MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trollbridge | 2025-05-06 01:15:15+00:00
America provides food stamps that provide groceries to those who need it.

However, I'm not sure it is the responsibility of a "decent modern society" to provide free quality meals to the populace. How far does this go? Does the government need to run restaurants? Vouchers to use at restaurants? I'm not convinced restaurants are even serving necessarily "quality meals".

I think a program providing groceries is a good idea, with some additional support for the rare cases of people who are completely unable to prepare meals from groceries.
by dinfinity | 2025-05-06 01:16:21+00:00
> However, since we have NOT created such a simulation, we are either in the FIRST real existence, OR the last in line of simulations which have not yet created one. So the chance go down from infinite to 1 that we ARE in one, to 50-50 that we are NOT.

This is like saying that the chance of winning the lottery is 50%: Either you win or you lose. I hope further explanation of why this is incorrect is not necessary.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-06 01:16:43+00:00
Not quite. The argument then becomes about pointing out that our accounting systems are stupid, brutish and terrible at modelling second order consequences - social, economic, even moral.

In fact they seem designed to hide these consequences, both good and bad. The features we tag profits and losses are right out front, while other important features are labelled "externalities" and essentially ignored.

This is very obvious in the differences between US and other Western attitudes to infrastructure spending. In the EU, public transport is heavily subsidised. It isn't expected to be profitable because it provides both direct and indirect returns.

No one rational - who isn't a chef - expects their fridge or cooker to be a profit source. Big public infra projects are no different. They're a kind of giant public appliance. You buy them to provide a service.

In the US and UK, the goal of infrastructure spending is usually to create private profits. This certainly creates returns for a small class of people, but it only seems rational because it's pretending other kinds of returns don't exist.
by dml2135 | 2025-05-06 01:17:12+00:00
> I am still trying to sort out why experiences are so divergent. I've had much more positive LLM experiences while coding than many other people seem to, even as someone who's deeply skeptical of what's being promised about them. I don't know how to reconcile the two.

I am also trying to sort this out, but I'm probably someone you'd consider to be on the other, "anti-LLM" side.

I wonder if part of this is simply level of patience, or, similarly, having a work environment that's chill enough to allow for experimentation?

From my admittedly short attempts to use agentic coding so far, I usually give up pretty quickly because I experience, as others in the thread described, the agent just spinning its wheels or going off and mangling the codebase like a lawnmower.

Now, I could totally see a scenario where if I spent time tweaking prompts, writing rule files, and experimenting with different models, I could improve that output significantly. But this is being sold to me as a productivity tool. I've got code to write, and I'm pretty sure I can write it fairly quickly myself, and I simply don't have time at my start up to muck around with babysitting an AI all day -- I have human junior engineers that need babysitting.

I feel like I need to be a lot more inspired that the current models can actually improve my productivity in order to spend the time required to get there. Maybe that's a chicken-or-egg problem, but that's how it is.
by omneity | 2025-05-06 01:18:03+00:00
Serverless in the context of Postgres means to decouple storage and compute, so you could scale compute "infinitely" without setting up replica servers. This is what Neon offers, where you can just keep hitting their endpoints with your pg client and it should just take whatever load (in principle) and bill you per request.

Supabase gives you a server that runs classic Postgres in a process. Scaling in this scenario means you increase your server's capacity, with a potential downtime while the upgrade is happening.

You are confusing _managed_ Postgres for _serverless_.

Others in the serverless Postgres space:

- https://www.orioledb.com/ (pg extension)

- https://www.thenile.dev/ (pg "distribution")

- https://www.yugabyte.com/ (not emphasizing serverless but their architecture would allow for it)
by LordGrignard | 2025-05-06 01:18:07+00:00
This exact same book has been modified to also help effortlessly quit porn. I say quit because its what will be understood the most easily by majority of people but it is in fact not quitting since quitting implies there's something valuable in porn. there isn't. its escaping the addiction. Honestly its hands down one of the best methods to escape the addiction and besides you don't have anything to lose! either you successfully break free from the addiction or you stay the same (which doesn't happen from experience but its written to convince you to read it.) https://read.easypeasymethod.org
by temp0826 | 2025-05-06 01:18:44+00:00
A family member fell for this while trying to recover their hacked fb account. I was around and caught wind of the call and some of the absurd steps (absurd to me, anyways) they were proposing and pulled the plug on the "support" call. The phone number was in what seemed to be a cached result of a bad search or something. '"Call us at xxx-xxxx..." not found' is what I saw. (Finding a real support number is either difficult or impossible, which makes this a good trap)
by TacticalCoder | 2025-05-06 01:18:48+00:00
Browsers allows corporations to prevent DoH and force DNS through company-owned DNS servers:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/dns-over-https

I use these settings on all my browsers to prevent DoH and make sure traffic goes through my Pi (I run unbound directly on the Pi though, not Pi-Hole: in my experience unbound is a bit harder to set up initially but it's also more powerful than Pi-Hole... For example unbound accepts wildcards in blocklists).

It's not incompatible with also blocking, at the firewall level, all known DoH servers of course.

Nor is it incompatible with forcing your router to also use your Pi as a DNS.
by avmich | 2025-05-06 01:19:00+00:00
The Starship in non-reusable stage didn't get to orbit purely to avoid problems with deorbiting, should they happen.

Energiya rocket, a Saturn-V class launcher which flew twice in 1980-s, deliberately was not getting to orbital speed, for the same reason - don't need to pollute the orbit in the case deorbiting burn fails. Starship has a disadvantage that it's not that easy to release the payload, so Starship has first to get to full orbit, and then take time to release the payload, and then deorbit, and we can have problems there with what to do with Starship which malfunctioned on the deorbiting stage. However to just get to orbit Starship needs to work a few seconds longer than it did already several times - a rather small change.

So it's not quite accurate to accuse them "they didn't get the easy part of getting to orbit done".
by dahart | 2025-05-06 01:19:44+00:00
I see the problem is I used your $5M number which is NYC, and divided by the state budget. However, I don’t think the $5M number is referring to the total cost of providing lunch, and that’s what you’re comparing it to in your calculation. Apples, oranges. Because the schools are already providing free and subsidized lunches, the additional cost isn’t that much and I’m not off by a factor of 150. I am wrong, but not by that much. And I still stand by what I said - even if the total addition cost is 3%, which it’s not, and even if I was off by 150x, which I’m not, the outcome still points at lunch being cheap in the big picture. And even if it does cost more, it doesn’t explain why we’ve decided to make families pay directly for lunch when we provide all the rest, right? I am agreeing with your top point that we (the US) ought to just provide the lunch as part of the elementary school education.
by apsurd | 2025-05-06 01:19:47+00:00
Very thought provoking reply. #3 sounds the most sticky to me, in the product sense that you'd build "your own LLM/agent" and plug it other services. I heard this on a product podcast [1], think of it like Okta SSO integration: access controls for your personal/sensitive LLM stuff vs all other services trying to get you to use their LLM.

#5 stands out as well as a substantial barrier.

The rest to me our sticky, but no more uniquely sticky than any other service that retains data. Like the switching cost of email or a browser. It does stick but not insurmountable and once the switch is made, it's like why did I wait so long? (I'm a Safari user!)

Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful reply.

[1] https://www.reforge.com/podcast/unsolicited-feedback/the-gre...
by mdaniel | 2025-05-06 01:21:25+00:00
Lucky you, you still can as it's Apache 2 https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/blob/release-8516/LICEN...

I haven't studied the CLA situation in order to know if a rug pull is on the table but Tofu and Valkey have shown that where there's a will there's a way
by rufus_foreman | 2025-05-06 01:22:13+00:00
This is a problem. If you roll out a program to deal with an extraordinary circumstance, some people think it should go on forever even when the extraordinary circumstance is over. They think it should be a welfare benefit forever.

Next pandemic, no government programs. None. We've seen how it goes.

No benefits next time. People just try to turn it into eternal government welfare programs.

I don't want eternal government welfare programs to deal with temporary problems. Next time, no. No "temporary" government programs.
by r0fl | 2025-05-06 01:23:16+00:00
I absolutely hate running, my cardio sucks and I like to lift heavy multiple times per week.

But when I run I don’t bring anything, no music no phone just a watch to track speed and time.

I get all my best thinking done during those runs. I run slow and it hurts and it never improves but I go for 1-2 hours just so I can get more disconnected thinking done
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-06 01:24:11+00:00
> it would cost more to make it free for everyone

That's assuming everyone would sign up for the free lunch. We have 2 kids in public schools and pack their lunches even though we could sign them up for free lunch (our state makes it available to all families). We're not alone in that either. (We're also not rich, but we put a high priority on healthy food.)
by bee_rider | 2025-05-06 01:24:17+00:00
It is worth keeping in mind that the broader effects might still be positive. But, I think the original poster was just asking about the direct cost of determining who gets the free lunches (that’s why they frame it in terms of the overhead).

While I agree that a full analyst of the social benefit would be better, and I bet it would almost certainly end up being a net positive (and also, the possibility that kids are just not getting fed because of record-keeping screw-ups, missed paperwork, or incomplete programs is just unconscionable), the question the asked about the overhead does have the benefit of being a lot more answerable and direct.
by mylesp | 2025-05-06 01:24:41+00:00
A solution that I have seen implemented and discussed is a flat, very low fare. High enough to keep people off public transit that are disrespectful of it, but low enough to allow almost anyone to take it thus increasing ridership. An added bonus is when using a transit card to tap on and off, the statistics of ridership are still readily available for governments to better plan infrastructure.

If you pick a low enough price you even decrease the number of fare dodgers, which means that enforcing is not as important or costly.
by senectus1 | 2025-05-06 01:27:21+00:00
something that these right wing free marketeer's dont seem to understand, is the life they live in these modern times need the Rube Goldberg Machine that is government to keep it all going.

You start pulling out processes and the whole thing starts to collapse in on itself. including THEIR businesses and the processes and bureaucracy that they hated before are the indirect reason why they're now losing money hand over fist, or worse yet is the reason their 450,000 kg flying metal tube is about to crash and kill them and theirs.

this world is a big community, no one man, no matter how rich or powerful can count themselves out of or above that community.
by Jach | 2025-05-06 01:28:49+00:00
If you don't perturb the initial numbers to see what changes to help construct a richer model (as well as one with tighter bounds on what it predicts or forbids), you're leaving out a lot of the benefits of the exercise. Sometimes the prior doesn't matter that much because you find you already have or can easily collect sufficient data to overcome various arbitrary priors. Sometimes different priors will result in surprisingly different conclusions, some of them you can even be more confident in ruling out because of absence of data in their predictions. (Mathematically, absence of evidence is evidence of absence, though of course it's just an inequality so the proof says nothing on whether it's weak or strong evidence.) And of course some priors are straight from the butt but others are more reasonably estimated even if still quite uncertain; in any case much like unit testing of boundary conditions you can still work through a handful of choices to see the effects.

Someone mentioned fermi calculations, a related fun exercise in this sort of logic is the work on grabby aliens: https://grabbyaliens.com/
by aforwardslash | 2025-05-06 01:30:02+00:00
> You can reason about block offsets. If your writes are 512B-aligned, you can be ensured minimal write amplification.

Not all devices use 512 byte sectors, an that is mostly a relic from low-density spinning rust;

> If your writes are append-only, log-structured, that makes SSD compaction a lot more straightforward

Hum, no. Your volume may be a sparse file on SAN system; in fact that is often the case in cloud environments; also, most cached RAID controllers may have different behaviours on this - unless you know exactly what your targeting, you're shooting blind.

> No caching guarantees by default. Again, even SSDs cache writes. Block writes are not atomic even with SSDs. The only way to guarantee atomicity is via write-ahead logs.

Not even that way. Most server-grade controllers (with battery) will ack an fsync immediately, even if the data is not on disk yet.

> The NVMe layer exposes async submission/completion queues, to control the io_depth the device is subjected to, which is essential to get max perf from modern NVMe SSDs.

Thats storage domain, not application domain. In most cloud systems, you have the choice of using direct attached storage (usually with a proper controller, so what is exposed is actually the controller features, not the individual nvme queue), or SAN storage - a sparse file on a filesystem on a system that is at the end of a tcp endpoint. One of those provides easy backups, redundancy, high availability and snapshots, and the other one you roll your own.
by mylesp | 2025-05-06 01:31:40+00:00
As an Australian, I find it crazy that getting food from a cafeteria at school is the norm in the US.

In Australia you bring food from home 90% of the time. On special occasions or every now and then you order lunch from the canteen.

It seems almost against American individualism to have a communal meal where everyone is served up the same food and sit indoors in a dining hall. Maybe it is just strange to me but I can't be the only person to think this.
by chasd00 | 2025-05-06 01:32:19+00:00
DISD ( Dallas Independent School District ) has had free lunch for as long as i can remember. Free breakfast too. On school holidays you can still goto school and get a meal. I want to say they do this on weekends too. Granted, MREs from an Army surplus store are better than school lunch but it is free. I don't think my kids have ever eaten a school lunch.

During COVID my wife and I got a EBT (food stamps) card in the mail from the school district with like $2,000 on it for food. It was basically the dollars spent on school lunch for the time the kids were not in school.
by valenterry | 2025-05-06 01:32:37+00:00
I agree.

However, as a non-native speaker, I really like the fact that I can give the LLM some description of a word that I don't know and it'll figure it out. "those fruits that are kind of bitter but also make my tongue feel like it wants to curl" (= "adstringend" [sic] or so, but who remembers that word or can spell it correctly?)

LLMs are basically like all those type-correction algorithms on steroids. Very helpful sometimes, even if it means I have to doublecheck their output.
by jiehong | 2025-05-06 01:33:31+00:00
So they basically train us to worsen our speech to avoid being interrupted.

I remember my literature teacher telling us in class how we should avoid those filler words, and instead allow for some simple silences while thinking.

Although, to be fair, there are quite a few people in real life using long filler words to avoid anyone interfering them, and it’s obnoxious.
Show HN: McPoogle: Search Engine for MCP Servers
by kirkmarple | 2025-05-06 01:33:49+00:00
With all the MCP servers coming to AI IDEs like Cline, Windsurf, Cursor and VS Code, we realized that their MCP search sucks.

So, we built a free MCP search engine using our Graphlit Knowledge platform, where you can ask about 4000+ MCP servers and tools, with LLMs from Groq, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google Gemini.

McPoogle MCP Server coming soon, so you can search within your favorite IDE.
by l33tbro | 2025-05-06 01:34:08+00:00
I think it's a just a more experimental record. The lack of songwriting is kind of the thesis of the entire album, right? (technology, repetition, etc) It's aims are not to be Digital Love or their more conventional song-based stuff. If anything, it's almost a return to their origins like some of the more techno-orientated tracks on Homework.

That's what I meant with what it has in common with garage and psych. Not the textures or sounds, but the relentlessly experimental approach to convention. Not saying it is perfectly executes, but I think this what it is meant to be.
by johngai | 2025-05-06 01:37:31+00:00
We're a mid-sized e-commerce brand that’s been using email marketing + paid ads for years. Lately, results have been dropping. Open rates tanked. Ad costs spiked. So we decided to experiment with SMS — specifically using an AI SMS platform called Netcapz.

We were honestly blown away. Within the first 30 days:

CTRs were 4x higher than email

Our abandoned cart SMS flow recovered 27% of lost sales

We cut our messaging costs by ~60% compared to Twilio

The killer feature for us is the AI-powered campaign assistant — it literally suggests message content, timing, segmentation, and even A/B tests. It also supports WhatsApp, Viber, and regular SMS — all in one inbox.

Not affiliated — just genuinely impressed. If you're running any kind of online business or local service and haven't tried SMS seriously yet, this is a solid place to start. (Also, there's a free trial with credits to play around before committing.)

Happy to answer questions or share more about our use case/setup.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-06 01:38:07+00:00
One of my favorite quotes:

> "I was in the Air Force a while, and they had what they call 'policing the area,' and I think that’s a pretty good thing to go by. If everyone just takes care of their own area, then we won’t have any problems. Be here. Be present. Wherever you are, be there. And look around you, and see what needs to be changed."

-Willie Nelson
by freddealmeida | 2025-05-06 01:38:09+00:00
That title is very misleading. The facts are convoluted as well. This is a mix of greed, espionage, incompetent government agencies, and companies that do not vet their remote workers yet giving them access to software and data they shouldn't have. Crazy. But with the stories coming out of DOGE, I am not even shocked. At least in this case one person (out of how many?) is going to jail. How many more of these people exist in the US now?
by robocat | 2025-05-06 01:38:18+00:00
Your "protectionist" comments come across to me as either parochial or ironic - perhaps Poe's Law in action (if you're trying to do parody, it failed on me).

You could choose to balance comments on Chinese actions against equivalent comments on US protectionism (Chicken Laws, import tariffs and non-tariff market protectionism).

Cars are status symbols. Very noticeable here in New Zealand where new cars are mostly only purchased by a small minority of wealthy people. The majority of kiwis can buy second hand because we import a lot of second hand cars from Japan. As a percentage of income I suspect we're lucky to be able to spend less in NZ.
by hliyan | 2025-05-06 01:38:57+00:00
There needs to be regulations about deceptive, indirect, purposefully ambiguous or vague public communication by corporations (or any entity). I'm not an expert in corporate law or finance, but the statement should be:

"Open AI for-profit LLC will become a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)"

followed by: "Profit cap is hereby removed" and finally "The Open AI non-profit will continue to control the PBC. We intend it to be a significant shareholder of the PBC."
by DrillShopper | 2025-05-06 01:39:20+00:00
> Some people are trying to get a promotion, or are just full of energy - they may work very hard, skip work/life balance and stress out. But it's all optional, if you are happy with your initial salary, you don't have to do it.

Every place I have ever worked has been "up or out". Maybe 20 years ago that kind of job existed, but it does not now.
by _AzMoo | 2025-05-06 01:39:31+00:00
In Australia this is actually an issue for low-income/underprivileged children in schools. Some parents don't give their kids breakfast or lunch, because they can't afford it or they just don't care.

Some schools run a "breakfast club" that everybody's welcome to attend, where they provide things like toast or cereal to kids that don't get breakfast at home, and it's couched in shame-softening language, though most kids know that if you go to breakfast club it's probably because you can't actually afford breakfast.

Schools will often have some bread and spreads available in the office for kids who are sent to school without lunch. I'm not sure how widespread it is, but I know that in some schools this is just funded voluntarily by some of the staff who will pick up more bread or whatever when it's required, because they don't want to see kids go hungry.

I think the idea of having lunch provided as part of your school fees is actually a good one. No kid should go hungry, or be subject to humiliation and shame, because their parents can't afford or can't be bothered to provide them lunch.
by Twirrim | 2025-05-06 01:39:34+00:00
The insidious part is it doesn't have to be so blatant as adverts, you can achieve a lot by just slight biases in text output.

Decades ago I worked for a classical music company, fresh out of school. "So.. how do you anticipate where the music trend is going", I once naively asked one of the senior people on the product side. "Oh, we don't. We tell people really quietly, and they listen". They and the marketing team spent a lot of time doing very subtle work, easily as much as anything big like actual advertisements. Things like small little conversations with music journalists, just a dropped sentence or two that might be repeated in an article, or marginally influence an article; that another journalist might see and have an opinion on, or spark some other curiosity. It only takes a small push and it tends to spread across the industry. It's not a fast process, but when the product team is capable of road-mapping for a year or so in advance, a marketing team can do a lot to prepare things so the audience is ready.

LLMs represent a scary capability to influence the entire world, in ways we're not equipped to handle.