MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iLemming | 2025-05-21 16:01:19+00:00
I'm not trying to attack or blame anyone, but rather share my empirical observations. "Young people and beginners don't even know these things exist" is also along the same lines of thought.

> This lack of an attempt is not some sort of flaw."

It could be, but perhaps on the other end here — maybe the evangelism and elucidation are at fault? Seasoned adepts often forget "the beginner's journey" and can't break through the "communication disconnect". It's hard to explain the "what" and "how" without effectively conveying the "why", especially when the other side is not interested in hearing the "why".

I'm just sad that a lot of very talented folk either choose to ignore or deliberately dismiss some great ideas, building their assumptions based on some shorts they watch on YouTube or TikTok.

The lack of attempt may not be a flaw, but maybe "the lack of attention" is our generational flaw? Maybe while I'm focused on Emacs and Lisp, I'm failing to see a bigger picture, where tons of other pragmatic ideas get dumped overboard because they don't align with the prevailing narrative?
by squigz | 2025-05-21 16:01:21+00:00
> Game modding is profitable

It can be. As I understand it, it's sort of like streaming or other content creation - yes, it's possible, but difficult, as it's a saturated market. Most mod authors don't make much money.

As a slight aside, I think people would be more inclined to support creators like mod authors if it were simply easier. Patreon and the like make it fairly easy, but I don't think many people want to subscribe to 20+ Patreons for $5 apiece, as much as they might like to support those authors. On the other hand, I think more people would be willing to pledge $X per month to be split among all of their subscriptions. Sure, most creators would only get a few cents per user, but they'd likely get many more people subscribing, and I think it would add up quick. I might be wrong, and I don't take credit for this idea by any means; I read it some time ago, and possibly Patreon even offered this system before?
by d--b | 2025-05-21 16:01:38+00:00
The two things that suck are:

1. The illusion of intimacy

2. The illusion of ephemerality

People think they chat to a small number of people, and people think that it's going to go away at some point.

So they think they're in a private conversation when they're not. They wouldn't behave the same if they realized what they say is being written down and stored forever in some database.

And yes, it sucks that technology doesn't allow you to have it both ways => public because you want to reach far and wide, and private cause you don't want it recorded.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-21 16:02:39+00:00
An example of advertising I hate is the infamous "distortion bubble" of Steve Jobs, who could make you believe you he was literally creating paradise on earth.

The only thing I would add to my comment is, let people know about it where they are. I posted my project to HN because it's based on a nostalgia we all share. Find a subreddit, or a forum, or a discord/slack or something where your userbase visits regularly, and let them know.
by pizzuh | 2025-05-21 16:03:59+00:00
Express is extremely mature as a backend, although you may not like the middleware patterns compared to Flask, for example. I've used Flask for years, and find these similar, with some differences.

Next.js + Vercel has strong adoption. This probably comes the closest to checking all of your requirements, although I wouldn't suggest using this for all use cases.

IMO the Node backend framework ecosystem is more mature than Python (no idea about .NET) since Python really is positioned better for data science/ML, etc.
by jraph | 2025-05-21 16:04:19+00:00
> consumer versions of Windows didn’t get Unix-like pre-emptive multitasking until Windows XP in 2002

What does this mean? I didn't remember Windows 95 and 98 SE as having cooperative multitasking. I'm reading that 95, 98 and ME had preemptive multitasking on a Win32 kernel for 32 bit applications, and only went back to cooperative multitasking for 16 bit apps [1].

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multit%C3%A2che_pr%C3%A9emptif... (yes, the French version has this info, not the English one)
by tocs3 | 2025-05-21 16:04:44+00:00
I asked ChatGPT to restate this in more laymen's terms (posted below) and I am not to surprised at the answer.

"Lately, some AI models have shown impressive abilities to solve complex problems, and many people credit this to a method called Chain of Thought (CoT), where the model is trained to think through steps like a human might. In this paper, we take a closer look at that idea to see if it's really what's driving better performance.

We focus on the model’s step-by-step thinking (the words it generates along the way) — often treated like human "thoughts" — and examine whether these actually help the model solve problems more accurately. To test this, we train AI models using clean, correct step-by-step reasoning paths and final answers, all based on a known solving method (A* search). This lets us check both the final answers and the reasoning steps to see how they relate.

Interestingly, we find that even when a model gives the right answer, its reasoning steps can still be wrong or messy. To go further, we even train models using completely random and incorrect reasoning steps — and surprisingly, they still perform about the same, and sometimes even better, than those trained on correct steps.

This suggests that the step-by-step "thoughts" the model shows aren’t as meaningful or reliable as many assume. In short, just because a model looks like it’s reasoning through a problem doesn’t mean it actually is — and we should be careful not to treat its outputs as if it thinks like a human or follows strict logic."
by dkarl | 2025-05-21 16:04:53+00:00
Could you write 80-100% of an application in this language? I'm wondering if it could be a good application language for Rust programmers who want to use the Rust ecosystem and have the option of writing parts of their application in Rust for extra performance, but who also want to experiment and iterate quickly, and who want a simpler, higher-level language for expressing business logic.
by freedomben | 2025-05-21 16:05:07+00:00
Marketing to developers is tough business. We are typically highly skeptical of things, and tend to see through promotion efforts. We are also pretty aware of what our problems are and are (often) quick to decide whether some solution will actually work for us. We dislike changing our workflows and have a natural resistance to that, even when the "new way" may be a little better than what we have. If it isn't substantially better, we'll often stick with what we know. Muscle memory mixed with comfort is a beast after all.

My general advice is to just speak plainly and frankly about your project on forums where it could be helpful to people. Don't exaggerate and don't sugar coat as those will be seen through and likely called out. Be willing to take crticial feedback for what it's worth. Some people are grumpy assholes, but often you'll get useful data even from them.

For example a grumpy but helpful reply to your project might be "I don't want to adopt this new thing in my workflow and have it go abandoned/unmaintained on me." That's a genuine concern that many people have that you would need to address in order to get them interested.

I think HN and Reddit are actually great places to talk about your project. Also I would look at any Java forums, especially related to AI tooling. Just be prepared to explain in plain language why your tool is useful in a world with Copilot/Claude/Gemini/etc. (this is just general advice. In your post yesterday you did a good job so I don't mean this specifically for this case)
by aaroninsf | 2025-05-21 16:05:25+00:00
I wish that all the factors were shown,

e.g. when on 12, I'd like to see both 3x4 and 2x6, with a visual indicator of when the animation is showing the different factors... maybe the whole thing shrinks and additional factorizations fill in tiles subdividing the space

Knowing the number of different factorizations is an interesting and visually presentable quality that interacts in an interesting way with the factors themselves
by gjm11 | 2025-05-21 16:05:52+00:00
If you have independent votes on everything then you run the risk that there are a bunch of mutually-incompatible things that all get majority approval.

(Would you rather higher taxes or lower? Lower, of course. Higher state pensions or lower? Higher, of course. Stronger or weaker military? Stronger, of course. Better or worse infrastructure? Better, of course. More teachers or fewer? More, of course. More national debt or less? Less, of course. Etc.)

This doesn't require any individual person to be irrational or forgetful or anything, although in fact people frequently are.

Also, whoever selects just which things get voted on has a great deal of power, more than most elected representatives have. If those people are elected then you've effectively got a representative democracy after all; if not, then arguably you've effectively not got a democracy at all.

Representative government as such doesn't solve this problem, but in practice it means that a candidate or party proposes a whole basket of policies to get judged collectively, and between when they get into power and when the electorate decides whether they did a good enough job to elect them again there's enough time for a wide variety of those different interacting things all to have happened and either worked well or not.

I don't want to claim that this works particularly well. But it feels to me like any sort of direct democracy would likely work much worse.

(Maybe there's scope for a hybrid system: elections every few years for representatives who are then obliged to put various classes of major decision to a national vote.)
by wahern | 2025-05-21 16:06:13+00:00
Hyperinflation in Germany was deliberate. And Germany didn't just decide on its own to return to the gold standard. European countries drifted away from gold during WWI, and then they all slowly returned to it in the early 1920s. In the case of Germany, its return to the gold standard was required by the Dawes Plan, a plan by the US to ease the effect of reparations on Germany so they'd cease the hyperinflation shenanigans.

Once Europe returned to the gold standard, it saw widespread deflation and consequent unemployment, particularly in the UK and Germany. The effects of deflation caused by a return to the gold standard, and related issues in the US and France which accumulated much of world gold reserves, is widely considered a major cause of both the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Notably, deflation contributed to a rapid trade deficit increase in Germany.

Some light reading:

https://www.cato.org/blog/world-war-i-gold-great-depression

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/did-france-cause-great-depres...

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/germanys-trade-surplus-is...

https://eml.berkeley.edu/~eichengr/fetters_gold_paper.pdf
by MostlyStable | 2025-05-21 16:06:17+00:00
For the US, the entire user base helps subsidize rural customers. I have recently had the thought that I'm curious how this subsidy compares to the price of creating local micro-grids for rural communities. Especially in places like California where it is long distance power lines running to rural communities that have started several major fires.

I don't have the skill to do it myself, but I'd love to see an analysis of whether it would make more sense at this point to do solar/wind + batteries and backup generators for at least the smallest and most remote communities.
by jasongill | 2025-05-21 16:06:21+00:00
I wish OpenAI would provide more clarity about the Assistants API deprecation, which has been announced as being sunset in spring of 2026 and replaced by the Responses API, but still no other updates on the timeline or migration plan.

Prior to the release of the Responses API, the Assistants API was the best way (for our use cases, at least) to interact with OpenAI's API, so hopefully some clarity on the plan for it is released soon (now that Responses API has some of the things that it was previously missing)
by eldaisfish | 2025-05-21 16:07:12+00:00
it generally isn't.

Peak demand on most electricity systems, including California's, is during the evening hours, typically between 18:00 and 21:00. This does not coincide with peak solar generation.

You can see this even as far back as 2018 via CalISO's own data. https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook
Show HN: I made "Who's Hiring?" searchable using GPT and Metabase
by matthewhefferon | 2025-05-21 16:07:38+00:00
I vibe-coded a small project that turns the “Ask HN: Who is hiring?” thread into searchable job data using OpenAI, PostgreSQL, and Metabase.

It pulls the thread using the Hacker News API, uses GPT to extract fields like company, role, location, salary, and contact, stores everything in PostgreSQL, and spins up Metabase so you can explore and search the results.

Right now it runs locally, but would anyone be interested if I built this out a bit more and made a public dashboard?
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-21 16:07:57+00:00
I could be wrong, but from my research and understanding, walking is one of the easiest things for us to do, only slightly more expensive than sitting up straight or standing.

On top of this, it doesn't "stack" well because of the low heart rate usage, meaning it logarithmically increases calorie costs (our bodies essentially amortize it), whereas lifting and carrying a heavy object for 20 seconds exponentially increases it.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-21 16:08:13+00:00
There really is no way to defend against US government actions against your infra or data so long as your supplier has humans in the US or are a US entity. The entire vertical must exist outside the jurisdiction. This is a Hail Mary by Google to try to convince non US customers they can protect their data. They can’t. This admin has already demonstrated the law does not matter to them. And so, physical and geographic controls are all that remain.
by groby_b | 2025-05-21 16:08:33+00:00
"The Russians" is a copout, though, if you can buy a GPS jammer for 50 bucks. It's commonly used e.g. by truckers who'd prefer their corporate liege lord don't track them every second they exist.

You'll have to make GPS more secure with or without geopolitical consequences for Russia, so why don't we focus on the actual topic of the article.
by dogecoinbase | 2025-05-21 16:08:36+00:00
> They claim full open source but for several years they did not release the server.

Specifically, they didn't publish the source for their server-side from 20 April 2020 to 6 April 2021 [0] while they secretly added a cryptocurrency payment system to which Moxie was a paid technical advisor [1], which Moxie denied they were doing in January 2021 [2].

0: https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/04/06/it-looks-like-signa... (source was published shortly after the publication of that article)

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26715013 (comment from founder of MobileCoin)

2: https://www.theverge.com/22249391/signal-app-abuse-messaging...
by epistasis | 2025-05-21 16:09:24+00:00
That's because residential solar is eating up the daytime peak, thus the duck curve. Residential solar is already saving the state tons of money on T&D costs.

(And becuase the Wikipedia for duck curve shows a day in October rather than a summer day where the peak is much higher, yes the annual peak does coincide with when solar is outputting a ton of power.)
by aaroninsf | 2025-05-21 16:09:25+00:00
Funny but also illustrative issue:

in the owl/badger video, the owl should fly silently.

This is an interesting non-trivial problem of generalization and world-knowledge etc., but also?

There's something somewhat sad about that slipping through; it makes me think, *no one involve in the production of this video, its selection, it passing review... etc., seemed to realize that it is one of the characteristic things about owls that you don't hear their wings.

We have owls on our hill right now and see them almost every day and regularly seem them fly. It's magic, especially in an urban environment.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-21 16:09:46+00:00
We shouldn't do this, because it's not democratic.

First, people talking about the Athenian system - it was limited to "Free men" of Athens. The discrimination might be something you feel we could counter today - all men and women could be selected - but what about convicted felons? Would they have a right to participate? Today, one is President of the USA (yes, I know, many think that's a sham, but legally he is). What about gay people? 50 years ago they almost certainly wouldn't have been allowed in. 150 years ago black people wouldn't. What about today's political third rail populations? Would communists or socialists or anarchists be allowed in? What about trans? Or people not born in the USA?

There will always be a group some part of the spectrum wants to other and exclude, but today there is a democratic short circuit: an Austrian can be voted into being the Governor of California; a convicted felon can be voted into the position of President; a transgender woman can be voted into Congress by her Delaware constituents.

Balloting - almost like voting today - will get systematic tinkering. Voting isn't perfect. Gerrymandering in the US is out of control and a more neutral system like the UK's needs creating, and yeah, donations are a mess...

... but choosing people at random is never really random, and there is no easy way to short circuit the orthodoxy. Minorities will get better representation at first, but they'll always be minorities and if the majority wants rid, they'll be locked out forever, just the same way women and slaves were in Athens.
by adolph | 2025-05-21 16:09:56+00:00
The fundamental weakness of GPS and similar is that they are a set of beacons from which a position may be calculated. This has simplified the navigation task but also made that task more fragile.

Navigation itself must "toughen up" and the seeds for that are being deployed to autonomous systems as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Instead of being dependent on a single data source, a toughened system would infer location from many sources: magnetometers, photogrammetry, inertial measurement, and other sources of radiation (ex star trackers). The article does cover some developments in these areas as a second line after advocating for breaking changes to the current radio-time system.

GPS jamming and spoofing will not abate anytime soon. The first line of defense is to crosscheck GPS PNT against inputs from other sensors. Parkinson advocates “deep integration,” or close coupling, of GPS sensors and inertial reference platforms, such as laser, fiberoptic gyros and microelectromechanical gyros and accelerometers, to flag obvious GPS signal interference.
by mdp2021 | 2025-05-21 16:09:58+00:00
In case of interest, maybe also see its related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44052898

https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/a-map-of-energy-in-the-brain

Edit: I see that the other submission is marked as a "dupe": it is not - a shorter introduction to the article in Nature. The submission of this page is the narrative presentation from a main researcher.

Edit2: though of course if we wanted to consider a submission as "news" instead of "content", then the two submissions are related. Dang, maybe we could think of an HN feature where linked submissions are somehow grouped?
by hannofcart | 2025-05-21 16:10:20+00:00
> Roto has no facilities to create loops. The reason for this is that scripts need to run only for a short time and should not slow down the application. [1]

Wait, what?! Isn't that choice a bit extreme?

There have been plenty of times in scripting where I've needed loops! Am I missing something here?

[1] https://rotonda.docs.nlnetlabs.nl/en/stable/roto/00_introduc...
by Verdex | 2025-05-21 16:10:44+00:00
The "left behind" mantra that I've been hearing for a while now is the strange one to me.

Like, I need to start smashing my face into a keyboard for 10000 hours or else I won't be able to use LLM tools effectively.

If LLM is this tool that is more intuitive than normal programming and adds all this productivity, then surely I can just wait for a bunch of others to wear themselves out smashing the faces on a keyboard for 10000 hours and then skim the cream off of the top, no worse for wear.

On the other hand, if using LLMs is a neverending nightmare of chaos and misery that's 10x harder than programming (but with the benefit that I don't actually have to learn something that might accidentally be useful), then yeah I guess I can see why I would need to get in my hours to use it. But maybe I could just not use it.

"Left behind" really only makes sense to me if my KPIs have been linked with LLM flavor aid style participation.

Ultimately, though, physics doesn't care about social conformity and last I checked the machine is running on physics.
by cogman10 | 2025-05-21 16:11:06+00:00
> It's the same reason so many outlets are willing to uncritically republish corporate press releases with little to no editing.

I'd add a big reason outlet do that is because nobody gets sued for publishing a press release. Good journalism attracts lawsuits like nothing else (bad journalism can as well, but mostly just if you are lying).

This has additionally led to newspapers using the most passive voice possible. Instead of "Foo company dumps 10 tons of toxic waste into the public water" they'll headline it as "A mishap at a local business has resulted in some chemical spillage".
by AcerbicZero | 2025-05-21 16:11:22+00:00
It does seem that if next-gen GPS tech isn't already being tested/deployed then we've managed to already begin falling behind. GPS III just isn't anywhere near as useful in a non-permissive environment

Also, I read something on ITAR being relaxed specifically for CRPAs, this year, so maybe some of this is improving? ->

https://rntfnd.org/2025/02/20/first-fix-freeing-crpas-gps-wo...

Not directly related, but I also think its impressive that a major airliner could take a SAM hit, from what was likely a Pantsir-S1 (20KG of HE moving at Mach 2 is not something airlines usually design for) and still land with half the souls surviving. While not great, that is certainly far better than I expected and shows some excellent airmanship.
by 6510 | 2025-05-21 16:11:40+00:00
Thinking about it, the encoded business logic also becomes hard to change. Perhaps like writing prevented language and stories from evolving. Encoding it might be the final version. I got stuck a few times when the business logic got overly fuzzy. If you have 10 people and 50 small tasks with each task taking between a and b minutes in some strange distribution where b might be 3xa. If task 1 takes more than c minutes task 2 is likely to also take longer while task 3 will be easy. Unless it is full moon then task 2 will take less time and 3 more.

On the factory floor the guy to plan this would also know how fast each employee is with each task and that employee 1 has a hangover on Monday, 2 goes to the gym on Thursday and 3 has to babysit before the night shift.

But now we are going to have an app to plan this???
by vcher | 2025-05-21 16:11:53+00:00
I’ve been using Google’s experimental NotebookLM for organizing research and writing, but found that its UX around link management is painfully limited. So I built a Chrome extension Notebook LM | LinkMaster to fix that. It allows you to: * Instantly add the current page to a NotebookLM document * Mass-import links from YouTube (including Shorts) * Grab all links on a page and send them into a NotebookLM doc * Mass-remove old links * Jump directly to your NotebookLM doc in one click I couldn’t find any extensions that do more than one thing — this one tries to actually improve workflow. I’d love your feedback (or ideas for features). Built with JavaScript + Chrome APIs + a lot of trial & error with DOM elements