MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alphazard | 2025-05-13 16:00:39+00:00
This comment and a sibling both brought up the issue of less experienced people and mentorship, which is important to clarify.

Some incompetence is a known quantity, and when it is known it will not produce stress. The junior dev on the team might not know how to do something. The team leadership should already have priced that in, and have a plan to help them if need be. If the junior dev's incompetence is creating stress, the root cause is leadership incompetence.

The kind of incompetence that produces stress is incompetence that is too impolite to mention. It can't be addressed through "mentorship" or "working together" because that would call the legitimacy of the role and the person filling it into question. Engineering managers who don't understand engineering, product managers who don't understand the product, etc. The list is long, and examples are common. The organization is built around the assumption that these people can do things that they are unable to do. That mismatch is the origin of stress.

Investing time in the 1st kind of incompetence is a good investment because you will get a good return on your time invested. The junior dev with potential becomes the rock star. The 2nd kind of incompetence is often "Throwing good money after bad". These situations are not worth your time. There is unlikely to be an improvement, and you risk it backfiring especially if the problem is above you in the org chart.
by bradford | 2025-05-13 16:00:43+00:00
Ok, but the brief README links to an actual microsoft.com domain (https://www.microsoft.com/store).

Why would you need a package to wrap a website? Wouldn't the website be accessible on a LTSC build, even if the official package isn't available?

If this is filling a highly useful role that I'm admittedly oblivious to, why are there only three commits in the project history?

(Best I can tell, this is a personal project that somehow made it to HN front page)
by neomantra | 2025-05-13 16:00:44+00:00
Counterpoint via anecdotes… this week I am at the International Symposium for Green Chemistry. >600 chemists from all over the world. They are all psyched to advance safer and sustainable solutions to a wide variety of problems. You see all their funding sources from the UN to EU to country to city to local, as well as private companies. You see their collaboration and enthusiasm.

Of course the US comes up… but it seems that the rest of the world is just moving on without us (I am American). Our government is simply an unreliable partner. Some US PhD candidates here are looking for post-doc labs in the EU.

A speaker for Dow Chemical was talking about their Year 2050+ plan for net-zero CO2 and circular economy. I was surprised to learn (news was last month) that Dow cancelled their $9B net-zero ethylene processing facility in Canada because US tariffs will make it too expensive (to build it and long term it’s the source of ethylene). Imagine the jobs lost, contracts lost, US exports lost, and environmental damage.

This morning I had this conversation (before seeing OP): “If all the US university research funding disintegrates, how does that affect the primacy of US science education? How should somebody applying to college now think about this?” Perhaps focus on a teaching-focused college and then try to do the research abroad? Of course such choices are more easily available to the wealthy. US higher science education and industry will just naturally decline?

Random: Only one talk I’ve seen so far included a GitHub repo.

Separately, I have multiple friends who lost their US lab funding and/or jobs. I also have a friend who was being poached via Dutch Visa fast-track. I think the science brain drain is real.
by kureikain | 2025-05-13 16:01:18+00:00
I'm building mailwip.com (and my second saas right now)

My strategy is too simple, I don't think it will works but It work good enough for me.

- Just engage in the community. In early day, I helped on the cloudflare forum. I just help generic about anything related to email, explain concept and here and there try to introduce my service. I always introduce my service last. Give people free option first, always, even if the free option is my competitor. But I do explain pros/confs of my service

- Build plugin that may drive traffic: For me, CloudFlare offers plugin ability so I built a CloudFlare app for that. It may not benefit me directly but get my name out there

I shared my revenu and publish update on indiehacker https://www.indiehackers.com/product/hanami/revenue
by throwaway5752 | 2025-05-13 16:01:25+00:00
You don't describe this like a person that possesses any domain expertise in the subject.

It wasn't a mechanism called the Chevron deference, it was law, as determined by the Supreme Court in "Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council".

The deference was on the part of the courts deferring to executive regulators when there was ambiguity, since the regulators were experts in a given field and the courts were generally legal experts. Not Congress.

That was overturned in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.

"non-elected, life-long positioned government employees" so, you mean, federal employees. Nothing about it is "life-long", you made that up. They could quit, change jobs, or be fired.

And "criminals" is false. It applied to civil statutes, not criminal ones. It goes on.
by hello_computer | 2025-05-13 16:02:23+00:00
“Everybody does it” does not alter the fact that a very small very wealthy very connected group of people exert far more influence over policy than the general public.

Per The Hill:

“Take, for example, the most frequently purchased item in SNAP — sugar-sweetened beverages, which comprise 9.3 percent of all SNAP expenditures. This part of the SNAP subsidy, by our estimates, drives 20 to 25 percent of U.S. revenues for Coca-Cola and Pepsico.*”

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/5118876-healthy-snap-...
by carlwgeorge | 2025-05-13 16:02:42+00:00
Ubuntu Pro and RHEL are both 10 years for their standard lifecycle, with optional add-ons to go longer. Ubuntu's is called "Legacy Support" to get an extra 2 years, RHEL's is called "Extended Life-cycle Support" to get an extra 3-4 years.

https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle#server-desktop-eol-ol...

https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata#Life...
by nikolayasdf123 | 2025-05-13 16:02:51+00:00
I think they using vector graphics and vector animations (say Rive). Rive takes order of 10s of KBs. Lottie is much larger to 100s of KBs. Even then you would need 5000 animations to reach 500MB, unlikely!

raster graphics and videos are likely not included in build

probably some unused code (libraries) got into it, it can grow quite large

or maybe some ML models?
by Cherub0774 | 2025-05-13 16:03:12+00:00
> Yep, if anyone didn't want their videos to be on our site, we would take it down.

Do note that this behavior of "opting creators into a program without their consent, justifying it via revenue share, and CYA with a 'they can opt out if they want to!' shield" is still... awful optics.

The whole Brave scandal (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736888) is a good case study on how laypeople will perceive this. It's not popular at all.
by foxanthony | 2025-05-13 16:03:12+00:00
This post tries to address the gap between current AI safety narratives—often abstract or speculative—and the operational realities of building and using AI tools.

Instead of treating AI like an alien mind or inevitable threat, I argue that it's better understood as a system of tools whose effects depend on user control and functional outcomes. The framework I propose leans on clarity, survival, and agency—not philosophical thought experiments.

Curious to hear where this breaks down for others. Criticism welcome.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-13 16:03:14+00:00
>The announcement came less than a month after Honda denied a report in the Japanese media that President Trump’s tariffs would force it to pull back in Canada.

Honda in Japan made a legally true statement to Nikkei. If they lied, these executives would be facing criminal charges. We now know this was true.

Honda Canada lied saying this was untrue. To the benefit of the Liberals during an election. Interfering in the election as an unregistered third party. Probably violating CSA laws as well; almost certainly OSC.
by jdnddnbe | 2025-05-13 16:03:26+00:00
Have those measures like taking more vacations and adopting a 4-day week really increased your productivity? How have you measured that?

Of cause one can deliver more per hour when working 8h/d instead of 12h/d. But the output of a 12h day will still be massively more than from a 8h day.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-13 16:03:27+00:00
Yes, in that context. It was extremely common to shorthand that to "illegals", as in, "Bob says he's gotta hire illegals or he can't find anyone who'll shingle houses for him", or, "I don't know why they can't mine the border to stop the illegals" (I guess I can assign that as a position the Republicans "shifted" to and then blame them for it since I've heard multiple actual Republican voters say it, no interpretation required, they literally stated they want a minefield on the border? That'd be more connected to reality than the rest of this nonsense thread).

Democrats have been pushing back on the language of that, because "illegals" had plainly become a slur and tool for othering and dehumanizing. I think democrats focus on that horse-shit way too much—though, then again, shifting language that way as that kind of political tool is something Republicans do and had done in this case, so maybe I'm wrong and they're right for trying to stop it—but that's what the sign's about, it's a topic they've had a bug up their ass about for like twenty damn years.
by njjv | 2025-05-13 16:03:53+00:00
A while back I wrote some stock market algorithms and charting software I use in my own DYOR daily stock analysis. I decided to offer up that daily information to others. I changed my SaaS delivery approach idea to be a daily Substack newsletter instead. It is a stock market info newsletter called StockQuakes ( https://stockquakes.substack.com ) . With Substack my newsletter grew by using the Substack Recommendations feature as well as their Notesfeature. Substack takes care of the signups, etc. via Stripe. You have to have value above and below the paywall line in the newsletter to keep users. And you have to have a free version in addition to the paid version. I also put up a separate website to drive SEO traffic to the newsletter ( https://stockquakes.com ). And I post on BlueSky, Threads, and X/Twitter daily in addition to Substack Notes. Have 600 users, 5000 followers.
by grafmax | 2025-05-13 16:04:14+00:00
Republicans vs Democrats is indeed the wrong way to look at it. Both parties are beholden to the billionaire/corporate class. Democrats helped pave the way for Trump. Mass surveillance, extrajudicial killing of US citizens, militarization of law enforcement, expansion of executive powers, the list goes on.

I’m curious to what degree the narrative will once again be recuperated by the Democrats to obscure the class origins of these policies - the expansion of power of the corporate-government machine. The Dems have been successfully playing ping pong with the Republicans for many years without addressing our society’s structural failures because they don’t want to upset their monied masters.
by pheelicks | 2025-05-13 16:04:17+00:00
Bear in mind that this is a "Show HN", the library was released just a few weeks ago! Whereas the other libraries have been around for a decade+

The plan is certainly to release versions in other languages, if you would like to be involved, please get in touch. I agree the porting shouldn't be too difficult, as by design the library has just one simple dependency and the code should translate nicely to other C-style languages
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-05-13 16:04:48+00:00
I think on year 2001 GHz CPU should be a performance benchmark that every piece of basic non-high performance software should execute acceptably on.

This is kind of been a disappointment to me of AI when I've tried it. This has kind of been a disappointment to me of AI when I've tried it. Llm should be able to Port things. It should be able to rewrite things with the same interface. It should be able to translate from inefficient languages to more efficient ones.

It should even be able to optimize existing code bases automatically, or at least diagnose or point out poor algorithms, cache optimization, etc.

Heck I remember powerbuilder in the mid 90s running pretty well on 200 mhz CPUs. It doesn't even really interpreted stuff. It's just amazing how slow stuff is. Do rounded corners and CSS really consume that much CPU power?

My limited experience was trying to take the unix sed source code and have AI port it into a jvm language, and it could do the most basic operations, but utterly failed at even the intermediate sed capabilities. And then optimize? Nope

Of course there's no desire for something like that. Which really shows what the purpose of all this is. It's to kill jobs. It's not to make better software. And it means AI is going to produce a flood of bad software. Really bad software.
by princevegeta89 | 2025-05-13 16:05:01+00:00
Sure, this was a few years ago. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, but all the other existing and new engineers on my team have expressed a lot of concern about the entire paradigm shift and that Elixir was unnecessarily complicating things in terms of implementing simple logic. A lot of junior engineers also have been unhappy with the kind of shift going away from the traditional procedural/oop styles. If I was working on a solo project, I would pick Elixir over Rails any day. The LSP server and tooling alone makes it stand up very strong.
by mjr00 | 2025-05-13 16:05:04+00:00
> That’s irrelevant here, the fully featured product can also be fast.

So why is it so rarely the case? If it's so simple, why hasn't anyone recognized that Teams, Zoom, etc are all bloated and slow and made a hyper-optimized, feature-complete competitor, dominating the market?

Software costs money to build, and performance optimization doesn't come for free.

> The overwhelming majority of software is slow because the company simply doesn’t care about efficiency.

Don't care about efficiency at all, or don't consider it as important as other features and functionality?
by naasking | 2025-05-13 16:05:29+00:00
> What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality,

This implication is the big question mark. It's often true but it's not at all clear that it's necessarily true. Choosing better languages, frameworks, tools and so on can all help with lowering costs without necessarily lowering quality. I don't think we're anywhere near the bottom of the cost barrel either.

I think the problem is focusing on improving the quality of the end products directly when the quality of the end product for a given cost is downstream of the quality of our tools. We need much better tools.

For instance, why are our languages still obsessed with manipulating pointers and references as a primary mode of operation, just so we can program yet another linked list? Why can't you declare something as a "Set with O(1) insert" and the language or its runtime chooses an implementation? Why isn't direct relational programming more common? I'm not talking programming in verbose SQL, but something more modern with type inference and proper composition, more like LINQ, eg. why can't I do:

let usEmployees = from x in Employees where x.Country == "US"; func byFemale(Query<Employees> q) => from x in q where x.Sex == "Female"; let femaleUsEmployees = byFemale(usEmployees);

These abstract over implementation details that we're constantly fiddling with in our end programs, often for little real benefit. Studies have repeatedly shown that humans can write less than 20 lines of correct code per day, so each of those lines should be as expressive and powerful as possible to drive down costs without sacrificing quality.
by egnehots | 2025-05-13 16:05:34+00:00
I don't think so, pdf.js is able to render a pdf content.

Which is different from extracting "text". Text in PDF can be encoded in many ways, in an actual image, in shapes (think, segments, quadratic bezier curves...), or in an XML format (really easy to process).

PDF viewers are able to render text, like a printer would work, processing command to show pixels on the screen at the end.

But often, paragraph, text layout, columns, tables are lost in the process. Even though, you see them, so close yet so far. That is why AI is quite strong at this task.
by conn10mfan | 2025-05-13 16:05:34+00:00
it's not dominance, it's scientific achievement in general that benefits US citizens as well as the rest of the world

whether you care to admit or not, you've benefitted immensely from US investment in science, the entire digital & technological economy is downstream of basic scientific research

(the irony of a hacker news user and American taxpayer wondering how they've benefitted from tax dollars spent on science is not lost on me)
by anonymars | 2025-05-13 16:05:40+00:00
This part resonated with me

> I know as a matter of personal experience that there are many people in Russia who are genuinely dedicated to doing things right, and I have no doubt that many of them work in the aviation industry. Granted, many of the best have left since 2022, but plenty remain. The problem is that apathy has been enshrined on an institutional level, trapping the people who care under the weight of those who do not, or who choose not to for purposes of survival. Such a culture is not easily rooted out.

As the US gradually starts to resemble its former nemesis and we become numbed to the daily outrage, I can feel myself becoming increasingly resigned and so this passage touched a nerve. I worry what happens when we have driven out those in public service who were committed to doing what's right. Which becomes further dispiriting.
by andrethegiant | 2025-05-13 16:05:58+00:00
Cloudflare’s ai.toMarkdown() function available in Workers AI can handle PDFs pretty easily. Judging from speed alone, it seems they’re parsing the actual content rather than shoving into OCR/LLM.

Shameless plug: I use this under the hood when you prefix any PDF URL with https://pure.md/ to convert to raw text.
by trealira | 2025-05-13 16:05:58+00:00
I find it funny that you're so threatened by and worried about a chatbot falling "into the wrong hands." Whatever you're implying would happen if it fell into the wrong hands would be no worse than the present state of things.

> so go ahead with your centralizing and your reddit bitch sarcasm, then reeeeee to us there when it all falls into the wrong hands, again.

Lol. Your comment is hard to take seriously. If I'm a Reddit bitch, maybe you should go back to 4chan.
by dudeinjapan | 2025-05-13 16:06:35+00:00
At TableCheck (Japan's answer to Resy, Tock, Sevenrooms, etc.) our first 100 customers were definitely the hardest. It took us nearly two years, and many times I came close to giving up. Even though we had built a solid MVP, in Japan's risk-averse culture, no restaurant wanted to be the first to use our product. The question was always "Who else is using it?"--basically a deadlock.

After a lot of cold-calling, we found a 120-year old sukiyaki and shabu-shabu restaurant chain. They told us they always survived by adopting the latest technology, and were willing to try our product. Most of their staff were elderly women in kimonos, many of whom had not touched an iPad before. We were worried they would struggle, but after a few training sessions they got the hang of it--soon they were greeting and seating customers with no problem.

12 years on, we are at 13,000 restaurants on our platform and adding a few hundred more each month!
by mystraline | 2025-05-13 16:07:08+00:00
A clusterfuck us usually no real plan, and everyone deciding on their own, causing chaos.

No, what we are seeing is a coup. The USA has exhausted in causing coups in other parts of the world. Now, we are in a coup caused by the USA government.

The executive branch is captured. The courts are captured. Most of Congress is captured. Those left over whinge about 'illegal' and basically send out more emails for more donations. And throw in a few stump speeches.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-13 16:07:17+00:00
Agents are nothing new? They’ve only been around for a couple years. The rustiness is expected.

Second the question you brought up can’t be answered even by a human. It’s a stupid question right? You blindfold a human and prevent him from using any tools and then ask him what tools he used? What do you expect will happen. Either the human will lie to you about what he did or tell you what he didn’t do. No different from an LLM.

The core network doesn’t store anything except generalization curve. Similar to your brain. You didn’t store those references in your brain right? You looked that shit up. The agentic LLM will do the same and the UI literally tells you it’s doing a search across websites.

Geeze.
Ask HN: Paying for Zapier – what Zaps make it worth it?
by prodigyboi | 2025-05-13 16:07:40+00:00
If you’re paying for Zapier (or were), what were the exact Zaps that made it worth it?

- What problem did the Zap solve? - Which two (or more) tools did it connect - How many Zaps are you running, and what plan are you on?

I’m looking for inspiration from people who use Zapier to save real time or money - automations that actually stick.

Would love to hear what’s working for you.
by pmontra | 2025-05-13 16:08:03+00:00
Yes, Redis is usually the backing store for Rails' Sidekiq.

With Elixir we stored the job data in a PostgreSQL table and started a process with the id of that record as argument.

When we had to restart the BEAM (deploy, reboot, anything) a process would look at that table and start a process for every record not marked as complete. If a process failed too many times and its supervisor gave up on it, we could restart it manually by calling a function in the console with the record id as argument. Or we could start all the processes of a given type at once, or all of them.

So we basically wrote a small subset of Redis and of Sidekiq admin.
by thewebguyd | 2025-05-13 16:09:10+00:00
There is a "show all file name extensions" option in Finder, but I don't recall if it's on by default or not as I haven't had to set up a fresh macOS install in a while and I've always had it turned on.

But, macOS isn't like Windows - the file extension doesn't matter. I can have a "file.txt" but it's actually a .xlsx excel workbook, and Excel will open it just fine (albeit, with a warning that the file extension doesn't match but that's dependent on the application presenting a warning). Windows actually uses the file extension to determine the type, macOS (and other *nixes) don't, they'll use some other file metadata. You can put whatever extension you want on a file, it doesn't matter except for determining what default app will attempt to open it when double clicking it in Finder.
by toast0 | 2025-05-13 16:09:36+00:00
In my experience there's several types of work stress in software.

One is people / process stress; related to the steps needed to get work done, including approvals and negotiations to decide what to do.

Another is operational stress; related to keeping a service running; some of that can be people or process stress, but if your service is growing rapidly it might just be organic operational stress.

There's also the stress of getting the work done in a reasonable time.

Some people are better at managing the different kinds of stress.

Anyway, I think the moral of the post is when you rage quit, say "fuck this shit, I quit" rather than "fuck you all, I quit" ... keep the rage pointed at the system rather than the people :P Unless it's just like one person who is really intent on making your job hell. You might be able to get away with singling out one person, rather than doing the Oprah thing and "everybody look under your chair, you get a fuck you" :P