MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chii | 2025-05-04 10:54:14+00:00
Nintendo doesn't litigate if they believe the community project won't impact their sales/profits.

For example, wii homebrew is not taken down by nintendo, even if there has been a recent "discovery" that the wii homebrew had relied on decompiled nintendo SDKs.

Nintendo's litigious intention always has been profit driven (and this includes vaguely IP related issues, such as palworld's game mechanics - which i think is frivilous but apparently not according to the courts).
by curtisblaine | 2025-05-04 10:55:11+00:00
I normally ask candidates to build a sample and easy component similar to those we use at work. There are a couple of points in the exercise that I use to understand if the candidate is aware of certain deep implications of the language and/or the framework they are using. If something is not on their CV, I don't test for that, but if something is, I will test for that extensively. I ask questions all through the process. I allow them to look up resources during the interview, but I don't allow AI. This works well and it's really hard to game, especially if the candidate shares their screen or is interviewing in office. I mostly tailor the interview process to minimize false positives and I don't much care about false negatives: these are much riskier and hard to catch, and to be honest allowing them is not a big deal.
by explodes | 2025-05-04 10:55:14+00:00
I thought about this as if I was starting my own scam-ring. Targeting individuals by cornering them into desperate situations may be more lucrative, but, in a matter of time, will lead to very real threats made against you. Spamming random email addresses fishing for the weakest seems like a better long-term play. Though it would be wise to never underestimate who you are targeting, simpler minded targets will always be easier.
by lambdaone | 2025-05-04 10:56:09+00:00
A side-note: I have a friend who is an electronics genius who managed to construct a production system that combined a multi-kilowatt electric arc lamp and a CCD array. Microvolts of CCD signal at megahertz of bandwidth mixed with hundreds of watts of RFI all in the same chassis. Oh, and of course lots of low-jitter digital timing and sequencing electronics and wideband ADCs.

It all worked perfectly. He used every trick in the book, and some new ones he invented from scratch, to implement it - I've never seen anything like it, before or since.
by chii | 2025-05-04 10:56:33+00:00
while i do give them benefit of the doubt, the support for the skybilvion fan remake is in effect a way to sell and market an old game (skyrim's sale has been on the decline but for these fan projects).

The moment such a project might affect sales in some way (that i am unable to imagine right now, but is possible surely), they will backpedal and find ways to take it down.
Show HN: Discover Europe for Under £100 – Flight and Stay Included
by amitbhakt | 2025-05-04 10:56:44+00:00
I made a platform that finds trips (return flight + accommodation) under £100 to European destinations.

You can -

* See return flights details and a link to book. * See hotel details and a link to book. * See any local transport passes to buy with their official link. * Generate itinerary (Need to optiise the response time) * Ask our Travel Bot (Eazy) for any tips (WIP)

No sign-ups or paywall. Simply explore. I'd love any feedback.

We currently cover departures from UK cities. The basic functionality will always be free for everyone.

Subscribe to the email list to get notified of the best deals. Soon, we will have more updates and premium features. So all the beta subscribers will get free access to those.
by cloudbonsai | 2025-05-04 10:57:05+00:00
> Hilton, Safeway, Dell, Nabisco. The list goes on.

For what it's worth, KKR's takeover of RJR Nabisco was actually a flop. KKR bought the company in 1988, and then spent 15+ years trying painfully to exit the position.

It is widely believed that it was the major reason why their 1987 vintage turned out to be disappointing.
by znpy | 2025-05-04 10:58:21+00:00
This post has unlocked the memory of seeing some Intel CEO demoing wireless power and connectivity for laptops.

Basically you "just" put your laptop on your desk and it automatically starts getting power (similar to what phones can do nowadays) as well transmit video to a display (on the same desk).

It's sad that went nowhere, it would have been very cool and something actually useful.
by palata | 2025-05-04 10:59:02+00:00
I think I disagree with that. This "people don't want files, they want to share photos", to me, is what product people want to believe. The whole thing has been enforced on users and is self-reinforcing: of course if you don't show files to users, they will not know what a file is.

Sure, I may be in a photo gallery and I may want to share a few photos with a friend who may want those photos to be treated as photos (instead of going into a big "Downloads/" folder). But it doesn't mean, at all, that the concept of file has to disappear to the user. In fact the files still very much do exist on the system. Product people just assume users are stupid, IMHO.

And the thing is: this abstraction (not knowing what a file is) doesn't make it faster or more efficient. It just makes the user more dependent on their platform and apps. Look at backups: product people at Google/Apple will tell you "people don't want to backup their files, they want to pay us to make sure that they never lose an image". Conveniently, it means that people are 1) forced to pay them and 2) don't have control over their own files.

Maybe GenZ/alpha now are stuck with these abstractions because they never learned what a file was (for no reason other than being abused by product decisions), but older generations grew up with physical media. "I have a piece of paper, I have a book, I have a CD-ROM, and those are all different kinds of files that can go into different "boxes" that are called folders".

Files and folders are very natural. The reason people don't know about them is because we hide them and force them to pay for literally subpar experience.
by curtisblaine | 2025-05-04 10:59:48+00:00
Agreed. Nothing beats in-person from the point of view of safety and nothing beats real problems to understand if the candidate is able to work with the current team. Many think that interviewing is about detecting hidden signals telling you that the candidate is a misunderstood genius, so you have advantage on competitors, but reality is much less dramatic: you just need someone with good communication skills who is used to work on the day to day issues at hand.
Show HN: A Hacker News-like web system written in Go, works without JavaScript
by Kholin | 2025-05-04 10:59:59+00:00
I started this project primarily because I was interested in the mechanism of ranking content based on votes, like Hacker News uses. Also, I was looking to try building something new with Go, so I decided to give it a shot.

During development, I set the following principles for the project:

- Keep the pages as simple and intuitive as possible.

- Ensure it functions correctly even when JavaScript is disabled in the browser.

- Implement full server-side rendering.

- Use semantic HTML tags whenever possible for better SEO and accessibility.

This is my first Go project, and more accurately, my first backend project. Although I have years of experience in web front-end development, I hadn't delved much into the backend side. This project greatly satisfied my curiosity and allowed me to learn many new things. While my understanding might still be superficial in some areas, overall, I managed to complete it and get it running live.

Here's the live demo: https://dizkaz.com

Here's the source code: https://github.com/oodzchen/dizkaz
by teekert | 2025-05-04 11:00:35+00:00
Hehe I was like: What?! Grub was LiLo’s successor and much better! What happened to the time?!

Back in the day I had a cool self made theme from Ghost in the Shell, I remember making some very obscure image format from some jpeg I found online. Man what time I have put into customizing my Linux experiences. The computer was truly a (well trimmed) pet. With desktops on kubes with fish inside and reflections etc.
by toofy | 2025-05-04 11:02:32+00:00
indeed. it will also not be limited to one agriculture crisis. the number of things these departments do that we don’t realize is crazy. putting out fire after fire.

since these departments generally don’t brag about non-sexy things like … screwworms, a certain type of person with tunnel vision, who imagines themselves to be smarter at everything than everyone else that has ever lived, they will imagine they failed not because of their own dipshittery but because of an imaginary ghost foe.

this is perhaps one of the greatest failures of that generation, so many of them seem to have a complete inability to see that other people may be intelligent at something. their tunnel vision is crazy af to see.

it’s gonna be hilarious to watch them cry about the messes they caused. they’ll try to blame everyone else for the mess they created.
by corford | 2025-05-04 11:02:50+00:00
I always assumed angel investing (at least as it emerged originally) was essentially philanthropy with the motivation being it gave very rich people a way to nudge things they liked into existence and provided them with a semi-cheap way to keep their network fresh with young, hungry, interesting new people. Bonus it might very occasionally turn in to a lottery ticket (but that wasn't the primary driver of making the investment).
by palata | 2025-05-04 11:03:23+00:00
I disagree. I find it condescending when techies say "the average user doesn't make the difference between sharing a file to a device next to them and sharing a file over the Internet".

Everybody, and I mean everybody is capable to understand that to connect their Bluetooth headset to their phone, they do it over Bluetooth. And that to connect to the Internet, they can either go over WiFi (which is "free") or cellular (which is less "free").

> People don't really internalize that those are two different use cases.

We actively keep them ignorant, and then we use their ignorance as a justification. I find it sad.

What if we said "People don't want to drive their car somewhere, they want to go from A to B. We should prevent them from learning how to drive so that they would have to pay for our taxis".
Show HN: I made a travel app that suggests activities based on your preferences
by miquicampuzano | 2025-05-04 11:03:36+00:00
Hi HN! I built PlanFast, a simple AI-powered app that generates activities to do in a city based on your preferences and budget. It's designed for travellers who: - Don’t want to spend hours planning - Want local, non-generic suggestions - Prefer quick, tailored recommendations over digging through dozens of blog posts or TripAdvisor lists Currently works for 50 top visited cities - expanding soon based on feedback. Would love your thoughts: - Is this something you'd use? - What would make it more useful or delightful? Appreciate your feedback! Cheers - Miqui
by dathinab | 2025-05-04 11:03:41+00:00
in general end to end tests/whole system tests which mock/stub as little as possible and are focused on testing whole use-case flows is a good starting point (sadly in many teams also a constant uphill battle from convincing PM over allocate time to bootstrap it to making CI harder due to basically having to bootstrap a whole testing system including db etc. to educating devs to write such tests properly, instead of writing unit tests at a end to end test level (which rarely ends well).

Optimal you then combine this with automatic collection and analysis of log traced to detect performance regression (which is hard but just because of the involved tooling but now it needs a CI env with reliable perf. characteristics e.g. not GitHub hosted GitHub action runners).

Through in this case the problem is a trap in the behavior of `IN (...)` sub queries which probably is not specific to WITH clause and might be as deeply rooted as the SQL standard but a you have to pay for being able to read it I'm not sure.
by brazzy | 2025-05-04 11:03:47+00:00
> Although “A Fire Upon the Deep”, started in the late 80s and published in 1992, posits that civilizations much more advanced and capable than ours would be communicating primarily through something like Usenet, which feels a little quaint.

It's sometimes enormously funny when you were around to witness Usenet. Especially when you realize there's one guy who all along knows something about the story's most essential reveal - but writes like a deranged conspiracy theorist, so nobody really talks to him.
Show HN: Journelly for iOS: like tweeting but for your eyes only (in plain text)
by xenodium | 2025-05-04 11:05:10+00:00
On iOS, I've flip-flopped back and forth between a bunch of note-taking and journaling apps. None would stick.

My initial attempts at building such an app faded just the same, until I realized I wanted the same level of low-friction posting and browsing offered by social media apps, but for my quick notes. Not social, just easy posting, search, and a familiar feed.

This is how Journelly came to be. I like to describe it as: tweeting, but for your eyes only (fully offline and in plain text).

If you’re an Org markup user, you’ll be delighted to know it’s powered by unicorns under the hood.

If you’re a Markdown fan, please get in touch! I’m recording interest for journelly + markdown at xenodium.com. The more requests I get, the sooner I’ll get Markdown support out the door.

Hope you like the app!
by judge_dreddlift | 2025-05-04 11:06:57+00:00
This comment is absolutely on point. It is simply fun to listen to songs that are specific to your micro-situation, enjoy them a few times, and then life has moved on. I get it to make little ditties for our customers about how great our products are; about specific moments or events in time, or as little theme songs for projects or releases. It is delightful.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-04 11:08:01+00:00
My first thought when I opened the article: I wonder if s/he would have been better in a low cost S&P500 tracker ETF instead of angel investing. Conclusion: Yep. Google AI tells me: <<Since 2012, the S&P 500 has returned about 424.72% or 13.33% annually, assuming reinvestment of dividends.>>
by chillingeffect | 2025-05-04 11:09:06+00:00
Same thing for "systemic racism." I told people it's totally a real problem, but for crying out loud, don't shoot yourself in the foot but calling it that. Only the most open-minded 1% or fewer will cop to their own imperfection/racism. And we can see how the results have been a failure concordant with our country (usa)'s widescale partisan breakdown.

Like a dog farting in an elevator, nobody wants it. Except perhaps the accusators who are willing, it seems, to create more heat than light with revelation accusation.
by MichaelMoser123 | 2025-05-04 11:09:23+00:00
i think an Agent is an LLM that interacts with the outside world via a protocol like MCP, that's a kind of REST-like protocol with a detailed description for the LLM on how to use it. An example is an MCP server that knows how to look up the price for a given stock ticker, so it enables the LLM to tell the current price for that ticker.

see: https://github.com/luigiajah/mcp-stocks

The implementation: https://github.com/luigiajah/mcp-stocks/blob/main/main.py

Each MCP endpoint comes with a detailed comment - that comment will be part of the metadata published by the MCP server / extension. The LLM reads this instruction when the MCP extension is added by the end user, so it will know how to call it.

The main difference between REST an MCP is that MCP can maintain state for the current session (that's an option), while REST is supposed to be inherently stateless.

I think most of the other protocols are a variation of MCP.
Show HN: Go from Idea to Revenue in Just Days
by kalashvasaniya | 2025-05-04 11:10:04+00:00
Think launching a SaaS takes months?

Not anymore.

Meet SuperFast — the all-in-one Next.js boilerplate that cuts 90% of the setup time so you can go from idea to live product in days.

No more wasting time on setup. SuperFast comes with everything you need:

- Authentication - Payments - Database integration - Auto-generated legal docs powered by AI

The problem? Most builders get stuck setting things up.

The solution? SuperFast handles the boring parts so you can focus on building, launching, and earning fast.

Why wait? Start shipping your SaaS today, not someday.

Let’s build smarter.
by petercooper | 2025-05-04 11:10:10+00:00
I want this for when I'm working.

"Here we see Peter copying and pasting in some generic quick sort algorithm from.. somewhere. Stack Overflow? ChatGPT? Who knows. And he goes for the compile without writing any tests! Let's see if it compiles first time. And it's a noooooo! Bad luck, let's see how he gets out of this pickle. (I told you he should have written some tests.)"
by photonthug | 2025-05-04 11:11:24+00:00
I did browse around, that's the page I got the first part of my comment from. Modules are one example of something that sounds probably good (https://elv.sh/ref/language.html#modules ). Good stuff is really weakened though by the many random changes that seem to go from arbitrary to.. also arbitrary, while destroying any chance of readability, backwards compatibility, or interoperability. Why?

> Line continuation in Elvish uses ^ instead of \

> Bash: echo .[ch] vs Elvish: echo .?[set:ch]

One more example, guess what this does: `echo &sep=',' foo bar`. Is it bash, elvish? Some combination of the two with markdown? Legal in all three? Elvish certainly cleans up conditionals and stuff, but you probably shouldn't introduce new things with exactly the same name unless you've created a genuine superset/dialect where the older version still works without rewrite. Namespace it as elvish.echo or use your module system. Shadows aren't friendly, this is equivalent to the guy that monkey-patches sys.stderr=sys.stdout to work around their one-off problem
by m000 | 2025-05-04 11:11:50+00:00
Could wireless USB be a case of "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"? [1]

I.e. the effort was driven by the USB-IF [2] that happens to be more hardware than software oriented. So they were eager to deliver a solution based around a new chipset that could be adopted immediately by anyone interested.

This failed to account for adoption friction/lag, and the era of ARM-based SBCs and WiFi proliferation which was already dawning (e.g. iPAQ handhelds were available at the time [3]).

So, they ended up with most of their envisioned use-cases [4] being covered either by SBCs, or by Bluetooth. At least in retrospect, standarizing a pure software solution like USB over IP, as an added-value proposition for the USB standard, would have made more sense.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument#Abraham_...

[2] https://www.usb.org/about

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_USB#Uses
by IshKebab | 2025-05-04 11:11:51+00:00
Yeah I was thinking the same. No more "They've really got to want to win this. This is a game of two halves. Etc."

Though tbh I found it still pretty annoying. Maybe just the tone of voice though, and it's clearly not actually connected to what's happening in the game.

I imagine the major sports game players are working on this.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-05-04 11:12:30+00:00
You seem a bit confused with your little rant there (there's so many wrong-minded ideas that I can't be bothered to explain why they're wrong) and you haven't answered my clear question:

> I can't see how anybody's freedom is infringed by adding fluoride to public water in those areas where it is lacking. What specific freedom are you talking about?
by sunpazed | 2025-05-04 11:15:49+00:00
The key benefit is significant lower power usage. Benchmarked llama3.2-1B on my machines; M1 Max (47t/s, ~1.8 watts), M4 Pro (62t/s, ~2.8 watts). The GPU is twice as fast (even faster on the Max), but draws much more power (~20 watts) vs the ANE.

Also the ANE models are limited to 512 tokens of context, so unlikely yet to use these in production.
by urschrei | 2025-05-04 11:16:16+00:00
I wouldn't say it's correct to say that GEOS isn't particularly sophisticated. A lot of (certainly not all) GEOS algorithms are now ported from JTS, the primary author of which is Martin Davis (aka Dr JTS), who works at Crunchy Data, who provide the PostGIS extension. So the chain (again, mostly) goes JTS -> GEOS -> {PostGIS, Shapely} -> … . Martin's work is at the cutting edge of open-source GIS-focused computational geometry, and has been for a long time (of course, industry has its own tools, but that's not what we're talking about).

I can sort of see your point about the merits of global, spheroidal geometry, certainly from a user's perspective. But there's no getting around the fact that the geometry calculations are both slower (I'm tempted to say "inherently"…) and far more complex to implement (just look at how painful it is to write a performant, accurate r- or r*-tree for spherical coordinates) along every dimension. That's not going to change any time soon, so the projection workflow probably isn't going anywhere.
by sensanaty | 2025-05-04 11:17:13+00:00
> With all due respect to folks working on web and phone apps, I keep getting the feeling that AI is great for high level, routine sorts of problems and still mostly useless for systems programming.

As one of those folks, no it's pretty bad in that world as well. For menial crap it's a great time saver, but I'd never in a million years do the "vibe coding" thing, especially not with user-facing things or especially not for tests. I don't mind it as a rubber duck though.

I think the problem is that there's 2 groups of users, the technical ones like us and then the managers and C-levels etc. They see it spit out a hundred lines of code in a second and as far as they know (and care) it looks good, not realizing that someone now has to spend their time reviewing the 100 lines of code, plus having the burden of maintenance of those 100 lines going into the future. But, all they see is a way to get the pesky, expensive devs replaced or at least a chance squeeze more out of them. The system is so flashy and impressive looking, and you can't even blame them for falling for the marketing and hype, after all that's what all the AIs are being sold as, omnipotent and omniscient worker replacers.

Watching my non-technical CEO "build" things with AI was enlightening. He prompts it for something fairly simple, like a TODO List application. What it spits out works for the most part, but the only real "testing" he does is clicking on things once or twice and he's done and satisfied, now convinced that AI can solve literally everything you throw at it.

However if he were testing the solution as a proper dev would, he'd see that the state updates break after a certain amount of clicks, and that the list was glitching out sometimes, and that adding things breaks on scroll and overflows the viewport, and so on. These are all real examples of an "app" he made by vibe coding, and after playing around with it myself for all of 3 minutes I noticed all these issues and more in his app.
by akerl_ | 2025-05-04 11:17:45+00:00
The Constitution and the principles of my country are perfectly aligned with adults entering into a mutually agreed business transaction. They’re aligned with a company offering to sell me a service with a given price, and where part of their upside is retaining data about me.

autoexec’s reply in a parallel thread is a strong case for why somebody might view the impact of that data retention as too costly to be worth using such a service. And that’s why nobody is forced to hire data-collecting robot movers. But under the principles and freedoms of my county, companies are allowed to make the offer.