MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by littlecranky67 | 2025-05-26 10:45:15+00:00
Terminating sessions on other devices is not possible, but another tradeoff is using a "Logout from all devices" mechanism. In that case you just have a global "token not issue before" field, and when you logout from all devices, set that timestamp to the current time (and all issued tokens will fail authentication). But again, tradeoff. You individual requirements may vary.
by mrweasel | 2025-05-26 10:45:30+00:00
AOL keywords? The benefit of DNS is that it's also sort of able to segment out globally, though that mostly works for smaller companies.

In many ways Google took over the role of DNS for non-technical people, but it's a little hard to advertise a specific search term. It is still possible to have a business without a domain name, but for e.g. WhatsApp, or Telegram, you're putting yourself into a garden with a wall high enough that even Google can't find you.

I have seem more and more companies simply advertise their Facebook or Instagram pages, but that sort of excludes a number of people from their business. Relying on WhatsApp would yield much the same problem.

On solution I could see, at least in some countries, is to have the government provide a "landing page" for each company when they register for their business licens. So you'd get tims-trash-removable.business.com when you register your company and you can then put in links to WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, email or a phone number.

Introducing something completely new would be extremely hard.
by loveparade | 2025-05-26 10:45:55+00:00
That's because the reality is somewhere in the middle. It obviously isn't 100x or even 10x except for very specific toy tasks, but for me it's probably around ~1.5-2x in everyday work. And I work on mostly long-tail scientific stuff, I imagine it's more if you do something like frontend dev with a lot of boilerplate. I'm absolutely convinced that people who say LLMs are not making them more productive either don't understand how to use them correctly, or they are working on very specific niche problems/infrastructure where they aren't useful.

2x may not sound like much compared to what you read in the media, but if a few years ago you had told companies that you can provably make their engineers even 2x more productive on average you'd probably be swimming in billions of dollars now. That kind of productivity increase is absolutely huge.
by red_admiral | 2025-05-26 10:46:52+00:00
If they really want to solve the problem, how about this - kind of like the ESTA for travel:

Individuals must register an account with government issued ID and the same level of KYC security as to open a bank account. This must be done a certain time in advance before the tickets for an event open.

You can only buy tickets for yourself or other already registered users whose username (or similar) you know - and only as long as you are buying a ticket for yourself too.

Some kind of exchange mechanism were a buyer can return a ticket to the pool and if someone else buys it, they get slightly less back than they paid in the first place, effectively allowing them to "resell" a ticket but at a slight loss (even if the platform takes a cut). Please don't use blockchain for this.

Maybe you can go full Chinese train tickets on this: you buy a ticket on an account backed by your government ID, and then your ID is what opens the platform gate for you. Your ID is your ticket.
by junto | 2025-05-26 10:48:07+00:00
Agreed. Germany does have a good class action equivalent, which an IP lawyer would be interested to pick it up. Companies such as AXA have been forced to pay back millions to customers for simple discrepancies in their legal terms and conditions for example in the past.

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/bgh-urteil-rueckzahlu...
by diggan | 2025-05-26 10:50:56+00:00
Just like ACs, fridges, washing machines, internet and a bunch of other things are "made-up preferences" too. In the end, does it really matter why or how the preference appears? If people are willing to have a personal assistant for 100/month, rather than 400/month, what difference does it make to you? Because you didn't get it at 400/month, you shouldn't want to get it at any price, because you don't really need it?
by mprovost | 2025-05-26 10:51:37+00:00
I have a strong memory from the start of my career, when I had a job setting up Solaris systems and there was a whispered rumour that one of the senior admins could read core files. To the rest of us, they were just junk that the system created when a process crashed and that we had to find and delete to save disk space. In my mind I thought she could somehow open the files in an editor and "read" them, like something out of the Matrix. We had no idea that you could load them into a debugger which could parse them into something understandable.
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-26 10:52:08+00:00
After decades of experience, I'm starting to acquire a notion that most of modern web app development is simply the obstinate refusal to put the code where it really belongs: inside the database engine.

Impedance mismatch, ORM, type generators, query parameterisation, async, etc... all stem from treating data as this "external" thing instead of the beating heart of the application.

It terrifies me to say this, but sooner or later someone is going to cook up a JavaScript database engine that also has web capability, along with a native client-side cache component... and then it'll be curtains for traditional databases.

Oh, the performance will be atrocious and grey-bearded wise old men will waggle their fingers in warning, but nobody will care. It'll be simple, consistent, integrated, and productive.
by fhd2 | 2025-05-26 10:52:15+00:00
Worse: If typing in code takes more time (i.e. costs more), there's a larger incentive to refactor.

I spent quite a bit of time as a CTO, and at some point there's a conversation about the business value of refactoring. That's a great conversation to have I think, it should ultimately be about business value, but good code vs bad code is a bit hard to quantify. What I usually reached for is that refactoring brings down lead time of changes, i.e. makes them faster. Tougher story these days I guess :D
Ask HN: How are you thinking about agent monetization?
by arnon | 2025-05-26 10:52:27+00:00
For those already monetizing agents - which model are you using, or what are you considering?

(mostly thinking around 1. Agent-based billing - Fixed fee per agent; 2. Workflow-based billing - Pay for what the agent does; 3. Outcome-based billing - Pay only for successful results)

I'm seeing most start with agent-based but quickly hit limitations when customers want to scale.

Also curious: How are you handling the "but ChatGPT is $20/month" objection when pricing enterprise agents at $30k+?
by reify | 2025-05-26 10:52:35+00:00
An IBM study based on conversations with 2,000 global CEOs recently found that only 25% of AI initiatives have delivered their expected ROI over the last few years, and, worse still, "64% of CEOs surveyed acknowledge that the risk of falling behind drives investment in some technologies before they have a clear understanding of the value they bring to the organization." 50% of respondents also found that "the pace of recent investments has left their organization with disconnected, piecemeal technology," almost as if they don't know what they're doing and are just putting AI in stuff for no reason.

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-05-06-ibm-study-ceos-double-do...
by qwertox | 2025-05-26 10:54:29+00:00
In other words, it would be enough for the chamber of commerce to offer a one-page-per-company index. Pre-populated automatically with all the legally binding contact information and offer a field or two where the company can put their Instagram-like profiles with lots of pictures. And allow people to comment on them.

One of the nice things in DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) is the obligation to put an imprint on the website [0]. This is valid for every hosted site which runs commercially (even if it is a private blog displaying ads).

They must show a phone number, an email address which must be usable as a customer support email (even if it is just named info@...), physical address, who is in charge of the company and other things.

Whenever I try to find out whom a website offering some "new AI stuff" belongs to, I'm baffled to see that other countries don't require this.

[0] https://www.porsche.com/germany/legal-notice/
by melvinroest | 2025-05-26 10:55:02+00:00
> I find LLMs very useful when I need to learn something new, e.g. a new library or API, or a new language. It is much faster to just ask the LLM how to render text in OpenGL, or whatever, than read through tons of terrible documentation.

LLMs are better at reading terrible documentation than the average programmer. So in that sense, "obscure text reading and explain it better" there seems to be a clear value add.

> If the answer is "a lot", you might consider how to solve that problem without relying on LLMs!

Aren't there languages with a lot of boilerplate though?
by jiehong | 2025-05-26 10:55:22+00:00
That’s a great point.

Thinking of IPFS, maybe we shouldn’t refer to content by name and location at once.

Perhaps every business gets a UUID, and that’s the official online ID for that business. Link it to a name only for display (or a list of names, for multiple languages). Now there is the question of how to bind that to a location (IP) online as well as IRL. Maybe a map of business with their UUID maintained by governments based on the post office system to validate it IRL?
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-05-26 10:55:38+00:00
> (and re-inflate the prices again)

That's not what re-inflated prices. Basically, no houses were built from about 2007 to 2017, and then far too few houses were built. Meanwhile, loads of people immigrated to Ireland for jobs (mostly in tech and finance).

Then, because lots of people spotted that Irish property was a good investment, people started piling in using rents as their baseline for investment, driving rents up, which pushed prices up etc.

But fundamentally property prices are increasing in Ireland because of population growth and a lack of supply (driven by poor planning for water and services, along with a culture of property owners objecting to the opening of an envelope).
by schroeding | 2025-05-26 10:55:59+00:00
These are ccTLDs, though, ICANN is out of the picture there, they have no authority after delegation. It's the fault of DENIC, the German ccTLD local operator. DENIC is a German entity, they are very much within reach of regulators.

(That's also the reason why foreign ccTLDs of, eh, semi-stable countries, e.g. .so domains, are risky - should the local operator start to lose it at some point, no-one can help you, neither ICANN nor IANA)
by jongjong | 2025-05-26 10:57:10+00:00
The trend towards increasingly low-quality, mass-produced code started long before AI but AI has greatly accelerated the trend and taken it to levels not previously possible. Short-term, this is destroying software dev jobs, long-term, it's going to create a lot of software dev jobs when people have to maintain or rewrite the mess (unless AGI can fill the gap). It will create a lot of jobs in cyber-security also because complex code, rushed out hastily, with less context awareness, opens the door to more potential vulnerabilities.

It's interesting how the trend which took over manufacturing is now also taking over software development. This trends towards low-quality, mass-production is taking over everything.
by dbspin | 2025-05-26 10:57:17+00:00
The vast majority, hard to quantify, but I'd guess well over 99% of professional musicians (certainly outside the US) never play a ticketmaster venue. They're not operating at that scale. When they tour it's at smaller venues - there are orders of magnitude more small bars and dedicated venues not owned by ticket master.

> Artists want money as much as other people, specially the ones playing big venues.

This is exactly the kind of projection I'm referring to. What makes you believe that most humans want as much money as possible - to the exclusion of all other values? Again, difficult to quantify, but I'd suggest a majority of people would put pure wealth lower down on their priority list than health, family connection, social connection, travel, time to spend on interests etc. This goes double for people who've chosen professions rooted in their own creative expression. All else being equal we'll all choose wealth - but if the cost is exploitation, all else will not be equal for most people.

It seems clear that you're conflating the microscopic numbers of 'major label' artists playing to vast audiences - effectively as employees of 360 label / marketing companies like Live Nation with the supermajority of professional touring musicians.

I'm reminded of the chap I attended college with who sold a salacious story about one of our mutual friends to a tabloid. When we found out this was happening I had a another mutual friend approach him to intervene, but heard back that it was 'too much money to turn down'. Fifteen or so years later this guy is a multi-millionaire who just lost a civil suit (and is under criminal investigation) for fraud and sexual misconduct. Most people do not operate like this - empathy is dimensional.
by tome | 2025-05-26 10:57:38+00:00
I call this the Peter Principle of Programming:

"Code increases in complication to the first level where it is too complicated to understand. It then hovers around this level of complexity as developers fear to touch it, pecking away here and there to add needed features."

http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/peter-principle/

Seems like I'm not the first one to notice this either:

https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2021/json-with-commas-commen...
Show HN: Daily Quiz
by danfrost | 2025-05-26 10:58:39+00:00
Hey! I’m a designer and this is a little portfolio project I’ve been working on. If you’ve got a moment, I’d love for you to check out the page and try the quiz.

The idea is to see what people think of the quiz format and whether it’s something they might come back to a few times a week. If you do give it a go, any feedback would be really appreciated.

Thanks a lot!

https://quizrush.webflow.io
by jemmyw | 2025-05-26 10:59:29+00:00
Just a clarification: in NZ most soft plastics are sent to landfill, regardless of what happens to most of the plastic that is actually recycled. We're pretty bad for general recycling and really bad for plastic recycling. Most soft plastics here are from agriculture so it's probably a more solvable problem than if it was weighted towards domestic waste, but farming often manages to lobby their way out of regulation.
by tmzt | 2025-05-26 11:00:47+00:00
Perhaps the next question we are asking is "what happens if you give a statistical model symbolic input" and the answer appears to be, you get symbolic output.

Even more strangely, the act of giving a statistical model symbolic input allows it to build a context which then shapes the symbolic output in a way that depends on some level of "understanding" instructions.

We "train" this model on raw symbolic data and it extracts the inherent semantic structure without any human ever embedding in the code anything resembling letters, words, or the like. It's as if Chomsky's elusive universal language is semantic structure itself.
by chimprich | 2025-05-26 11:00:47+00:00
From the article: "70% of the soft plastic that reached a known destination was burnt, not recycled".

That doesn't seem too bad. That means 30% got recycled, which is more than I expected given the general cynicism around plastic recycling. 30% definitely seems worthwhile.

For the plastic that got incinerated, it is presumably more efficient to burn products for energy reclamation that are already separated by type.

Having these recycling pathways set up is a necessary step towards improving recycling rates. We should be able to improve on that 30% over time.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-05-26 11:00:52+00:00
Tradeoff: You can't implement individual token revocation, but you can easily implement a "Logout on all devices" system. You have a timestamp with a "minimum issued at" attached to each identity, and if that identity (user) choses to "logout from all devices", you set the timestamp to the current time. Upon validating a token you only make sure the issued-at (iat) is after your "minimum issued at".

I think it is a real good trade-off, as in case of a security breach you have an easy way to mitigate leaked tokens. The downside is, your user will have to re-login all devices. If you do not want to burden your users with the login on all devices, you should ask your self how often you do have security breaches and leaked tokens, might be you have others issues going on.
by NilMostChill | 2025-05-26 11:01:39+00:00
That's....certainly a take.

it hurts that it's not exactly wrong.

but i don't think it's 100% right either, there are some things that you just can't do reliably, in current db engines at least.

As soon as you start baking this kind of support in to the db all you have if a db engine that has all the other bits stuffed in it.

They'll still have most of the issues you describe, it'll just be all in the "db layer" of the engine.
by red_admiral | 2025-05-26 11:01:59+00:00
> It would be crazy if in an auto factory people were measuring to make sure every angle is correct

They are.

Mechanical engineers measure more angles and measurements than a consultant might guess - its a standard part of quality control, although machines often do the measuring with the occasional human sampling as a back-up. You'd be suprised just how much effort goes into getting things correct such as _packs of kitkats_ or _cans of coke_.

If getting your angles wrong risks human lives, the threat of prosecution usually makes the angles turn out right, but if all else fails, recalls can happen because the gas pedal can get stuck in the driver-side floor carpet.

Assembly-line engineering has your favour that (A) CNC machines don't randomly hallucinate; they can fail or go out of tolerance, but usually in predictable ways and (B) you can measure a lot of things on an assembly line with lasers as the parts roll through.

It was thankfully a crazy one-off that someone didn't check that _the plugs were put back into the door_, but that could be a sign of bad engineering culture.
by tootyskooty | 2025-05-26 11:02:01+00:00
I still get a lot more value from webuis than from the agentic offerings, also for more general coding tasks. The main benefit is that I can more easily manage context. A muddied or insufficient context can sometimes degrade performance by a whole model generation, ime.

What works for me is collecting it manually and going one implementation chunk at a time. If it fails, I either do it myself or break it down into smaller chunks. As models got better these chunks got larger and larger.

Collecting context manually forces me to really consider what information is necessary to solve the problem, and it's much easier to then jump in to fix issues or break it down compared to sending it off blind. It also makes it a lot faster, since I shortcircuit the context collection step and it's easier to course-correct it.

Collecting manually is about 10 seconds of work as I have an extension that copies all files I have opened to the clipboard.
by Tepix | 2025-05-26 11:03:12+00:00
The missing feature is federation! In my view, centralized structures like a giant source repository such as github are something we as a developer community need to avoid. Unfortunately, features like federated merge requests in gitlab ( https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/14116 ) are something we've been waiting for for 9 years and nothing seems to be happening there. This feature alone would enable a lot of new collaboration without forcing everyone to work on a centralized system to use git - a decentralized versioning system - with high efficiency.

Last week, Microsoft cut off the email account of the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court, after being ordered to do so by the Trump administration. This is merely a week or two after Microsoft did a big PR campaign, telling the European Union how they were to stand up against this administration if the need arises. The irony!

Trump isn't hiding his opinion about the EU. What's stopping him from ordering Microsoft to block the EU from accessing github one day? Right now: Nothing at all. Think about how it would impact your business and open source software in general. We must not put all our eggs in a single basket.
by rollcat | 2025-05-26 11:03:31+00:00
> What LLMs are good at and their main value I'd argue, is nudging you along and removing the need to implement things that "just take time".

I was still learning Java at uni (while being a Python/Lisp fanboy) when I realised this:

- Complex and wordy languages need tooling (like autocomplete, autoformatting) to handle the tedious parts.

- Simple and expressive languages can get away with coding in notepad.exe.

- Lisp, as simple and powerful as it is, needs brace highlighting. You. Simply. Just. Can't.

Now 10, 20 years later you can look back at the evolution of many of these languages; some trends I've observed:

- Java, C#, C++, have all borrowed a lot from functional languages.

- JVM has Clojure.

- Go stubbornly insists on "if err != nil" - which isn't even the worst part; the following fmt.Errorf is.

- Rust (post-1.0) cautiously moved towards "?"; Zig (still pre-1.0) also has specific syntax for errors.

- Python is slowly getting more verbose, mostly because of type annotations.

- Autoformatters are actually great, you don't even have to care about indenting code as you spit it out, but... Python, being whitespace-sensitive, makes them a bit less useful.

Good tooling helps you with wordy languages. Expressive languages help you write concise code. Code is read much more often than it's written. Deterministic tooling can work with the structure of the code, but LMs (being probabilistic) can help you work with its intent. Language models are an evolution of automated tooling - they will get better, just like autocomplete got better; but they will never "solve" coding.

In my opinion, there's no truth here, only opinions.
by nottorp | 2025-05-26 11:04:38+00:00
> LLMs are better at reading terrible documentation than the average programmer.

LLMs don't go and read the terrible documentation for you when prompted. They reproduce the information posted by other people that struggled with said terrible documentation, if it was posted somewhere.

It's still better than a modern web search or struggling with the terrible documentation on your own - for introductory stuff.

For going into production you have to review the output, and reading code has always been harder than writing it...
by consumer451 | 2025-05-26 11:05:06+00:00
Postgres or Supabase MCP is really useful for me, especially when dealing with data related issues like permissions bugs. It seems faster to me. Example:

> I cannot see the Create Project button as user project-admin@domain.com. Please use Supabase MCP to see if I have the correct permissions, if so, are we handling it correctly in the UI?
by pornel | 2025-05-26 11:05:42+00:00
I find they're useful for the first 100 lines of a program (toy problems, boilerplate).

As the project becomes non-trivial (>1000 lines), they get increasingly likely to get confused. They can still seem helpful, but they may be confidently incorrect. This makes checking their outputs harder. Eventually silly bugs slip through, cost me more time than all of the time LLMs saved previously.