MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phkahler | 2025-05-08 13:05:57+00:00
Stackoverflow is no longer a Q&A site. It's trying to become a curated information source. Like wikipedia or the kind of thing you'd train AI with. As such it isn't great for answering question any more.

Another old problem was notable users. There was a guy famous for his presence and answering tons of question (I forgot his name). He was actually pretty good but... he was not an expert in all the areas he'd participate in, but his answers would sometimes win because he was articulate, not because it was the best.
by aeve890 | 2025-05-08 13:06:09+00:00
>I let Cursor handle the basics - basically acting as a glorified multi-file autocomplete.

Same experience. I'm in no need to let the AI write large, real working code. But it's amazing for fast refactoring, function signatures, boilerplate, etc. The real boring parts. I only wish it wouldn't be so eager to try to dump a 50 lines of bullshit code every time. But for small changes, super cool.
by tomhow | 2025-05-08 13:06:21+00:00
> This is laughably incorrect.

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by mrweasel | 2025-05-08 13:06:56+00:00
There's apparently no good way of doing this. Denmark have a system for identifying yourself online. It has a 2FA component, either an app on your phone, where you have to swipe or something (I don't use it) or a physical code generator. It should be basically impossible to break, except it's not, because people will get calls from "their bank" asking the to do the 2FA stuff. Basically any measure put in to prevent this is being circumvented by people believing that the bank, who barely wants to deal with customers, would actually call them up Thursday evening.

I think the current solution is to have users scan a QR code, if they are on a different device than the one with their authenticator app. I haven't hear of anyone with the hardware token being scammed though, but most of the people who have the hardware version, do so because we don't even trust an app on our phone.

But yes, there are PLENTY of cases of identity theft even in countries with electronic identification solutions.

One thing the US could do, but won't, is have an account registered with the federal and state governments. Any money coming from the government should ONLY go to that account and it changing it should require a thorough identity validation.
by jwr | 2025-05-08 13:07:35+00:00
> grave misconceptions regarding the true value of products like Oracle, MSSQL and DB2

In the context of this discussion, I would offer that we are getting into "apples vs oranges" comparisons here.

If you are doing custom queries for building reports where each report needs to access humongous amounts of data, SQL databases are likely a good fit.

If you need a fast and yet correct distributed database (for fault tolerance) for an online app backend, where the data and query patterns are known and do not change much over time and all retrieval is done using indexes, SQL databases are not a great fit, "big boy" or not.

As for "questioning if the business was ever viable to begin with", as a solo founder SaaS builder, I would humbly point you to numerous HN discussions where people are OUTRAGED at any subscriptions, and expect software to be an inexpensive one-time purchase. But that's a separate discussion.
by wcoenen | 2025-05-08 13:08:02+00:00
Related note for those surprised that 3DES is still a thing: the Mastercard specifications still use 3DES for pin block encryption. This is used each time you enter the pin for a Mastercard card!

There is no alternative yet. Support for AES "coming soon".

https://developer.mastercard.com/card-management/documentati...
by astura | 2025-05-08 13:08:38+00:00
>One of the groups of people using these apps are the disabled

No they aren't, certainly not on a large scale.

I know and have known a LOT of disabled people (as well as "disabled" people) in my life.

I think there is very little overlap between

a) the population of disabled people and

b) the population of people who have enough money they can afford the cost of restaurant food + delivery fees + tip on more than a very occasional basis.

It's exactly the opposite from what I've seen. I've seen the disabled people in my life get grocery delivery (with informal arrangements before apps existed). I've seen them get bulk frozen food delivery. I've literally never seen someone who is homebound order delivery food. They can't afford it.
by seszett | 2025-05-08 13:08:39+00:00
> even a tiny city will need more than 100 buses to just provide bad service, and would need 5-10 times as many just to give good service

Wikipedia says De Lijn (the company that provides public transport for Flanders) has 2200 busses total. Service could be better but it's not awful either, and that's for a whole region of 6 million inhabitants, so I think your numbers are quite off. A tiny city only requires a handful of busses, a medium one use 50 busses or so.
by parsimo2010 | 2025-05-08 13:09:10+00:00
Small correction: the jammers used are specifically targeting the L-band, because it is used for navigation and satellite communications.

Normally ground transmitters in this band are using just a couple watts or less, so they don’t significantly impact the readings of a satellite looking at a large area on the earth, but a jammer uses a lot more power and can be noticed.
by josephg | 2025-05-08 13:09:32+00:00
I'm fine with trait inheritance. (If you want to call it that - its maybe better to describe it as trait preconditions.)

I'm fine with it because trait inheritance doesn't increase code complexity in the same way C++ / Java class inheritance does. If you call foo.bar(), its usually pretty obvious which function is being called. And you only ever have to look in one place to see all the fields of a struct.

In C++, its common to have a class method say "blah = 5;" or something. Then you need to spend 5 minutes figuring out where "blah" is even defined in the class hierarchy. By the time you find it, you have 8 code windows open and you've forgotten what you were even trying to do. And thats to say nothing of all the weird and wonderful bits of code which might modify that field when you aren't looking. Ugh.
by pc86 | 2025-05-08 13:09:41+00:00
Once you get more than 1 step removed things just get silly, and I don't just mean with firearms.

If someone buys a car legally, and commits vehicular homicide with it, the car salesman is still 100% innocent. If I buy a hammer from Home Depot and kill someone with it no reasonable person assigns even the slightest bit of blame to the cashier, or the manager of that Home Depot location, or the CEO of Home Depot.

We can talk about systemic factors and the socioeconomic influences until we're blue in the face but "blame" should rest with the person pulling the trigger, behind the wheel, or swinging the hammer.
by diggan | 2025-05-08 13:10:10+00:00
> Using Third-Party GitHub Actions

Maybe I'm overly pedantic, but this whole section seems to miss the absolutely most obvious way to de-risk using 3rd party Actions, review the code itself? It talks about using popularity, number of contributors and a bunch of other things for "assessing the risk", but it never actually mentions reviewing the action/code itself.

I see this all the time around 3rd party library usage, people pulling in random libraries without even skimming the source code. Is this really that common? I understand for a whole framework you don't have time to review the entire project, but for these small-time GitHub Actions that handle releases, testing and such? Absolute no-brainer to sit down and review it all before you depend on it, rather than looking at the number of stars or other vanity-metrics.
by bluGill | 2025-05-08 13:10:23+00:00
The problem with showrooms is it is easy to go in, see what you need, then walk out and order from the cheaper mail order place that doesn't have retail overhead.

The other problem is walmart with the generic stuff is good enough for most even though it is measurably bad, in a cheap but measurably bad listening environment - but they can thereby compete with online sales. That and a lot of expensive stuff is measurably no better than the "our best" walmark junk and so if you do find such a store there is no guarantee they are not pushing you overprice junk instead of the good stuff.
by eterm | 2025-05-08 13:10:58+00:00
Thanks for trying to help.

On the client side, randomStream.Close will get called when it's disposed.

On the server side, I'm not sure what I could put into an overriden Close that wouldn't just be base.Close()? RandomStream itself doesn't own any resources that need cleaning up.

I could force WCF to use Session mode, and then add flow-control through a side-channel, so other messages could prepare the stream to internally buffer and then rewrite in requested chunks?

But at that point I might as well just use an apprpriately sized GetRandomBlock(ValueWithSequence[]), and chunk requests that way and abandon using a stream for this at all.

I'll have an experiment with that approach to try to find the best buffer size and whether streaming the buffer actually helps vs just having it as the message and letting WCF control the sending.
by RHSeeger | 2025-05-08 13:11:24+00:00
From a very modified version of something I was working on recently, but with the stuff I couldn't do actually done here (and non-functionality code because of that, but is shows the idea)

public interface MetadataSource { Metadata metadata = null; default Metadata getMetadata() { if (metadata == null) { metadata = fetchMetadata(); } return metadata; } // This can be relatively costly Metadata fetchMetadata(); } public class Image implements MetadataSource { public Metadata fetchMetadata() { // goes to externally hosted image to fetch metadata } } public class Video implements MetadataSource { public Metadata fetchMetadata() { // goes to video hosting service to get metadata } } public class Document implements MetadataSource { public Metadata fetchMetadata() { // goes to database to fetch metadata } }

Each of the above have completely different ways to fetch their metadata (ex, Title and Creator), and of them has different characteristics related to the cost of getting that data. So, by default, we want the interface to cache the result so that the

1. The thing that _has_ the metadata only needs to know how to fetch it when it's asked for (implementation of fetchMetadata), and it doesn't need to worry about the cost of doing so (within limits of course)

2. The things that _use_ the metadata only need to know how to ask for it (getMetadata) and can assume it has minimal cost.

3. Neither one of those needs to know anything about it being cached.

I had a case recently where I needed to check "does this have metadata available" separate from "what is the metadata". And fetching it twice would add load.
by eitally | 2025-05-08 13:11:31+00:00
Arguably, "the way our reasoning works" is probably a normal distribution but with a broad curve (and for some things, possibly a bimodal distribution), so trying to understand "why" is a fool's errand. It's more valuable to understand the input variables and then be able to calculate the likely output behaviors with error bars than to try to reduce the problem to a guaranteed if(this), then(that) equation. I don't particularly care why a person behaves a certain way in many cases, as long as 1) their behavior is generally within an expected range, and 2) doesn't harm themselves or others, and I don't see why I'd care any more about the behavior of an AI-driven system. As with most things, Safety first!
Show HN: CoGenAI, home of unlimited AI inference for agents
by carlosfm | 2025-05-08 13:11:40+00:00
Today we announce the release of CoGenAI (https://cogenai.kalavai.net/), an AI inference platform for agentic AI. It's an all you can eat inference API for text, coding, reasoning, tool calling, audio and speech models designed to be used by agents.

What makes it different? - Free, unlimited, not metered, inference. Pay for fair usage instead. - Contribute to the computing pool with your resources to earn credits

And to celebrate it, we are giving $100 in credits to everyone that registers this week.

Feedback and thoughts welcome here, or in our discord server: https://discord.gg/YN6ThTJKbM
by d_k_f | 2025-05-08 13:12:04+00:00
I'm with you, and at least here in Germany this is already the law, though it is only required if your deceleration rate is greater or equal to 1.3m/s² (it is allowed starting at a rate of 0.7 m/s²).

There are already voices against this, as the recuperation functionality of electric vehicles can repeatedly trigger this feature if the driver lets go of the gas pedal for a short time.
by alif09 | 2025-05-08 13:12:19+00:00
The global Ship Repair and Maintenance Services Market was valued at approximately USD 35.72 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach around USD 53.23 billion by 2032, exhibiting a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 4.60% during the forecast period from 2024 to 2033.
by crowcroft | 2025-05-08 13:12:36+00:00
You would be surprised how many companies do in fact use multiple analytics services.

Only one tool will be a 'source of truth' but a company using a combination of something like GA4 (Business source of truth), Mixpanel (product insights), and Clarity (Landing page analysis) is not unheard of.

The types of companies that use multiple services are also the types of companies that are likely spending $1,000s per month as well, so overall quite a profitable industry for many companies to operate in.
by lolinder | 2025-05-08 13:12:50+00:00
Look, I'm all for democracy in the real world, but this is a very bad use of democratic processes for a number of reasons:

1. First and foremost, it's not a democracy if your turnout is too low. The 2024 election had voter turnout of 2%, which would be a catastrophic turnout in any real democracy. Either too few knew about the election, too few thought their vote mattered, or too few had any idea how to choose between the options. Any of these reasons requires immediate and pressing attention if a democracy is to be called that.

2. Never having re-elections makes it useless. For it to be a truly democratic process there absolutely needs to be a way to withdraw consent from a moderator who behaves differently than expected. So yeah, a no confidence vote would be an option, or better yet regular elections to hold a position.

I'm afraid that the largest problem is that democracy is really just a bad fit for this kind of site. By its nature the only people who are likely to vote in this type of election are a small dedicated core, not the enormous number of users that the site actually serves. A small core of contributors to a community resource invariably seems to develop a sense of "us against the world"—the thin blue line of police lore isn't an isolated thing, it's what happens when people view themselves as lone defenders of something they care about. And just like with police, that can result in a toxic culture that begins to actively degrade the plebian outgroup that they started out serving.

I don't have a better answer, but I don't believe democracy is a good fit for moderators on the scale of community that Stack Overflow operates. It's too big to have good turnout, and the problems caused by bad turnout have become catastrophic.
by bluGill | 2025-05-08 13:12:55+00:00
That if is the question. There in other industries examples of a good small company being bought out and it is for the better - they keep making quality things but now have the advantages of the big company. There however a lot of well known examples of a good small company being bought out for the name which is then put on junk while fooling people who still remember the name.

Only time will tell.
by Deathmax | 2025-05-08 13:13:29+00:00
Gemini's free tier will absolutely use your inputs for training [1], same with Mistral's free tier [2]. Anthropic and OpenAI let's you opt into data collection for discounted prices or free tokens.

[1]: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms#data-use-unpaid

[2]: https://mistral.ai/terms#privacy-policy
by handsclean | 2025-05-08 13:14:21+00:00
I’d appreciate if somebody more familiar with SO would verify this, but I believe there’s some low constant number of close votes required to close something, and this doesn’t adapt to how many people are voting or to positive signals. Because there’s an error rate in all things, this naturally means that things are wrongly closed all the time, especially content that’s viewed a lot and not fought for.
by KolmogorovComp | 2025-05-08 13:14:41+00:00
Because reading the code is useless if you can't pin the version, and the article explains well it's hard to do

> However, only hash pinning ensures the same code runs every time. It is important to consider transitive risk: even if you hash pin an Action, if it relies on another Action with weaker pinning, you're still exposed.
by eru | 2025-05-08 13:15:27+00:00
> And thats to say nothing of all the weird and wonderful bits of code which might modify that field when you aren't looking. Ugh.

Agreed, mutation tends to make everything worse and definitely more complicated.

Mutation is a powerful technique, but needs to be treated with care. Haskell and Rust (and Erlang) amongst others have some interesting approaches for how to recognise the danger of mutations, but still harness their upsides.

Haskell even has quite a few different approaches to choose from, or to mix-and-match.
by phkahler | 2025-05-08 13:15:29+00:00
>> isn't like this our goal here??? I mean we are comment on YC site that produce startup aiming just that

NO! I've been here long enough to remember PG saying to build something people WANT. YC has become less about technical founders building an MVP and more about the investors finding something they can make money from. The later often depends on "monetization" which has become the driver of enshitification, which is precisely the opposite of what people want and the antithesis of what YC once was.
by rsynnott | 2025-05-08 13:15:40+00:00
> You need to provide good service all day, not just during rust hour.

Providing good service at non-rush-hour is comparatively easy, though; it just has to be relatively frequent. Particularly for buses, the trouble at rush hour is that you can effectively hit capacity for a line; you get buses waiting for other buses to leave stops, and so on.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-08 13:15:42+00:00
I don't like the ban, or the fact that the "TikTok bill" ended up granting broad new powers to the executive branch. I just read it a bit differently with regards to free speech.

When it comes to limiting the audience we can engage with, that would require a ban on talking to specific people rather than on a specific platform. Anyone that I may have engaged with on TikTok can still be engaged with on other platforms.

The fact that many of the biggest social media platforms are based in the US and that we saw clear evidence of both the US government's and the plstforms' willingness to collude is a huge problem. To me that's a separate issue than the TikTok ban, though they are in the same arena I suppose.
by palata | 2025-05-08 13:16:01+00:00
> in tension with "I want to ask whatever questions I want."

As I said, I strongly disagree with the idea that my questions were unfit for StackOverflow. Every single time their reason was "duplication", it was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously very different) with two different answers. Hell, they closed some of those as duplicate even though I posted both the question and the answer, and the answer was completely different from the one they were pointing to.

This is not "I want to ask whatever questions I want". It's bad moderation.
by josephg | 2025-05-08 13:16:55+00:00
We're all flavoured by our experience. You can for sure make a mess with flat C-style code that uses structs and global functions. But whenever I've seen a mess in C, its a sort of "lego on the floor" type of mess. Code is everywhere, but all the pieces are uniquely named and mostly self contained.

Classes - and class hierarchies - really let you go to town. I've seen codebases that seem totally impossible to get your head around. The best is when you have 18 classes which all implicitly or explicitly depend on each other. In that case, just starting the program up requires an insane, fragile dance where lots of objects need to be initialized in just the perfect order, otherwise something hits a null pointer exception in its initialization code. You reorder two lines in a constructor somewhere and something on the other side of your codebase breaks, and you have no idea why.

For some reason I've never seen anyone make that kind of mess just using composition. Maybe I just haven't been around long enough.
by tomhow | 2025-05-08 13:17:02+00:00
This subthread turned into a flamewar and you helped to set it off here. We need commenters to read and follow the guidelines in order to avoid this. These guidelines are especially relevant:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Eschew flamebait

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by wokwokwok | 2025-05-08 13:17:13+00:00
How about making it a site where only people who answer questions can even be eligible to be moderators?

What if moderators had to actually have karma from recently answering questions or they lose mod privileges?

Wouldn't that be a fresh change. You'd have to actually work to be a mod.

...

It shouldn't be controversial. That mods currently make visitors unwelcome is disgrace. :(

That SO incentivizes that behavior is ridiculous.
by metalliqaz | 2025-05-08 13:18:56+00:00
I left SO a long time ago when it was really at its peak. Your SO score was starting to be used as a metric to get hired for jobs in the valley. At that time moderation was totally out of control. One contributor in particular* would find a post he didn't like, then go to chat rooms to rally a downvote brigade. It was so toxic I called it quits on the spot. I still use SO quite a bit, but through DDG. I search for something, it displays an answer that it scraped from SO. Some years ago I read that they made an effort to soften the atmosphere there because they realized it was chasing away female devs and other minority groups. I guess they couldn't turn it around.

*Later he took over the Flask project and I was still bitter so I stopped using that too.
by eru | 2025-05-08 13:19:19+00:00
That's part of the reason that as an employer I don't like worker democracy anywhere I work.

With the usual model, I can just negotiate directly with management and they can tell me yes or no, and we can make a contract (or be a bit vaguer and make promises).

With worker democracy, there's no one I can negotiate with that can tell me anything definitive.
by strken | 2025-05-08 13:19:35+00:00
Cramming for an entrance exam is a revolting waste of a life. It's enabled by a system that cannot and will not evaluate students on their ability to commit to something that actually matters.

I agree that "well-rounded" people without depth are not as interesting or as valuable as people who've picked one or more topics to learn in detail, especially since the latter can often be well-rounded and also have an area of expertise. However, a bit part of their value comes from their ability to do something without anyone telling them to do it. An engineer who spent six months writing a protein folding simulator out of obsessive interest is a much better pick for a computational chemistry course than one who spent that time in a cram school.