybody just does the right thing" is not a solution you can implement in the real world.

> You keep describing it as a tactical error to use a strategy that amounts to hedging.

Maybe this is the source of the confusion: an intermediate score is not an optimal way to hedge. A hedge is a decision that offsets potential losses in the event of a bad outcome. No vote configuration on a single question can do that. It can, in some cases, reduce the chance of a bad outcome. In the best case, it does so by also reducing the chance of a good outcome (in favor of a moderate outcome). But crucually, each point affects each outcome in the same way as each other point.

So, by what rational reason am I choosing an intermediate value? Why would I prefer (in a contrived example, but all cases are linear) a 20% chance of both the good outcome and the bad outcome over both a 25% chance and a 15% chance? Moving from 4 points to 5 always does the same thing as moving from 5 to 6. It's linear, so the local maxima and minima are at the ends.

> There is no single "most important value".

You are making a linear probabilistic trade-off between two values. One of them must be more important than the other in order for any score assignment to be better than any other. Either being more important than the other will drive the score to one extreme.

> But why would you admit even this deficiency just to avoid allowing yourself to specify a score instead?

It's not something I want people to actually do. It's a reduction ad absurdum. Your approach does the same thing as a random approach, so - barring deception reasons - it must be a mistake.
Ask HN: Pending/failed card transactions for the exact balance of my account
by ta73930 | 2025-05-21 10:20:36+00:00
I'm in the UK and have a regular payment to my orthodontist for $385, which works out as about £290 at the moment.

Yesterday my balance was £170.68 and I got a pending transaction to my ortho for £170.68 which meant I couldn't spend anything. (I don't have an arranged overdraft).

My ortho couldn't see this transaction on their end.

Later on, my ortho tried the usual amount (~£290) and it got declined.

I can now see another pending payment to them for £245.80, which was also my exact available balance at the time.

I've spoken to the fraud center and the person insisted this was just some kind of coincidence. I called my bank, and the person I spoke to there admitted that this was highly unlikely, but also didn't have any explanation for it. He said that in order to do this, the company requesting the payment would have to know my balance.

The fact that they are requesting dollar amounts makes it even weirder, but apparently at my bank the £245.80 shows as a request for something like $325.29, and I think he said the £170.68 one was a request in pounds, although this could have been a miscommunication between us.

What could be causing this? Is there some component within the card system that's seeing these transactions and min()ing them with my currently available balance? That seems unlikely but also the only possible explanation here.

The card is a Visa debit card with Co-Operative Bank.
by jampekka | 2025-05-21 10:20:47+00:00
> just handwaving about how USD's status as a global currency somehow makes trade deficits inevitable despite simple facts available that US had a surplus trade balance 50 years ago, when the USD has been considered the global / reserve currency for over 60 years.

US has had two trade surplus years since the USD essentially replaced gold as the reserve asset: 1973 and 1975. The reserve currency status is the primary reason for the practically constant deficit. During the Bretton Woods era US ran consistent surplus.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/t...
by Filligree | 2025-05-21 10:20:54+00:00
Just don’t put unwrap in library code, please. Not if it can possibly happen, bearing in mind that you can make mistakes.

I like my background threads to be infallible. If they panic, then chances are nothing will notice and the rest of the program will solely seize up.

I might have agreed with more of this article if panics actually crashed the program, but in multithreaded Rust that’s rarely the case.