MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xingped | 2025-05-24 06:56:36+00:00
Yes, you're not wrong, but also consider that kids generally lack differing perspectives and knowledge of other situations. As an adult you've heard or seen other variations of how kids grew up and can better compare them. It's easy for kids to not understand how their situation actually compares to other situations they've heard about or imagined in their head. That's not to mean they shouldn't be asked, but like all things, take it with a grain of salt.
by eastbound | 2025-05-24 06:57:07+00:00
We’re also too many people on Earth to continue living in a green field world. Fantasizing about freedom and the absence of tracks is a Western thing; I don’t think you can afford trial-and-error paths or separating from the cohort of applicants when you live in Singapore, Taiwan, or China. Kalzumeus had to show his bride’s mother his revenue sheet before asking her hand, because startup creator is second to homeless in the humiliation ranking.
by magic_hamster | 2025-05-24 06:57:34+00:00
Hitting CTRL+F and searching for AI all over the piece, there are 0 mentions. I would have loved to read what a writer thinks of the coming AI takeover in creative writing.

Virtually all the jobs mentioned can already be replaced with AI for a fraction of the cost.

One thing is clear from this text: she can definitely write. I wonder what her erotic stories read like even though I'm not exactly the demographic they were aiming for.
by browsejobs5 | 2025-05-24 06:58:02+00:00
Actually, AI does not really think in machine code. It learns by looking at the kinds of code humans usually write, like Python or Java, which are much easier to understand and work with. Writing directly in machine code, those ones and zeros, is very complicated and specific to the hardware, so it is not really practical even for AI. High level code is like a common language everyone understands, making it easier for AI to help write useful and flexible programs. Plus, since AI trains on tons of this high level code, that is where it is naturally strongest.
by josephg | 2025-05-24 06:59:21+00:00
> Rooting for your friends is great. But people sometimes bond over wishing harm for their foes. Shared trauma does that.

Yeah this is way too common. And it’s not just trauma which does it. I think it’s its own psychological trap. I think the trap is a self reinforcing cycle of a few thoughts:

1. Other people are bad at things. Look at all the things others do which have flaws! You must be better than all those dolts.

2. You tell yourself you could do something better - but if you try, maybe it’ll have flaws too. Then you’ll be just as bad as anyone else. Uh oh.

3. So you don’t do anything creative, or take responsibility for anything. But you need a reason to tell yourself as to why you’re not doing anything.

4. It must be because other, idiot people stop you. Change is too hard. Doing anything would be “fighting against the system” or something. See point 1.

And the trap is closed. The only way to escape it is to do stuff that you’re bad at. And if you do that, you’ll find all the faults in your own work and feel terrible about yourself.

I think the bottom level of almost any company is packed with people who have this mindset. It’s a disaster on every level - personal and professional. And it’s quite resilient and contagious. People like that are always a little afraid that somebody will call them on it. So they need others to agree with them that staying small is the smart move.

Avoiding them is definitely a smart move. I’ve taken to sometimes needling people like that, just to rattle the cage and see what happens. “You’re so right about those flaws! We’d love your help fixing some of them?” / “I think your idea is wonderful! So what you’re saying is if we got Bob on side, you think we could do it? Let me help - I’ll set up a meeting. With the two of us, I’m sure he’ll come around!”

I generally hate being too positive. But I make an exception for this kind of subtle supportive bullying. This awful mindset can’t survive in the sunlight. It’s fun to see what happens!
by bruce511 | 2025-05-24 06:59:26+00:00
It is Stripe's problem to figure out, and it seems they have (to their satisfaction. )

>> they shouldn't get to punt by saying "guilty until proven innocent".

That's certainly an opinion, and almost certainly a common small-customer opinion.

Unfortunately in the real world, that's not how it works. In the real world businesses fo not operate with a "innocent until proven guilty" attitude. Quite the reverse.

Pretty much any security starts with "guilty" and moves up from there. For example my building has a buzzer, not an open door. I assume all visitors are nefarious unless someone in the building vouches for them by buzzing them in.

A small business has scope to individually vet each customer. For high value transactions we do due diligence (on both sides) looking for possible problems.

A business like Stripe at scale necessarily doesn't behave like two individuals would. You can wish it so, but that's not enough.

Understanding this imbalance between the size of the consumer and the size of the supplier is helpful. (It's one reason big customers tend to favor big suppliers. )

I too wish that my bank could bend to my needs and requirements. I wish the world treated me in good faith assuming only good intentions. Alas thats not the world I live in, and understanding that has made me more content.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-24 07:00:17+00:00
Achem, Ubuntu had ads before, I am not sure if this is still the case, but I would not be surprised.

Why the down-vote? Do I need to flood HN with links? It actually had ads. Go ahead and search for it (or ask me), there were ads in more than one places. It even had ads in its motd (and gnome notifications, and somewhere else I forgot)... I do not care if it is your favorite Linux distribution, it ACTUALLY had ads (and might still do) in more than one places.

So "not getting cluttered with ads" is not so certain. Only if they got rid of all ads, but the future is still not certain with regarding to it, as they have done it before without blinking an eye.

See some links https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44079458 for Amazon ads.

Also https://askubuntu.com/questions/1083504/how-to-disable-the-a... for bit.ly links in motd.

If you need more, I am willing to provide.
by cryptonector | 2025-05-24 07:00:34+00:00
> how do you find the code that will run when they do fail?

That's part of the point: it's dynamic code injection. You can use shallow- or deep-binding strategies for implementing this just as with any dynamic feature. Dynamic means just that bindings are introduced by call frames of callers or callers of callers, etc., so yes, notionally you have to traverse the stack.

> And this cannot be done statically (i.e. your IDE can't jump to the definition),

Correct, because this is a _dynamic_ feature.

However, you are expected not to care. Why? Because you're writing pure code but for the effects it invokes, but those effects could be pure or impure depending on context. Thus your code can be used in prod and hooked up to a mock for testing, where the mock simply interposes effects other than real IO effects.

It's just dependency injection.

You can do this with plain old monads too you know, and that's a much more static feature, but you still need to look way up the call stack to find where _the_ monad you're using might actually be instantiated.

In other words, you get some benefits from these techniques, but you also pay a price. And the price and the benefit are two sides of the same coin: you get to do code injection that lets you do testing and sandboxing, but it becomes less obvious what might be going on.
by 8n4vidtmkvmk | 2025-05-24 07:00:46+00:00
Yep. 17 year old me working alongside a 70 year old dude working the same job as me... I knew that's not what I wanted for my life.

That said, I think I've still wafted through life on tracks. I just concluded that FAANG was the next track after uni so I made it happen. Not sure I'm happy any more though. Maybe I need to reinvent myself.
A Fast, In-Browser Decimal ↔ Balanced Ternary Converter (Handles 21M+ Entries)
by VBproDev | 2025-05-24 07:01:03+00:00
Balanced ternary is a lesser-known but fascinating number system where each digit can be -1, 0, or 1. Instead of using -1, the symbol T is often used. So, for example, T10 means: (-1 × 9) + (1 × 3) + (0 × 1) = -6.

It’s a balanced system because the digits are symmetrically distributed around zero. This makes certain computations, comparisons, and even some hardware designs cleaner — and it's an interesting area of research in computer science and mathematics.

While researching Goldstein's theorem and analyzing number distributions in balanced ternary for research, I needed to convert large datasets between decimal and balanced ternary. But I couldn't find any converters online, let alone something which can convert in bulk

So... I built one!

Decimal ↔ Balanced Ternary Converter Live demo: https://vbprodev.github.io/decimal-and-balanced-ternary-converter/ Source: https://github.com/vbprodev/decimal-and-balanced-ternary-converter Key Features:

Convert single numbers or bulk ranges (e.g., 1,1000 or T0,1T1) Handles 21 million+ entries using Web Workers — the UI stays smooth Output to clipboard for small sets, or .txt file download for large ones Fully responsive and accessible interface

Built with:

HTML, SCSS, TypeScript Web Workers for async processing No backend — everything runs entirely in your browser

The aim is let you convert non standard number systems (like this one) into standard one's like base 10, base 8, or base 16
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-24 07:01:19+00:00
There were some volunteers working on this topic that kind of backed away from this topic. But they got quite far with this.

What I don't get is why Valve isn't backing such efforts financially. There are millions of wealthy mac owners out there with pretty capable hardware. That should translate into quite a bit of steam purchases.

I just got a shiny m4 max laptop. I run Steam on a much less capable crappy old Samsung laptop (via manjaro). Would I run that on my mac if I could? Yes. Would I be tempted to spend a bit of cash on some fun games. Probably. Am I doing that currently? No, because that crappy old Samsung is too old and most games don't run on it. And I'm not in a mood to buy a dedicated gaming machine. I might at some point but just not a priority. But I don't mind dropping a few euros on a game to entertain myself once in a while.
by Manfred | 2025-05-24 07:02:37+00:00
SteamOS actually does the opposite.

It does not use any of the popular desktop environments (unless you drop into Desktop Mode). It heavily curates hardware, kernel, and drivers to keep the platform from breaking and install with sane (performance) defaults for gaming. It doesn't rely on a common package manager.

Beside a Steam Deck I also use a Linux PC for gaming and even with 25 years of Linux experience I still struggle sometimes to keep hardware acceleration working after a driver update, sometimes spending an evening of troubleshooting instead of gaming. Certain parts of the desktop environment sometimes lock up to the point where I have to SSH into the PC to fix it. It's like owning a vintage car in a certain way.

And yes, I prefer all of that over the Windows experience, but it's not seamless and not simple enough for anyone to just jump into.
Show HN: The Scrawl-canvas developer Runbook
by rikroots | 2025-05-24 07:04:10+00:00
The advancement of LLMs, and the profound changes that they have unleashed in the way developers approach coding tasks, feel at times like a tsunami. This came to a head when I realised that people trying to use my Javascript library for working with the canvas element were encountering a fundamental problem: LLMs simply don't know about, or comprehend, the purpose of the library or how to work with it to deliver projects/products.

My solution to this problem is to document everything I can think of about the library. Maybe if I can get enough coherent data into future LLM training data, they will (eventually) stop hallucinating such garbage code for users trying to use the library. I also used this new data, alongside some structured investigations of the library with two LLM products, to come up with a summary document[1] which users can feed into an LLM session to at least correct the worst assumptions current LLM iterations make about the library.

I don't expect to see any useful results emerge from this work for at least 12-18 months. But the work has to be done. I think this sort of documentation is yet another burden on the solo developer working on a pet side-project in the open software space ... but I see no other solution for the radically changed developer environment we suddenly face.

[1] - https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas/blob/v8/LLM-summ...
by Ygg2 | 2025-05-24 07:04:13+00:00
Linux biggest problem as a consumer OS was rarely tech and mostly just the schizoid amount of options, and lack of consensus on what to use.

In essence Linux suffers from a Lisp curse. Whenever two OS nerds disagreed on something they made their own slightly different distro.

This means wasted effort on multiple DE, window managers, app flavors, installed libraries. To this day, almost no two distros can agree on baseline libraries every Linux must have.
Show HN: A microsite with 100 ways to take a break (tiny, fast, no ads)
by bingbing123 | 2025-05-24 07:04:18+00:00
Hi HN,

I made a lightweight little site that lists 100 simple ways to take a break — things like “go outside,” “breathe,” or “draw a line.” It’s minimal, fast, and works on mobile. No login, no ads, no tracking.

https://100-ways-to-take-a-break.com

This started as a personal side project to fight burnout and screen fatigue. Now I’m sharing it in case others find it helpful too.

Would love any ideas for how to improve it, or more break suggestions you use in your day.thanks
by magic_hamster | 2025-05-24 07:05:20+00:00
Windows have definitely lost me. I grew up on Windows (and DOS...) and while there was always loud criticism pointed at Microsoft, personally I loved everything about Windows from 98 to windows 7. I even liked Windows ME (it's really cool, I swear, and it introduced Movie Maker!) and Vista (best Aero theme to date probably) and obviously XP and 7 as the big winners.

But with 10 and 11 Windows became a massive adware, user experience plummeted, and the OS constantly gets in my way.

The only good thing about Windows in 2025 is wsl. So what does that say?

I tried daily driving Mint and I was instantly filled with nostalgia and appreciation for how the OS really tries to help me do whatever I need, gets out of the way, doesn't ask for anything or makes product "suggestions". It's so smooth and simple compared to Windows right now.

Of course it helps that by now I have more than enough Linux experience, but I would still recommend Mint over Windows to most people.
by petepete | 2025-05-24 07:05:25+00:00
I suspect it's not about Gaming not working well on Windows but that gamers are likely enthusiasts and Windows 11:

* is difficult/impossible to install without tying up a Microsoft Account

* has ads baked in

* is trying to force feed everyone Copilot when most people just don't care

* comes preinstalled with bloat

It's a pity. There's a great OS hiding in there somewhere. A consumer version of LTSC would probably make gamers very happy.
Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?
by pella_may | 2025-05-24 07:05:46+00:00
I'm a software engineer with a solid full-stack background and web development. With all the noise around LLMs and AI, I’m undecided between two paths:

1. Invest time in learning the internals of AI/LLMs, maybe even switching fields and working on them

2. Continue focusing on what I’m good at, like building polished web apps and treat AI as just another tool in my toolbox

I’m mostly trying to cut through the hype. Is this another bubble that might burst or consolidate into fewer jobs long-term? Or is it a shift that’s worth betting a pivot on?

Curious how others are approaching this—especially folks who’ve made a similar decision recently.
by mjevans | 2025-05-24 07:06:13+00:00
I suspect you're correct about basic / true research and discovery of 'the new'.

Also probably about that US Gov funding. I've heard it's more about knowing how to write a grant than it is about being worthy of getting one. Better direction, better active identification of candidates (instead of the passive system that's biased towards large players), better stability. All of those would help.

However, there's a _lot_ of stuff that would be within reach, were only enough mass manufacture involved to drive down the adoption cost and break through the catch 22. Many things only need for gathering the correct sort of people, giving them enough room to work on a clear goal, and seeing where things really are.

The big business problems with that are figuring out if the return is plausibly worth the investment, and feeding the baby long enough that it can become a working adult.
by oliwarner | 2025-05-24 07:06:40+00:00
"Therapeutic index" is a strange number to worry about. Those index scores are the balance between efficacy and toxicity.

Acetaminophen is an effective analgesic, just toxic in large doses. It's perfect for lower intensity pain. It's non-addictive, doesn't have long term issues like NSAIDs. It's popular for a reason.
by Max-q | 2025-05-24 07:07:02+00:00
I liked the piece on corruption. You say it’s not everyone, it’s the system. I think it might be the culture, not the system? It has become the culture of the country to think that way. This is something I’m often thinking about, how can this be changed? How can a leader say “we as a country have to change. We need to change our culture, think of corruption as illegal and destructive” , and get the citizens on board with it. Because, with my, unfortunately limited, knowledge about Africa, I have understood that in many countries a government employee can’t make a living of their salary. The position is a position enabling taking bribes, and that’s what’s putting food on the table. When it’s that ingrained, how is a transformation possible? Where to start?

One idea I’ve had, is transformation via a system similar to corruption, but regulated. If you go to a government office, you don’t pay a bribe, but you pay some kind of tip to the representative. And that tip is listed on a “menu” and is reported to the employer, and a small tax is paid. The amounts are set at a level around the commonly known bribe paid today.

Then, year by year, those tips are reduced (or stay the same, not adjusted for inflation), while the salary is increased. This is possible due to the small tip tax.

Doing this while information campaigns are running on TV, internet, schools, and so on, continuously.

Let’s say this is a 20 year project, with a clear goal of a higher level of civilization, imprinting in people that this good and this will make life better for you, your children and grandchildren.

I hope that your country will be able to fix the problem.
by hnaccount_rng | 2025-05-24 07:07:06+00:00
But that resonance is a form of surprise. You are just using different words for the same context. At the same time: You are correct in the sense, that this "surprise" is completely ignored by today's LLMs. They only use this in training mode and not for continuous learning. Whether one can find a sufficiently useful definition of "surprise" to use auxiliary "learning systems" (vector DBs or system prompts) has yet to be shown
by pjmlp | 2025-05-24 07:07:55+00:00
Coding since 1986, and what I see is the dream of CASE tooling finally coming true, eventually as AI matures, assuming we aren't getting through yet another AI cycle that will stabilize until the next wave, I see ourselves writing requirements documents in a UML kind of way (in spirit, doesn't need to be boxes and arrows) for AI minions to actually do the work with one third of current team sizes.

The other two thirds can search for something else, just like the factory workers when robots took over most factory roles.

The remaining one third, are the folks doing the jobs robots can't yet do, or doing their maintenance.

Software factories are no different from physical ones, in this regard, a few iluminaries will be able to profit from AI, everyone else needs to re-train themselves.
by yawpitch | 2025-05-24 07:08:21+00:00
If you were taught the sum total of the publicly available text on the Internet, would you speak machine code as your native tongue?

Or, let’s put this slightly differently… your underlying operating system speaks synapse discharge potentials mediated over chemicals like seratonin, but you’ve learned mainly in English… why don’t you write me a poem in excited hippocampus?

These things don’t think, they don’t understand what they’re doing, and they haven’t got the slightest clue that machine code and, say, Ruby even are related, except through a vague N-dimensional vector that averages over the fact that humans relate the two more than they do butterflies and industrial lubricant.
by godelski | 2025-05-24 07:09:24+00:00
I'm not sure what you're going on about. I logged in, and the 3rd model (1st non anime model) is CyberRealistic Pony. Without the filters practically every example is NSFW (>9/10 of the images). Are you trying to say that these images are not frequently based on real people?

I don't mean just trained on. I mean there's a ScarJo lookalike front and center.

If you're expecting the LoRA attached, I guess you can go with one of those "AI Characters" and that's at least feigning compliance. But come on, you can hide the LoRAs that were used too. But come on... the models themselves ingest a lot of porn photos and celebrity photos. You really think this is going to stop someone from just describing the celebrity and getting their nude? Don't be so dense. You aren't fooling anyone here
by mnahkies | 2025-05-24 07:09:58+00:00
I'm still haunted by a bug caused by the JSON serializer our C# apps were using emitting bigints as JSON numbers, only for the JavaScript consumers to mangle them silently.

Kinda blows my mind that the accepted behavior is to just overflow and not raise an exception.

I try to stick to strings for anything that's not a 32 bit int now.
by neom | 2025-05-24 07:10:31+00:00
I'm going through a really really difficult time right now, 3 major areas of my life have broken down simultaneously over the past five months. I was ranting to this guy I've known for years about it (who is very successful but was once jr to me at work) - I would have called him a "good friend" - he was drunk and giggled out something along the lines of "makes me feel strong" - I reacted as you would expect "uh.. really?". We got into a bit, and talked it out (he basically explained it was normal, hence I then went to research if that is true or not), I can see where it sits in his personality now, and I don't think he and I will be friends anymore.
by cryptonector | 2025-05-24 07:12:10+00:00
It's the same as with monads:

1) Testing. Write pure code with "effects" but, while in production the effects are real interactions with the real world, in testing they are mocked. This allows you to write pure code that does I/O, as opposed to writing pure code that doesn't do I/O and needs a procedural shell around it that does do the I/O -- you get to write tests for more of your code this way.

2) Sandboxing. Like in (1), but where your mock isn't a mock but a firewall that limits what the code can do.

(2) is a highly-desirable use-case. Think of it as a mitigation for supply-chain vulnerabilities. Think of log4j.

Both of these are doable with monads as it is. Effects can be more ergonomic. But they're also more dynamic, which complicates the implementations. Dynamic features are always more costly than static features.