MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A tool to help me find ways to connect with friends
by baochicabowwow | 2025-05-05 04:27:02+00:00
A while back, I posted about Krestrel — a lightweight tool I built to help me stay in touch with friends more regularly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41639339).

The feedback I got was helpful, people don't generally know how to reach out to friends or make friends, not just remembering to meet with friends. I made this tool in hopes to help people find ideas and events to engage their friends with.

For example:

If a friend is into dogs, the app might suggest: “There’s a local dog walk every Sunday.” If you met someone at tennis, it might say: “Tennis lessons for beginners at the local tennis club” ” The goal isn’t to automate your friends interactions, but to provide you with a starting point to talk to your friends. You'll still have to do the hard part and overcome any fears you might have asking people to hang out.

Everything runs privately — nothing is posted, no names are shared, and the suggestions come straight to you. I’ve been using it myself and it’s helped me find new activities.

I would love feedback.

Caveat - It often takes around 30 seconds to get a response. I know this isn't the best and if you have ideas on how to speed things up, I'd be happy to hear it!
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-05 04:29:12+00:00
> Less combative, less jokey, less provocative.

This sounds like a miserable future to me. Less "jokey"? Is your ideal human is a Vulcan from Star Trek or something?

I want humans to be kind, but I don't want us to have less fun. I don't want us to build a society of blandness.

Less combative, less provocative?

No thanks. It sounds like a society of lobotomized drones. I hope we do not ever let anything extinguish our fire.
by jhgaylor | 2025-05-05 04:29:55+00:00
Hey Thomas - I hadn't seen your new server yet. I did migrate over to json resume as a part of building all this out. It works really well with LLMs. Iterating on it was a breeze compared to previous time's i've tried to dial in my resume.

Underneath this site is a package to make this easy to spin up for anyone. https://github.com/jhgaylor/node-candidate-mcp-server

I was thinking about spinning up a site to let folks deploy their own candidate MCP servers, it just needs a configuration blob. I wonder if we can tie it in with resume.json gists some way.
by travisgriggs | 2025-05-05 04:30:54+00:00
I love the idea of sortition. Wish more people knew and used the word in their political vocabularies.

I've always wanted to see someone experiment with a hybrid. A coin has value because it has two sides (e.g. just one coin face spend very well). So I've always wanted to see sortition and meritocratic elections paired.

Either you use a lottery system to select who can run for office in a given cycle (say 1000 people get the nod to run for State Senator), and then those that wish of that set can run for office in the traditional way.

OR

You use a voting system to select a set of candidates (say 5-10 of them) and then "cast lots" to select the winner.

Either way allows the electorate to steer the process, but also accepts the hand of fate. Marries chaos and order, yin and yang, stability and turbulence.

I've always wished that there was more record of this having been tried out. And respect for the value of a little chaos in the system. Large system designers often use turbelence/randomness in ways that reinforce otherwise ordered systems.
by j_bum | 2025-05-05 04:31:40+00:00
Thanks for sharing. It’s very nice to hear from others with similar experiences. I agree about the mindfulness component too.

I’m curious how you capture pics. I use my iPhone. Over the past few years, I’ve also started taking short videos, as the iPhone video processing is just unbelievably good. The videos capture nice audio context, and really help me remember the “being” of the memory. iPhone pics are good too, but of course the sensor size is the main limitation. I have been thinking about looking for a dedicated small digital camera.

Curious to hear what you use!
by mitch-p | 2025-05-05 04:34:21+00:00
Recently, I have been using many ai assisted coding tools. My favourite has been cursor, it feels clean, fast and allows me to edit with precision. A friend of mine told me about loveable and showed me his poorly built web app with no functionality. I gave it a go and found that this platform did not do well unless heavily prompted with requirements and specifications. I made my own tool to help engineer requirements before using one of these platforms and I have gotten great results so far. I am building the next version of my tool breta.ai using it, which I then put into loveable for a few prompts then edit offline in cursor. It feels difficult to find a great coding flow with so many new tools and coding paradigm shifts, but for me this has worked well. By getting a strong SRS before coding you can force tools like loveable/cursor to code specific features and conform to specifications. Please check it out and let me know if it works for you
by lotyrin | 2025-05-05 04:35:21+00:00
I've met a few good recruiters, to be sure. But the median one definitely seemed to just match candidates up to roles in an entirely mechanical way, not even as well as an LLM could (because it at least would be informed roughly about whether or not experience in X translates at all to experience in Y, and not be tricked into thinking e.g. Java and JavaScript are at all functionally related). I wonder how those folks are doing these days, and how well they'll be doing in a few years.
by zdc1 | 2025-05-05 04:38:10+00:00
I've been bitten by the surprising amount of time it takes for Kubernetes to update loadbalancer target IPs in some configurations. For me, 90% of the graceful shutdown battle was just ensuring that traffic was actually being drained before pod termination.

Adding a global preStop hook with a 15 second sleep did wonders for our HTTP 503 rates. This creates time between when the loadbalancer deregistration gets kicked off, and when SIGTERM is actually passed to the application, which in turn simplifies a lot of the application-side handling.
by ijidak | 2025-05-05 04:39:17+00:00
Absolutely. Also, the level of cheating in college, even pre-AI is often overlooked in these articles.

For the exact reasons you state, pre-AI homework was often copied and then individuals just crammed for the tests.

AI is not the problem for these students, it's that many students are only in it for the diploma.

If it wasn't AI it would just be copying the assignment from a classmate or previous grad.

And I imagine the students who really want to learn are still learning because they didn't cheat then, and they aren't letting AI do the thinking for them now.
by vasco | 2025-05-05 04:39:32+00:00
I've noticed the "live in the moment" crowd is funnily enough the one that least lives in the moment. They are the first to notice how many people around them are taking pictures or posing or looking "ridiculous", worrying how themselves would look if they did the same, sometimes wanting deep down to do the same but held back by their own perceived judgement of others potentially turning on them.

I had a friend that spend a concert mad that someone was filming with an iPad on his peripheral vision. Kept talking about it and was the main topic when reviewing the concert to other friends.

Just live your life, you want to take pictures do, you don't don't, you want to post your whole life in Instagram do. Life is whatever you want it to be.
by evolve2k | 2025-05-05 04:39:34+00:00
Yes in Australia you can vote at ANY polling station.

If you vote outside your local area there is extra steps and you need to let them know. They usually ask everyone; “if you’re voting outside of area”, join this line.

Extra verification and proof is needed if outside of area. I think behind the scenes, the fact you voted out of area is communicated back to your area.

Voter fraud is very low in Australia. With compulsory voting of all ciztiens, the quantity of votes is very high. We have 98% of the population enrolled to vote fyi.

So with these quantities, the incentive of say double voting fraud is greatly reduced.
by jhgaylor | 2025-05-05 04:39:52+00:00
Claude Desktop just added support for remote servers this week. They've got it locked behind a pretty big paywall for now but I'm sure it'll make it's way to the standard plan. Others will come along. MCP is ~6 months old. There will be public clients everyone knows (chatgpt, claude) and there will be private clients (recruiter tools) that can consume those endpoints before long.
by ijidak | 2025-05-05 04:40:22+00:00
The level of cheating in college, pre-AI, is often overlooked in these articles.

Pre-AI, homework was often copied and then individuals just crammed for the tests.

AI is not the problem for these students, it's that many students are only in it for the diploma.

If it wasn't AI it would just be copying the assignment from a classmate or previous grad.

And I imagine the students who really want to learn are still learning because they didn't cheat then, and they aren't letting AI do the thinking for them now.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-05 04:40:23+00:00
> How was it overblown, we now have a non-trivial amount of completely de-socialized men in particular who live in online cults with real world impact

There are way more factors to the the growth of this demographic than just "internet addiction" or "videogame addiction"

Then again, the internet was instrumental in spreading the ideology that is demonizing these men and causing them to turn away from society, so you're not completely wrong
Show HN: A Modern Personal Homepage Template with Fluid Background and Anime.js
by Tomotoes | 2025-05-05 04:41:24+00:00
I spent 2 days building this personal homepage template using Cursor IDE (AI-powered development environment). It combines stunning visuals with smooth interactions. Key features:

- Interactive WebGL Fluid Simulation as background - Smooth animations powered by Anime.js - Simple configuration through config.json - Fully responsive with mobile support - Delayed page transitions for better UX

The project leverages popular libraries like Anime.js for animations while maintaining a lightweight footprint. Everything is highly configurable through a single JSON file, making it easy to customize for your needs.

What's particularly exciting is how quickly this came together - just 48 hours from concept to completion using Cursor IDE. The AI-assisted development workflow helped maintain clean code while accelerating the development process.

Demo: https://simonaking.com GitHub: https://github.com/SimonAKing/HomePage

Looking forward to your feedback and suggestions!
by Andaith | 2025-05-05 04:42:13+00:00
Imagine if they used this power for good and also identified the adults in these childrens lives who cared & would make a difference, and shared this with them. Ensuring those teens get help & support.

Or even just altered their algorithmic feeds to show much more positive messages, suggest hobbies & push them towards more positive social circles, or something for these teens?

But no, we can target them with ads instead.
by colonial | 2025-05-05 04:43:01+00:00
I participated in a competitive university hackathon recently. It was sponsored by some B2B cloud company peddling an "agentic platform" and an ill-defined (but also AI oriented) Google program.

Shockingly, all the cases demanded SaaS chatbot wrappers. I spent a good chunk of time commiserating with one of the other undergraduate teams about how cosmically lame this was, especially when contrasted with the "innovation" rhetoric espoused by the organizers.

To quote one girl: "Bro, my backend is just stateless Ollama calls and prompt templates. I could one-shot this garbage while hammered."

So, yes, they do feel fake. There's no challenge. The focus is on churning out box-checking slop rather than taking some kernel (a theme, perhaps, instead of precisely specified cases) and building something novel around it.
by mikepurvis | 2025-05-05 04:47:15+00:00
I was surprised to see such world-weary criticism of the bullet-points-with-bold style in TFA— it's long been what I've reached for when writing for a technical audience, whether that's in a wiki page, a design doc, a README, a PR, or even a whole book.

I feel like for most of my audiences it provides the proper anchor points for effective skimming while still giving me room to include further detail and explanation so that it's there as desired by the reader.

(And responding to my sibling comment, I also use em dashes and semicolons all the time. Has my brain secretly always been an LLM??)
by Centigonal | 2025-05-05 04:49:05+00:00
There is also evidence linking some common pharmaceuticals to long term deficits in memory and cognition.

Diphenhydramine (Benadryl/OTC Sleep Aids) use is associated with an increased risk of dementia [1], while benzodiazepines like Xanax and Ativan are strongly associated with long term cognitive deficits [2]. Taking many drugs is a cost-benefit analysis, and it's important to be informed about the possible consequences before diving in.

[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/common-anticholinergic-d...

[2] https://academic.oup.com/acn/article-abstract/33/7/901/47349...
by zmgsabst | 2025-05-05 04:50:38+00:00
In the US, you can just make up degrees — but you have to be honest that you’re unaccredited.

Accreditation is regulated by NGOs who need government approval and without that you cant received financial aid (or participate in some programs) — but you can hand out pieces of paper for completing your program.

https://www.ed.gov/laws-and-policy/higher-education-laws-and...
by omranjamal | 2025-05-05 04:50:57+00:00
This is great, but here's a bit of feedback that would make things nice:

1. I actually understood what it does and why only after reading your first comment on HN but I think the motivations behind the project should be on the README itself. Especially for people like me who are only now dipping our toes into generative coding. We see something like this, we get excited but then confused and we click out.

2. The README could use a bit of examples especially for the output. (I understand this is a WIP)

3. Could we get a Linux version too please?

4. I'm not entirely convinced this need to be a GUI app. Could have been more useful if I could run it from my terminal, it would also be much easier to port to Linux if it were a CLI app.
by kagevf | 2025-05-05 04:52:25+00:00
I like LoL alright too. I was only maybe a year or so into CL when I read it, so I didn't really notice a lot of what it's criticized for. On the one hand, I'm a little sad that I see it bagged on so much (that link from beach's site, IRC, reddit) since I felt I got decent enough value out of it, but OTOH it's good and healthy to point out problems.

The abstractions used in Calendrical Calculations sound good - and echo what I've seen elsewhere - so, based on your comment I'm now more likely to read it, so thank you for that.
by Geee | 2025-05-05 04:52:27+00:00
It's not really suitable. Blender uses polygonal modeling, which is quite limiting. It's possible but very difficult compared to CAD, unless you're modeling something organic like human figures.

I'm currently using Shapr3D and it's very quick to design simple parts. Blender doesn't have any of the tools which I'm using in Shapr3D, such as sketches, constraints, parametric modeling etc. and most of the direct modeling tools are just way easier to use than Blender.
by pmarreck | 2025-05-05 04:54:15+00:00
I love this idea.

But you know what? It's one step away from a system where AI's act as agents of our values, interests, needs and availabilities and mingle with other AI's to find possible business or romantic connections for us, all automatically.

Like a business coach/matchmaker and dating coach/matchmaker in one. Imagine just receiving high-potential connections for both, in your inbox, every day, according to whatever criteria you value.

My OpenAI ChatGPT knows me VERY well. It would possibly be amazing if a system existed that I could deem my chatgpt account a proxy of me for.

EDIT: I don't think there's currently a way to hand out a key to my (privacy-preserving except where explicitly allowed) own ChatGPT which also includes the conversation memory, unless MCP might provide this somehow
by jltsiren | 2025-05-05 04:56:12+00:00
It's less about cultural preferences and more about fighting with what you have.

If you have a feudal society based on personal relationships between the elites, you probably can't raise large bodies of heavy infantry. You don't have the people trained to fight in formation, you don't have the resources to equip them, and you don't have the capacity to organize them. Instead, you have the elites, who are often well trained and equipped. The elites have their personal retainers, who are pretty much the same. There can be some mercenaries if you can afford them. And then there are commoners who have to fight for various reasons but often lack both training and equipment.

Elephants used to be native to North Africa, until the Roman Empire drove the subspecies to extinction. Carthaginians, Romans, and some Macedonian kingdoms used them in war. Persians and other Macedonian kingdoms imported elephants from India. But none of them fielded more than tens of elephants at once, at which scale infantry was capable of countering them. Some contemporary Indian kingdoms found it practical to have hundreds of elephants on the battlefield, which was qualitatively a different situation.
by rlupi | 2025-05-05 04:57:18+00:00
We're more malleable than AI, and we can't delete our memories or context.

I wonder if this is an effect of users just gravitating toward the same writing style and topics that push the context toward the same semantic universe. In a sense, the user acts somewhat like the chatbot extended memory through an holographic principle, encoding meaning on the boundary that connects the two.

https://chatgpt.com/canvas/shared/68184b61fa0081919c0c4d226e...
by hristov | 2025-05-05 04:58:45+00:00
Not entirely on topic but a relevant warning. Extasy is used nowadays as a rape drug. Be careful. I have had extasy three times in my life, none of them consensual -- every single time it was slipped into my drink. I described the symptoms to my psychiatrist and she said that it was extasy for sure. I am a middle aged man and not incredibly attractive. God knows what is happening to young sexy people.

So if you are having a drink somewhere and you suddenly unexpectedly get this really happy, warm and cozy feeling, as if everything is alright with the world, there is love everywhere and you just have to hug and kiss somebody, anybody .... well do not hug or kiss anybody. You may have just been drugged.

There is a very troubling lore about MDMA, in that it apparently it is not such a bad drug, etc. I don't know about this ... I do know that a lot of MDMA deaths happened at the extasy fueled raves that were popular in the 90s and the early 2000s. They say those deaths were from other causes ... I do not know if this is true, but I have a feeling that this mantra of "MDMA is not that bad it is all about love, etc. " has been taken up by would-be-rapists to convince themselves that what they are doing is not that bad. That MDMA is not really a rape drug like Rohypnol, so there is nothing wrong in slipping one into a person's drink.

Well they are wrong. It is a serious crime and it is attempted rape if intent is established.

I confronted one of the guys that slipped me MDMA. It is not difficult to guess who did it, they usually make sure they are close to you when you are having those "I need to hug and kiss someone, anyone" feelings. He essentially admitted it without saying it outright and started laughing. Thought it was a cute thing, like something out of a romantic comedy.

I wish I had proof to send all those f*ckers to jail but of course when you are happy on MDMA you do not think to save the evidence for the police. But next time I will. I have thought about this enough that next time I will recognize the symptoms and do what needs to be done regardless of how happy I am feeling.

If anyone cares, none of these events resulted in sexual assault, I am a very careful person and I do not easily give in to strange feelings.
by ednite | 2025-05-05 04:58:55+00:00
While the trend is concerning, it's also a pivotal moment to rethink our economic and social models. A 10% shift to AI today could easily become 50% tomorrow.

In my opinion, the real question isn't AI vs humanity, but whether we can design systems where both thrive. As Erik Brynjolfsson has argued, the issue isn’t automation itself, but whether the benefits are broadly shared. That means reimagining how we distribute the wealth created by AI—before the gap becomes unbridgeable.
by haswell | 2025-05-05 05:00:13+00:00
I picked up an Olympus OM-D E-M5 III (weather sealed) during the pandemic and started going on photo walks. Fell in love with it and have taken it all over the US on road trips and hikes. I’ve since purchased other cameras and have gone pretty deep down the photography rabbit hole. Recently I’ve been eyeing a used Panasonic GX85 to pair with my existing smaller lenses like the Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 because it’s even smaller than the Olympus.

But I still use my iPhone for some things - especially video.

There are some great compact micro four thirds cameras on the market that are better than a phone but still small enough to carry regularly. The “Micro Four Nerds” YouTube channel is a great resource if you’re curious. She covers many of the really compact every day carry cameras on the market and best lenses for various scenarios.

MFT cameras are a great gateway into the hobby, and some of the more vintage looking bodies just inspire me to take them everywhere and take photos.

Highly recommend looking at used gear on sites like mpb.com or keh.com. Can usually find lightly used equipment for significantly less than retail pricing.
by samplatt | 2025-05-05 05:02:34+00:00
In reality, holding a piece of paper has nothing in common with relevant ability. Some graduates will exit university as competent people, some won't.

This isn't exactly news, or even a recent phenomenon. My peers who finished their CS degree circa 2004 ish were a broad mix of utter idiots who shouldn't get a job in that field, or damn sharp (if green) technically-minded people, or somewhere in between.

The industry will sort them out; the ones that can, do, the ones that can't, will do something else of use, or find another job.
by hristov | 2025-05-05 05:02:48+00:00
The responsible drug user is a myth created to sell more drugs. Most illegal drugs are both addictive and tolerance causing. It is certainly true of MDMA. That means you will not get the same effect, from the same amount next time. You will have to increase your dosage to get the same or similar experience.

So you either stop using the drug (if you are lucky) or go on a downward spiral of higher doses, more negative side effects and life deterioration.
by taneq | 2025-05-05 05:04:00+00:00
If you don’t gave a tap handy you can quickly “heat-set” threads in a part. Print the hole slightly undersized (I usually go 0.2-0.4mm under for M3-M4 size screws) so it takes some effort to screw in, then quickly screw the screw all the way in with a cordless drill. Friction should heat it up enough to melt the plastic and form it round the screw. Wait until cool before removing the screw. :)
by jfil | 2025-05-05 05:05:52+00:00
A loved one recently had this experience with ChatGPT: paste in a real-world text conversation between you and a friend without real names or context. Tell it to analyze the conversation, but say that your friend's parts are actually your own. Then ask it to re-analyze with your own parts attributes to you correctly. It'll give you vastly different feedback on the same conversation. It is not objective.