MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antognini | 2025-05-08 16:44:57+00:00
The field of candidates in this conclave was relatively open compared to the past few conclaves, so it is a little surprising that the cardinals were able to come to a consensus by the fourth ballot. That suggests that one of the initial front runners (likely Parolin or Tagle) was able to generate momentum early on and get the 2/3 majority pretty quickly. But we'll see in about 30 minutes if the cardinals have surprised us all with someone completely different!
by _bin_ | 2025-05-08 16:45:39+00:00
This is a pretty common question that's raised: how can we square this with loving our fellow man?

The short answer is Christianity isn't a utilitarian belief system. While God loves everyone equally, he puts some of us closer together in love: family, friends, neighbors, countrymen. This incurs a greater obligation, plus we ought to love more those who are closer to us.

Sadly, a lot of Christian faiths teach dogma before the underlying reasoning or take a Bible-only approach which I find to be incredibly incomplete. In case your upbringing didn't include much theological reading, I would strongly recommend Civitas Dei and Summa Theologiae; the latter is less explicitly relevant to its definition but probably a better book overall.
by bgirard | 2025-05-08 16:45:46+00:00
> products we couldn’t manufacture ourselves even if we wanted to, since the vendor has well-deserved IP protections

That's something I hadn't though about in the context of tariffs with interesting implications.

Does following IP rules mean that any products and technologies that wont manufacturer in the US but holds IP protections become subject to a permanent tariff? Giving countries a permanent 125% advantage over US businesses when using that IP?

What's the plan here?
by shooker435 | 2025-05-08 16:45:49+00:00
In addition to having 1 service with vastly different scaling requirements, having 1 service with vastly different availability requirements may make sense to separate as well.

If you need to keep the lights or maintain an SLA and can do so by separating a concern, it can really reduce risk and increase speed when deploying new features on "less important" components.
by throw10920 | 2025-05-08 16:45:53+00:00
Pointing to programs written with design flaws caused by the flaw in the programming language does invalidate the claim that the flaw exists and negatively affects those programs.

You can write any program in COBOL. Most people would say that it's an insufficient language for doing so.

"Insufficient" here obviously does not mean that it's impossible to write non-trivial programs, just that they'll have bad code.
by vasco | 2025-05-08 16:46:07+00:00
Yeah but it's not either or. And people are always want to contribute to their pet causes. Go tell someone who's sibling died of cancer or whatever that they shouldn't donate to cancer research because the state should do it. Like yes it should but however much they do you may have personal reasons to want to do more. So private charity is always going to be a thing in parallel to public works.
by joeharwood3 | 2025-05-08 16:46:39+00:00
Thanks for the feedback — it’s really helpful. You’re right that giving an LLM a schema and prompting it directly is a viable option for some users, especially those comfortable with that workflow. I think where I see Queryhub going is a one-stop plug-and-play for database querying, I want to eventually make a single interface across Postgres, Mysql, Snowflake, Oracle etc., with a consistent UX dedicated to querying and data insights in one place.
by freshpots | 2025-05-08 16:46:58+00:00
It is not trivial at all, it's the same energy used as about 9,000 homes and roughly 50-100 L/s of water wasted to evaporative cooling of said hardware.

"The Dongfang Electric Corporation's 26 MW offshore wind turbine is the largest in the world, surpassing previous models like the Mingyang 20 MW turbine. This turbine's larger size and capacity enable it to generate about 100 GWh of electricity annually, potentially powering 55,000 Chinese homes or 9,200 American homes."

Edit: more info here, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...
by lwo32k | 2025-05-08 16:47:09+00:00
The business model of the web was killing itself long before AI showed up.

Read the UN report on the Attention Economy from 2 years ago - https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_...

It says a simple thing - Content has vastly exceeded Eyeballs and Time available to consume it all.

So what happens when Supply exceeds Demand by a huge margin?

Attention Economy CEOs (basically the monopoly platforms) have handled this question by doing a fantastic job convincing Content Creators if your content is not getting eyeballs either something is wrong with you, OR you got to pay us more for Reach and Visibility/buy more ads/produce more engaging garbage. If its engaging we will take a cut. If its not, pay us to get the algo to prop you up.

This is a parasitic model which is eating itself.
by Hilift | 2025-05-08 16:47:48+00:00
Ludicrous. You can't build a reactor in the US for less than $10 billion. Combine that with natural gas at prices five times less than Europe and that means that no-one will loan money for a project. If they do, it is usually subsidized by naive taxpayers. Meanwhile a windmill can transported on the Interstate in Kansas unattended and installed in two days.
by kubb | 2025-05-08 16:48:02+00:00
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_...

The US is spending more of its GDP percentage-wise on healthcare than any European country. How you can consider the European spending "extravagant" is inexplicable, you have to be deep deep in the ideological rabbit hole, and unable to admit new information.
by RadiozRadioz | 2025-05-08 16:48:03+00:00
We have lost a great deal of artistry in calligraphy, and no doubt a printing press uses more energy than a pencil, but we can't really stop Pandora's box one it's opened. Regardless of how people feel about it, it's here, it's cheaper, so here it will remain. As defeatist and cynical as it sounds, we might as well give in and try to be on the side making the money.

Ms Adams' story in the article reflects this, in some respect unfortunate, reality.
by whartung | 2025-05-08 16:48:22+00:00
I have to add this.

Back in the day, we sold accounting systems.

Now the beauty of accounting is that everyone needs accounting, the fundamentals are all quite solid and common, but even still, everyone does accounting differently. Matter of taste of the Controller, industry specific bits, etc. While everyone has a chart of accounts, no two chart of accounts are the same.

So, anyway, we ate our own dog food, we used our own accounting system in house for, you know, accounting stuff.

But the funny thing is that when you opened up the Accounts Receivable Invoice screen, and this is on an 80x25 color terminal, I would say it was 60%+ a collection of fields regarding the invoice. Customer, dates, terms, etc. Probably 20 fields on that screen, all crammed together, because real estate was always an issue on 80x25 terminals.

But, we were a simple business, and the bulk of those fields are optional for specific use cases, and those options are based on the customer.

So, when you entered in the customer for the invoice, 80% of the fields just vanished from the screen. Feature of the system. But it made a very busy screen into something quite stark. It doesn't resize, it just makes the field go away. The top half of the screen was, essentially, blank.

I always found it amusing to see all of that information vanish.
by hobs | 2025-05-08 16:48:24+00:00
I don't even consider what the user asks - simply that it was rejected and it was a question they wanted to ask - hence "whatever they wanted", and while I agree SO's moderation is overly burdensome (and was a mod myself once more than a decade ago) I don't agree that moderation that's effective and limited having users being "ultimately fine with it" - it totally depends on which users you ask.
Show HN: I created an open source AI research assistant
by rohitghumare | 2025-05-08 16:48:37+00:00
Imagine typing ANY question and getting a perfectly organized answer with sources, summaries, AND a knowledge graph... instantly!

That's the power of the AI Research Assistant we're building TODAY using Motia, the backend framework that's changing the game for AI agents!

This isn't just another tutorial – it's a peek into the future of AI workflows.

See how Motia's event-driven magic lets you chain together complex tasks: Accepting your query, Generating search ideas with Gemini, Scouring the web, Deep-diving into content analysis, Extracting key concepts, Delivering a full research report.

We'll start coding LIVE (well, almost!) and you'll see just how FAST and SIMPLE it is to get a powerful agent running.
by Terr_ | 2025-05-08 16:48:51+00:00
> I'm happy to pay for the actual cost of shipping a single item across an entire ocean, but maybe that increase is a bit much...

The Import-ant thing (heh) is that the additional money you must pay is not going to the manufacturer or the shipper. It won't be improving working-conditions of foreign sweatshop laborers, or upgrading cargo ships to reduce pollution, etc.

Instead, it's going to a US government official that basically seizes goods crossing the border who won't give them back without a payment.,

Worse: These higher import-taxes all US companies and consumers are being made to pay will probably go towards the benefit of... lowering what rich Americans pay on their personal income taxes.
by csomar | 2025-05-08 16:48:53+00:00
I am not sure there is that many people (beside IBM) that are using it. In fact, they have a pretty much dead Discord channel with very few users. My only explanation was either people didn't like the very corporate style or that it had a steep initial cost to implement.

> but unfortunately it gives me extreme IBM cloud ptsd

Sure. It did give me some of that PTSD but then every UI framework I struggled with had lacking that gave me severe headaches. At some point I realized that Carbon is not that bad after all.
by jodrellblank | 2025-05-08 16:48:58+00:00
Like the startups which try to make solar systems to condense drinking water from the air. They demonstrate it in wet climates where the idea works but the solar panels don't because it's cloudy and cool. Those environments don't need drinking water because they are rainy. Then they try it in deserts where the water is needed and the solar panel bit works, but the whole thing doesn't work because there's no water in the air - that's why the water is needed there(!).

ThunderF00t Busted! videos on scammy startups keeping on raising money for this fundamentally unworkable idea:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc7WqVMCABg - Zero Mass Water

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vss1ke5tTvI - Fontus self-filling water bottle

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vss1ke5tTvI - self-filling water bottle lab experiment what would be reasonably possible

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfmQcY_sEt0 - WaterSeer part 1

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gPSyU564Io - WaterSeer part 2

Drinking game: drink every time he says "it's a. de. humidifier."
by jm4 | 2025-05-08 16:48:59+00:00
And if you're big enough and you do that, you get bullied into submission by the White House. It's really hard to look at this administration's economic policies and not wonder whether there is deliberate sabotage going on. The best case scenario is these people are woefully uninformed and incompetent. These tariffs will hurt consumers, destroy small businesses, and simultaneously have the potential to enrich the largest players in the market. This never would have happened if our population was better educated and particularly more financially literate.
Show HN: Using eBPF to see through encryption without a proxy
by tylerflint | 2025-05-08 16:49:11+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Tyler Flint, one of the creators of qtap.

For a while now, my team and I at Qpoint.io have been grappling with the challenge of understanding what's actually happening inside the encrypted traffic leaving our production systems. Modern apps rely heavily on third-party APIs (think payment processors, data providers, etc.), but once TLS kicks in, figuring out exactly what data is being sent, identifying PII exposure, or debugging integration issues becomes incredibly difficult without resorting to complex and often brittle solutions.

Traditional approaches like forward proxies require terminating TLS (MITM), managing certificates, and often introduce performance bottlenecks or single points of failure. Network firewalls usually operate at L3/L4 and lack payload visibility. We felt there had to be a better way.

That's why we built qtap. It's a lightweight agent that uses eBPF to tap into network traffic at the kernel level. The key idea is to hook into common TLS libraries (like OpenSSL) before encryption and after decryption. This gives us deep visibility into the actual request/response payloads of HTTPS/TLS traffic without needing to terminate the connection or manage certs. Because it leverages eBPF, the performance impact is minimal compared to traditional methods.

With qtap, we can now see exactly which external services our apps are talking to, inspect the payloads for debugging or security auditing (e.g., spotting accidental PII leaks), monitor API performance/errors for third-party dependencies, and get a much clearer picture of our egress traffic patterns.

We've found this approach really powerful for improving reliability and security posture. We've packaged qtap as a Linux Binary, Docker container, and Helm chart for deployment.

This is still evolving, but we're excited about the potential of using eBPF for this kind of deep, yet non-intrusive, visibility.

We'd love to get the HN community's feedback:

Do you face similar challenges monitoring encrypted egress traffic? What are your thoughts on using eBPF for this compared to other methods? Any suggestions or potential use cases we haven't considered?

Happy to answer any questions!
by neilv | 2025-05-08 16:49:15+00:00
Why does it have to global? Isn't that just imperialism? Why can't it be scoped to a geopolitical unit that wants it?

(I'm highly skeptical of social movements that claim to be for equality, but of course there are officials who suspiciously enjoy non-equal luxuries. Then it just looks like greedy sociopaths leveraging 'equality' PR in bad faith, as a tactic.)
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-08 16:49:17+00:00
The AI won't reject a claim because that's easier than doing the paperwork to approve the claim and it's 4:30 on a Friday.

It also won't approve it because despite not putting the "magic words" on the form it's clear from the situation that you'll get approved regardless and it's a waste of the company's labor to have you file an appeal that they then have to review.

I'm not sure which case is more common though.
by simple10 | 2025-05-08 16:50:25+00:00
I worked with a lot of ecomm and especially crowdfunded companies that shipped to 100+ countries. Outside of the US, most consumers expect to have to pay import fees as a separate line item.

But this is new for US consumers. My hope is that US companies will add temporary price increases if they can't eat the tariffs in their existing margins and then reduce when tariffs are reduced. But my guess is that most companies will increase prices, blame the tariffs (rightfully so), but then not fully reduce prices if/when the tariffs decrease.

It's similar to what happened with tipping for takeout food during Covid. It's now a permanent tax.
by EMIRELADERO | 2025-05-08 16:50:44+00:00
> To produce yet another analogy, imagine I have a service X. You can pay and I will give you any movie you want. You don’t know how I do it. Is this copyright infringement or not? I would say yes. Now let’s say I reveal the secret - I open up photoshop and painstakingly recreate the movie frame by frame. I might make a mistake here or there. Is this still copyright infringement? I think it is.

Okay, but that is not what's happening here. Demonstratably so. The fact that a model is technically capable of overfitting to certain very repeated points in the training data doesn't mean the entire thing has to be shot down. The non-infringing uses far outweigh the offending ones, by a lot.

If what you say is true, and they do outright copy a lot, then it should be pretty easy for any IP holder to sue anyone who misuses the model that way for copyright infringement on those specific outputs.
by Dave_Rosenthal | 2025-05-08 16:50:46+00:00
Thanks for the insight. A $XX million exa-data system is no doubt impressive :)

> Another big problem I found with modeling real apps was the five second transaction timeout. This is not, as you might expect, a configurable value. It's hard-coded into the servers and clients. This turns into a hugely awkward limitation and routinely wrecks your application logic and forces you to implement very tricky concurrency algorithms inside your app, just to do basic tasks. For example, computing most reports over a large dataset does not work with FoundationDB because you can't get a consistent snapshot for more than five seconds!

I'm pretty sure that the 5-second transaction timeout is configurable with a knob. You just need enough RAM to hold the key-range information for the transaction timeout period. Basically: throughput * transaction_time_limit <= RAM, since FDB enforces that isolation reconciliation runs in memory.

But, the other reason that 5 seconds is the default is that e.g. 1 hour read/write transactions don't really make sense in the optimistic concurrency world. This is the downside of optimistic concurrency. The upside is that your system never gets blocked by bad-behaved long-running transactions, which is a serious issue in real production systems.

Finally, I think that the current "Redwood" storage engine does allow long-lived read transactions, even though the original engine backing FDB didn't.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-05-08 16:50:50+00:00
Google had a really great paper on this about 2 years back titled Towards Modern Development of Cloud Applications[0] that talks about how teams often:

> ... conflate logical boundaries (how code is written) with physical boundaries (how code is deployed)

It's very easy to read and digest and I think it's a great paper that makes the case for building "modular monoliths".

I think many teams do not have a practical guide on how to achieve this. Certainly, Google's solution in this case is far too complex for most teams. But many teams can achieve the 5 core benefits that they mentioned with a simpler setup. I wrote a about this in a blog post A Practical Guide to Modular Monoliths with .NET[1] with a GitHub repo showing how to achieve this[2] as well as a video walkthrough[3]

This approach has proven (for me) to be easy to implement, package, deploy, and manage and is particularly good for startups with all of the qualities mentioned in the Google paper without much complexity added.

[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3593856.3595909

[1] https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2024/01/a-practical-guide-to-modul...

[2] https://github.com/CharlieDigital/dn8-modular-monolith

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEggfW0A_Oo
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-08 16:51:03+00:00
The apps select for people who can do the most deliveries per unit time, because that's the only way to actually make anything like a living out of these apps.

People who are considerate, pay attention to instructions, care about your food, etc, can't afford to continue working, because they don't deliver often enough to afford rent.

The point of an auction model like these apps use is to drive down labor prices to the lowest bidder. There's no force pushing quality up, because people cannot ban certain "known bad" drivers and the rating system is non-functional. You will only ever get laborers who don't have better choices to sell their labor to. Specifically, the apps don't care about bad service, because it empirically has not stopped people from ordering. People will literally have a delivery driver eat the meal they paid 2X for and still order again from that service, because the entire system provides plausible deniability that "surely that was a fluke and this time I will have a different, better driver, right?"

American consumers are insanely un-discerning. They are willing to pay huge markups and get radically bad service on a burger and fries for whatever reason.

Also consider how many of the people working this "job" literally cannot read english.
by westurner | 2025-05-08 16:51:07+00:00
Does [self-hosted, multi-tenant] serverless achieve similar separation of concerns in comparison to microservices?

Should the URLs contain a version; like /api/v1/ ?

FWIU OpenAPI API schema enable e.g. MCP service discovery, but not multi-API workflows or orchestrations.

(Edit: "The Arazzo Specification - A Tapestry for Deterministic API Workflows" by OpenAPI; src: https://github.com/OAI/Arazzo-Specification .. spec: https://spec.openapis.org/arazzo/latest.html (TIL by using this comment as a prompt))
BookGenAI: Revolutionary Tool for Instant Bedtime Stories Generation
by flixaiorg | 2025-05-08 16:51:13+00:00
BookGenAI is an innovative tool from FlixAI's lab that solves a common parenting challenge: the constant need for new bedtime stories. Instead of buying books repeatedly or dealing with library late fees and wait times, parents can instantly generate fresh, engaging bedtime stories for their children. This tool represents a significant advancement in how we access children's literature, making storytelling more accessible, affordable, and convenient for families.
by 91bananas | 2025-05-08 16:51:20+00:00
I think everything McMaster dates to it being a physical book first. They still operate on that same business model, but we have the internet now. The supplied product might change, but it still meets whatever specification is in the catalog that is released yearly. If they could guarantee a TI-83 Plus was what you were going to get they would have put it in the catalog, but they couldn't so they don't. And they STILL operate out of that physical book for some customers, so the website has to match it too. That's my take.
by grey-area | 2025-05-08 16:51:24+00:00
The article points out some really important downsides of tariffs for any business but particularly small businesses:

Unlike sales taxes or income taxes they are paid up front, before the sale.

If they don't make a sale due to tariffs they still have to pay them and end up with unprofitable inventory.

Tariffs can change at any time, and order/shipping times are long, so they are very difficult to plan for. Products may have been ordered months before tariffs but end up liable.
by snowwrestler | 2025-05-08 16:51:24+00:00
I found this interesting:

> Since they are electronics products/components, there’s a chance we may be able to request reclassification on some items to avoid the 125% ‘reciprocal’ tariff, but there’s no assurance that it will succeed, and even if it does, it is many, many months until we could see a refund.

I did not realize exemptions were processed as refund requests. So even if they are granted, it still kills cash flow in the meantime.
by libraryatnight | 2025-05-08 16:51:28+00:00
Time and time again we see when the investors want to see a bump, they lay people off. We have execs that openly talk about maximizing head winds by running leaner than necessary so that when the next tail wind comes the gains from the shift are as big as possible... for investors.

I'm not excited to see how an administration that seems to enjoy manipulating market swings pairs with investors that treat the labor force as a stock price lever.