MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by signa11 | 2025-05-31 14:22:54+00:00
i see ok. well, erlang is more suited to program gateway nodes in the core of 3g/4g networks.

these nodes handle tasks such as handling mobility (managing handovers as cell phones moves from one location to another etc), data transfer f.e providing ip addresses to your phones etc etc.

as you can imagine, this sort of gear lives deep within service providers network, and each entity handles hundreds of thousands of sessions f.e serving an entire state etc etc.

and these nodes cannot go down taking services/sessions with them.
by loloquwowndueo | 2025-05-31 14:23:16+00:00
Tell me you haven’t had your site scraped by an abusive AI crawler without telling me you haven’t had your site scraped by an abusive AI crawler.

Google and traditional crawlers are fine. This new breed of AI crawlers have no scruples, no rate limits, and will just load pages and follow links as fast as they can, very likely overwhelming smaller web servers in the process.

I too have blocked many of them to avoid them filling my logs with nonexistent page accesses, for example.
Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API?
by meander_water | 2025-05-31 14:23:49+00:00
Are there any solo devs or small teams out there genuinely paying their rent from selling API access?

What's your API? How much MRR? What's your pricing model? How did you find your first paying customers? And most importantly - what problem are you solving that people will actually pay for monthly?

Bonus points if you can share: - Your biggest challenge (rate limiting? customer support? competition?) - Whether you'd do it again - Any "I wish I knew this before starting" wisdom
by dpflan | 2025-05-31 14:24:02+00:00
Forgive me for asking, but im always curios about the definition of “agent”. What is an “agent” exactly? Is it a static prompt that is sent along with user input to an LLM service and then handles that resposne? And then it’s done? Is an agent a prompted LLM call? Or some entity that is changing its own prompt as it continues to exist?
by fallingknife | 2025-05-31 14:24:33+00:00
ZIRP had little to do with it. Tech is less levered than any other major industry. What happened is that growth expectations for large tech companies were way out of line with reality and finally came back down to earth when the market finally realized that the big tech cos are actually mature profitable companies and not just big startups. The fact that this happened at the same time ZIRP ended is a coincidence.
by StefanKarpinski | 2025-05-31 14:25:39+00:00
Pretty sure that’s not possible. More accurate for some inputs will be less accurate for others. There’s a very tricky tension in float optimization that the most predictable operation structure is a fully skewed op tree, as in naive left-to-right summation, but this is the slowest and least accurate order of operations. Using a more balanced tree is faster and more accurate (great), but unfortunately which tree shape is fastest depends very much on hardware-specific factors like SIMD width (less great). And no tree shape is universally guaranteed to be fully accurate, although a full binary tree tends to have the best accuracy, but has bad base case performance, so the actual shape that tends to get used in high performance kernels is SIMD-width parallel in a loop up to some fixed size like 256 elements, then pairwise recursive reduction above that. The recursive reduction can also be threaded. Anyway, there’s no silver bullet here.
by dinfinity | 2025-05-31 14:26:54+00:00
Same.

I am at about 70 wpm and I do semi-touch typing. I can type without looking at the keyboard 95% of the time (symbols etc. are tricky), but I don't use all 10 fingers (pinkies are pretty much unused) and do not rely on having my hands in the 'home' position.

Doing the 10 finger based home position approach almost immediately feels incredibly restricting. Some things like typing a C with my middle finger feel like I am doing something counter to my anatomy (when would you ever make such a movement naturally? let alone hundreds or thousand times a day?).

I wonder whether it is just a lack of getting used to it or whether people who do the full on touch typing a lot just fuck up their body regularly.
by fallingknife | 2025-05-31 14:27:18+00:00
Raising interest rates has nothing to do with the 2022 war. If it did, rates would have come back down. Interest rate increases don't help with supply/demand driven price spikes. They do help with money supply and aggregate demand driven inflation, which was the cause of our recent inflation (that started way before Russia invaded Ukraine). The war was a convenient excuse because it deflects responsibility.

And remember when they first said inflation was "transitory" and caused by supply chain issues from the economy reopening after covid? They didn't raise interest rates then because, like I mentioned above, interest rates don't help with supply shocks. If they did, the Fed would have raised rates then.
Show HN: Phended – Defensive Cybersecurity Education for Non-Tech Folks
by fathermarz | 2025-05-31 14:27:18+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been building Phended, a cybersecurity education platform for people who don’t have a technical background — small business owners, freelancers, community organizations, and anyone who just wants to feel safer online.

The goal is simple - make cybersecurity feel like a life skill, not a specialist subject. Most of what’s out there is either too technical or too alarmist. Phended is designed to be calm, clear, and genuinely useful — something you’d feel good sharing with a non-technical colleague, your parents, or your team.

Here’s what’s live so far:

→ Phended.com The main hub for practical, plain-English resources — like our cybersecurity checklist and real-world incident playbooks. These are meant to be useful on a normal Tuesday, not just when you’re in a panic.

→ Dave.phended.com Dave is a friendly AI assistant trained to answer everyday cybersecurity questions like “How do I spot a phishing email?” or “What should I do if I think I’ve been hacked?” It’s built to remove the fear and confusion from getting help.

→ Learn.phended.com This is our structured learning center — with in-progress courses that go deeper into core topics like secure communication, passwords, backups, and more. No fluff, no acronyms — just practical, scenario-based learning.

⸻

I’m also actively looking for course contributors. If you know cybersecurity and enjoy teaching others — especially beginners — I’d love to collaborate. There’s so much room to build approachable, meaningful content in this space.

If you have a moment to check it out, I’d really appreciate your feedback:

• Is the tone clear and approachable? • Does the content feel useful to someone without a tech background? • Is there anything that feels confusing, overcomplicated, or missing? • If you’ve worked on similar educational tools — what would you do differently?

I’m building this in public, and I’d love to learn from this community. Thanks for taking a look.
by zenburnmyface | 2025-05-31 14:27:28+00:00
meh. I feel this is just a linguistic shortcut, similar to how _trained_ biologists can talk about a species or organism evolving some trait. Of course the organism isn't _really_ evolving with any goal in mind, but that's clear to the speaker and audience. Whether or not LLMs understand (very unlikely), it's clear what we mean by an LLM "understanding": has the context + prior training to make reasonable predictions. But no one wants to write that each time.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-31 14:27:28+00:00
> But did you do anything wrong? Not really, you followed best practices and didn't make any mistakes. The LLM just sometimes kills people. You didn't intend that at all.

Whoever made and/or (mis)use the LLMs should be liable for it, regardless of intent.

If I shot someone which I did not intend to, do I get away with it? No, I would not get away with it.
by tronicjester | 2025-05-31 14:28:35+00:00
How many jobs we create is a terrible metric for societal progress. How many jobs we destroy is the absolute best. Man doesn't need labor it needs work and work based on need/subsistence is a necessity for capitalist barons and communist pimps.

What have we been struggling for if not freedom from menial routine production - especially in engineering and farming? Jobs are a way to onboard new markets into capitalist systems and to busy idle hands in socialist ones. We should be wary the proponents of job creation and critics of work nullification in equal measure.
by lo0dot0 | 2025-05-31 14:29:35+00:00
Even if you can not compute the result in a finite number of steps through the naive approach there could still be a better approach, let me call it shortcut, for determining the value that can be computed. E.g. the geometric series result is known (a/(1-r)) but not computable through evaluating the series itself. A problem is undecidable if you can prove that the shortcut can not exist, it is decidable if you know a shortcut exists (knowing the formula is not required), and potentially either decidable or undecidable if a proof in either direction is unknown.
by motorest | 2025-05-31 14:30:05+00:00
> LLMs don't understand. It's mind-boggling to me that large parts of the tech industry think that.

I think you might be tied to a definition of "understanding" that doesn't really apply.

If you prompt a LLM with ambiguous instructions, it requests you to clarify (i.e., extend prompt to provide more context) and once you do the LLM outputs something that exactly meets the goals of the initial prompt, does it count as understanding?

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck,or something so close to a duck that we'd be better off calling it that.
by OutOfHere | 2025-05-31 14:30:11+00:00
SO failed to use a structured approach to validating new questions. Users could have been asked to justify how their question is different from each of the top five closest older questions, also whenever a challenge arises, and generally given the benefit of the doubt. Instead, users met with hostile downvotes whenever posting a question even if it was an original one.

This may be hard to appreciate now, but AI is soon going to begin to struggle with self-training, leading to worse outputs and even a model collapse. For this reason, SO still is more important than ever as a source of original training material.
by Waterluvian | 2025-05-31 14:30:49+00:00
I sometimes agree, sometimes disagree. I don’t like magic numbers like retry(3, 1_000, 2_500)

(Though sometimes your text editor and docs are good enough to help, but I don’t like making those feel required).

I like how Python (and probably many other languages) allows for using the name of a positional arg. So you could call the exact same function but write it as retry(count=3, min_ms=1_000, max_ms=2_500) if you feel like it needs more clarity. Now you’ve got documented values that are tied to the function signature, their names have been decided for you, and they’re inline!
by dpflan | 2025-05-31 14:30:50+00:00
AI allows for exquisite demos, demos that tantalize the audience into thinking of the infinite potential of the technology, that stunning vision expands and expands until the universe of potential overwhelms the dreamer into a state of terminal fantasy. So it is always a solution looking for a problem. There are cases where the two meet more realistically and a valuable impactful company develops it.
Show HN: LaminarFlow – AI-native, open-source finance platform for startups
by ydew | 2025-05-31 14:31:43+00:00
I'm Yash, and I'm building LaminarFlow — an AI-native, open-source platform to help startups, founders, SMBs, manage their fincial ops more efficiently.

It brings together financial insights, banking, invoicing, payment tracking, time tracking, and banking-style reconciliation — all powered by an AI agent that automates the boring stuff.

We’re building this as an open startup, sharing everything publicly, and keeping it fully open-source (MIT).

Would love your feedback and thoughts!
by collinmcnulty | 2025-05-31 14:32:12+00:00
I would like to see this effect compared to other obstructions, like regular buildings. I understand that wind farms are built in areas that are mostly otherwise flat, so the effects matter, but I just don’t feel like my scale is calibrated. I would think an individual tall building would have more effect than an individual wind turbine, but what about a typical small town center vs a wind farm?
by sandworm101 | 2025-05-31 14:32:16+00:00
The various candles are not independent yardsticks, nor are they just assumed to be true. Wherever possible they are compared against each other. And there are people who spend entire careers debating how dust absorbs light in order to best compensate for such things.

If measurements point to some sort of incongruity, questioning the accuracy of one's ruler is a fools trap. Altering the rulers to remove incongruities results in a spiral of compromises, internal debates that don't result in progress. If one suspects that the rulers are wrong, the answer is to build a better ruler. Not to arbitrarily chop bits off until the difficult observations go away.
by mooreds | 2025-05-31 14:32:40+00:00
I came here to post the Manna story. I've read it multiple times and found it eerily prescient. (It reminds me a bit of what L. Bob Rife[0] was trying to accomplish as well in Snow Crash.)

I didn't know Brain had committed suicide :( . More details about that[1].

0: https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/L._Bob_Rife

1: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-...
by gooodvibes | 2025-05-31 14:33:18+00:00
I can see being annoyed by a software engineer calling themselves "engineer" without the qualifier. But almost nobody does that, it's always "software engineer" - take it as a whole term instead of getting hung up on the word engineer being in it.

And if a person

1. lives in a jurisdiction where the restrictions on the "engineer" label don't apply

2. has a job and the job title in their contract is "software engineer"

what should they do according to you - not use their actual job title out of reverence for the professional standards of people with a different profession in a different country?
by zkry | 2025-05-31 14:33:54+00:00
I find that this is on point. I've seen a lot of charts on the AI-hype side of things showing exponential growth of AI agent fleets being used for software development (starting in 2026 of course). Take this article for example: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/revenge-of-the-junior-developer

Ok, so by 2027 we should be having fleets of autonomous AI agents swarming around every bug report and solving it x times faster than a human. Cool, so I guess by 2028 buggy software will be a thing of the past (for those companies that fully adopt AI of course). I'm so excited for a future where IT projects stop going overtime and overbudget and deliver more value than expected. Can you blame us for thinking this is too good to be true?
by bogwog | 2025-05-31 14:34:27+00:00
In case you weren't aware, a blue hat is typically associated with law enforcement in the US. On its own it'd be no problem, but the logo, the paper, and the comment above correctly pointing out concerns/lack of acknowledgement on your site (until now) really comes off as suspicious.

FWIW, I do believe you just made a few unintentional awkward choices instead of being malicious... But a product associated with something like this is a hard sell.
by motorest | 2025-05-31 14:34:27+00:00
> I designed something for a business and found I needed 4 major sub-systems (like a real business) - insight/data, cognition, meta cognition and execution, and if you don't define all 4, the system is junk.

Might it be just another realization of Conway's law?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Might it be possible that the only reason you're assuming a system is junk is just that it doesn't resemble the systems you know and expect? There are so many ways to skin a cat, and certainly no business process represents the optimal process.
by mistrial9 | 2025-05-31 14:34:31+00:00
thanks for this tip but no thanks. Media hype generated by layers of people who do not code, do not paint or draw, do not write expository articles and do not write cute fiction, but are driven by deep pockets investor money.. actively pushes out the practice and livelyhood of skilled adults who must earn money to pay for living in Western society. There is a lot of deep pocket investor money (waves to MaryM), lots of cloud compute available for a time-unit billing price, and apparently enough people who will carry water for those investment bucks.

Simply pointing to the typical dull adult watching the parade of this, and half-heartedly urging some vague amount of understanding, seems to be cold-comfort and basically pissinginthe wind.
by scythe | 2025-05-31 14:35:36+00:00
I think a restricted version might be possible to implement: only allow transformations if the transformed version has strictly fewer numerical rounding errors on some inputs. This will usually only mean canceling terms and collecting expressions like "x+x+x" into 3x.

In general, rules that allow fewer transformations are probably easier to understand and use. Trying to optimize everything is where you run into trouble.
by joshuajooste05 | 2025-05-31 14:35:43+00:00
Agreed, the agents people are building are not solving the real issues.

The other thing people have been trying to do is build general agents e.g. Manus.

I just think this misses the key value add that agents can add at the moment.

A general agent would need to match the depth of every vertical agent, which is basically AGI. Until we reach AGI, verticalized agents for specific real issues will be where the money/value is at.
by xnyan | 2025-05-31 14:36:06+00:00
Most institutions use a remote test proctoring service. Before the test begins, the service verify all the requirements are met.

Anything short of all the requirements and they do not administer the test. In the case something is broken, there is usually a window rather than a specific time when you can take the test, so you have an opportunity to resolve it.

If a webcam is required, students are informed about this requirement before enrolling in the institution, and are usually required to purchase hardware capable of doing this as a condition of enrollment.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-05-31 14:36:06+00:00
> I suspect a lot of accidental complexity also comes from those who don't really know what they're doing, so instead of focusing on the result, they take a very roundabout path until they stumble upon a solution.

I suspect that you are right on this; it often appears as a lack of depth of understanding of the problem being solved for and whether the proposed solution actually solves that problem and solves it in the simplest way possible.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-05-31 14:36:15+00:00
When grids set up markets to let people compete to provide those grid balancing services batteries totally dominate. Which suggests that is just another area that modern renewables win and reduce costs.

On the other hand Nuclear LCOE generally assume they can sell a high proportion of their power for the next 40 years.

So really the big hidden assumption is that solar won't eat half their market in that timeframe. And then solar plus batteries eats into it further. Which would drive up their cost, letting solar plus batteries win more business in a vicious cycle.

With the recent Iberian power situation half their nuclear was offline because they were already in a huff because they weren't being paid enough money.
by sillyfluke | 2025-05-31 14:37:35+00:00
Although I think your general position is by and large correct, it would test the limits of credulity to think that previous US administrations did not use USAID to extract concessions from African countries for decades prior. The case can be made that it is the better of three evils perhaps, but how far one can argue past that is a more difficult proposition. And one also needs to explain why Russia, who prefers making deals with a single person on the other side (ie a dictator) in the rest of world, would rather deal with a bunch of warring warlords when it comes to Africa.
by BoorishBears | 2025-05-31 14:39:12+00:00
"after Apple beefed it?" ... what? Apple's inability to improve their OS is somehow an indictment of B2C AI offerings in a general sense?

You seem unfamiliar with the space, there are plenty of players outside of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google bringing AI to the consumer space: https://a16z.com/100-gen-ai-apps-4/

Consumer AI is arguably doing better than enterprise where 99% of the spend is poorly scaling undertakings that don't deliver on even 1/10th of their cost.
by pimlottc | 2025-05-31 14:39:22+00:00
I was surprised that it automatically fills in the blank spaces once you mark all the filled ones, I haven't seen that in other PBN games. As a test, I tried solving one by only marking all the blanks, sadly it didn't fill in the remaining squares for me... :)

One minor UI suggestion: you should allow filling (or marking empty) multiple boxes by holding the mouse button down. This makes it easier to fill in entire rows or columns.
by scott_w | 2025-05-31 14:40:30+00:00
Fixed point Decimal is your friend here. I’m guessing you buy tokens in increments of 1,000,000 so it isn’t too much of an issue to account for. You can then normalise in your accounting so 1,000,000 is just “1 unit,” or you can just account in increments of 1,000,000 but that does start looking weird (but might be necessary!)
by andrewzeno | 2025-05-31 14:41:02+00:00
Lol I don't think I ever had 300 tabs open. Must be a nightmare to navigate haha. I believe I also used to have 6 browsers, but with Donut it now fluctuates at around 10 profiles, depending on what I need to do.

In terms of tabs, I rarely have over 30 tabs open. The moment I feel like I'm getting overwhelmed with the number of open things, I close all tabs that I don't absolutely need.
by still_grokking | 2025-05-31 14:42:04+00:00
As you say, "China" is here only a placeholder.

This "logic" that you need to do obviously illegal stuff (under current legislation) because otherwise someone else would do it and take the loot from that raid remains highly questionable no matter what country you put in that placeholder.

The same "logic" would for example dictate that you should dismiss patents as otherwise "someone in China" could do it before you. Somehow nobody would agree that this is a valid approach in that case…
by dinfinity | 2025-05-31 14:42:54+00:00
Are unrealistic beauty/physical expectations for girls and women an 'unfair situation', a 'systemic issue'?

If you say yes, think about what expectations for men there are and whether those constitute a systemic issue. Hint: https://www.reddit.com/r/FemaleDatingStrategy/comments/ma8h0...

The best thing you can do is actually listen to the things the boys and men say about why they are depressed, feel disadvantaged, etc. instead of just dismissing them and saying they just have to learn how to deal with it. There really is quite a lot of truth in there to be found.
by ido | 2025-05-31 14:44:44+00:00
It’s more a dishwasher level of automation than 3CPO- when you order they enter your table number and the kitchen staff puts the prepared dishes in the shelves in the robot, which the drives to your table. Once it gets there you take the dishes from the robot.

Tech-wise this could have existed 30 years ago (maybe going around the restaurant would have been more challenging than today but it’s a fixed path and the robots don’t leave the restaurant).
by chuckadams | 2025-05-31 14:44:46+00:00
I'd love an environment so integrated I don't have to use a build system for anything complex, but I'm not going back to the likes of jQuery in vanilla JS. That's the opposite of fun to me. Vite may be a fiddly beast, but once it's set up, I just edit and see changes live, and I can do it while writing in a better language.