MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ednite | 2025-05-13 14:09:46+00:00
For my SaaS, the first 100 users were almost too easy. I partnered with a company sitting on thousands of clients and offered my tool—free—to just 10% of their list. But I didn’t sell features. I asked what their clients hated most, then built a fix for that. One well-placed feature, and the doors swung open. Real users, real feedback—and we’re still building on that foundation.

Then there’s my blog. A creative sandbox, no overlap with my day job. No built-in audience. No distribution. Still waiting on subscriber #1 (Mom, seriously—now would be a good time).

Takeaways:

Partner with someone who already has meaningful reach. Solve a real, hair-on-fire problem. Offer something free to earn early trust. Knock on doors, pitch relentlessly, repeat. And hope the gods of luck are listening.

As for the writing side—different beast. Slower burn, no roadmap, no shortcuts. Still wandering in the woods, but enjoying the walk. Open to ideas—and subscribers. (Mom… last chance.)
by bluGill | 2025-05-13 14:09:47+00:00
HFT would love to do more complex calculations for some of their trades. They often make the compromise of using a faster algorithm that is known to be right only 60% of the time vs the better but slower algorithm that is right 90% of the time.

That is a different problem from yours though and so it has different considerations. In some areas I/O dominates, in some it does not.
by mppm | 2025-05-13 14:10:38+00:00
This is an extremely long and unfocused analysis of what was a fairly straightforward incident. Following the lightning strike, which created a dangerous, but manageable situation, the main contributors to the catastrophic outcome were (roughly):

80% - Pilot error. Poor adherence to procedures and checklists. Poor choices all around. Poor piloting in manual mode and botched touchdown. Part of the blame for this rests with Aeroflot, for putting such a pilot in the air.

15% - People retrieving their luggage slowed down the evacuation and increased death toll.

5% - Aircraft design. Could be improved in some areas, but no really serious bloopers.

~0% - Delayed emergency response. Not good, but partly caused by incorrect communication from pilot. Also, fire spread so fast, it's not likely they could have changed anything.
by pessimizer | 2025-05-13 14:10:43+00:00
What does "make in the long-term" even mean? How do you make a sandwich in the long-term?

Bad things are cheaper and easier to make. If they weren't, people would always make good things. You might say "work smarter," but smarter people cost more money. If smarter people didn't cost more money, everyone would always have the smartest people.
by d4v3 | 2025-05-13 14:11:10+00:00
> I choose to believe that a democratically elected government with proper functioning institutions can regulate speech properly instead.

Abuse of free speech has almost always been justified by those very "proper institutions" that you place so much faith in. I'd say you're being a wee bit optimistic about them. One embarrassing example that comes to mind was during the Troubles [1]

> I see unshackled free speech as much more dangerous than that of a democracy being overzealous in speech, as the first can absolutely undermine democracy if enough imbeciles decide to believe in.... erm... "challenging" ideas (and I use those quotes very sarcastically).

> A proper democracy being overzealous can be fixed by the democratic process.

You assume a “proper” democracy won’t go too far, and if it does, democracy will fix it. Yet, speech is what allows people to challenge, protest, and critique. So regulating that speech undermines the very tools needed for democratic correction. Also, free speech is often what prevents overstepping in the first place.

> If it was cultural norm to engage in revenge killings, I would very much expect government to step in and stop that, not to take a wishy-washy stance "eh, it is a cultural problem" and handwave it away.

Indeed, so would I! But there is a difference between violent actions and bad ideas, and there can be laws for violent actions without needing to suppress discussion about them. We don’t need to outlaw speech in order to outlaw violence. Ultimately, I think robust free speech doesn’t undermine democracy but protects it, even if um "challenging ideas" (I'm smirking) are uncomfortable to hear

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988%E2%80%931994_British_broa...
by QuadrupleA | 2025-05-13 14:11:28+00:00
This always saddens me. We could have things instant, simple, and compute & storage would be 100x more abundant in practical terms than it is today.

It's not even a trade off a lot of the time, simpler architectures perform better but are also vastly easier and cheaper to maintain.

We just lack expertise I think, and pass on cargo cult "best practices" much of the time.
by Prosaic_Hack | 2025-05-13 14:11:29+00:00
We just launched a new feature that drastically simplifies financial analysis for any company. It creates a knowledge model that understands your data, automatically map it to key financial questions, and delivers answers that normally take analysts days — in minutes.

Why we built it: Most finance teams are stuck exporting data to Excel, waiting on BI teams, or wrestling with reporting tools that take months to implement. We wanted something faster, lighter, and more intuitive — especially for mid-sized companies who can’t afford an army of data engineers.

Highlights: • NetSuite setup in minutes • Enterprise rollout in under 2 weeks • Handles complex data structures, multi-entity setups • Uses LLMs with embedded SQL execution for real answers • Cuts cost from ~$18K to a few pennies per analysis

Here’s a 2-minute video showing how it works: https://youtu.be/N-Z262fUuv0

Would love your thoughts, questions, or brutal feedback. Happy to go into technical details, architecture choices, and edge cases in the comments.
by 3036e4 | 2025-05-13 14:11:37+00:00
It's like ignoring backwards compatibility. That is really cheap since all the cost is pushed to end-users (that have to relearn the UI) or second/third-party developers (that have to rewrite their client code to work with a new API). But it's OK since everyone is doing it and also without all those pointless rewrites many of us would not have a job.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-13 14:11:38+00:00
KDE Connect allows me to browse the folder I picked and upload/download files just fine, using SAF. You point the app at a directory, click "grant access", and you have permanent access. The only problem I can think of is that some directories are restricted (https://developer.android.com/about/versions/11/privacy/stor...) because they're a dumping ground for files already.

SAF provides both provider and consumer APIs, and from the language NextCloud uses, I get the feeling they might've missed the consumer API here. Had NextCloud said "we want the user to be able to select the Download folder and certain external media directories" then I would've thought the restrictions are the main problem, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
by HappMacDonald | 2025-05-13 14:11:40+00:00
I feel like the argument is similar to that of all corporate externality pushes.

For example "polluting the air/water, requiring end-users to fill landfills with packaging and planned obscolescence" allows a company to more cheaply offer more products to you as a consumer.. but now everyone collectively has to live in a more polluted world with climate change and wasted source material converted to expensive and/or dangerous landfills and environmental damage from fracking and strip mining.

But that's still not different from theft. A company that sells you things that "Fell off the back of a truck" is in a position to offer you lower costs and greater variety, as well. Aren't they?

Our shared resources need to be properly managed: neither siphoned wastefully nor ruined via polution. That proper management is a cost, and it either has to be borne by those using the resources and creating the waste, or it is theft of a shared resource and tragedy of the commons.
by drannex | 2025-05-13 14:11:42+00:00
By far one of the best languages I have ever used professionally and as a hobbyist, which is why I donate every month to keep the project alive.

I am dropping the link here so for those who can, should donate, and even if you don't use it, you should consider supporting this and other similar endeavors so they can't stop the signal, and keep it going: https://github.com/sponsors/odin-lang
by inetknght | 2025-05-13 14:12:14+00:00
I was working as a janitor, moonlighting as an IT director, in 2010. Back then I told the business that laptops for the past five years (roughly since Nehalem) have plenty of horsepower to run spreadsheets (which is basically all they do) with two cores, 16 GB of RAM, and a 500GB SATA SSD. A couple of users in marketing did need something a little (not much) beefier. Saved a bunch of money by not buying the latest-and-greatest laptops.

I don't work there any more. Today I am convinced that's true today: those computers should still be great for spreadsheets. Their workflow hasn't seriously changed. It's the software that has. If they've continued with updates (can it even "run" MS Windows 10 or 11 today? No idea, I've since moved on to Linux) then there's a solid chance that the amount of bloat and especially move to online-only spreadsheets would tank their productivity.

Further, the internet at that place was terrible. The only offerings were ~16Mbit asynchronous DSL (for $300/mo just because it's a "business", when I could get the same speed for $80/mo at home), or Comcast cable 120Mbit for $500/mo. 120Mbit is barely enough to get by with an online-only spreadsheet, and 16Mbit definitely not. But worse: if internet goes down, then the business ceases to function.

This is the real theft that another commenter [0] mentioned that I wholeheartedly agree with. There's no reason whatsoever that a laptop running spreadsheets in an office environment should require internet to edit and update spreadsheets, or crazy amounts of compute/storage, or even huge amounts of bandwidth.

Computers today have zero excuse for terrible performance except only to offload costs onto customers - private persons and businesses alike.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43971960
by Xelbair | 2025-05-13 14:12:17+00:00
the thing is - countries have set down legal rules preventing selling of food that actively harms the consumer(expired, known poisonous, addition of addictive substances(opiates) etc) to continue your food analogy.

in software the regulations can be boiled down to 'lol lmao' in pre-GDPR era. and even now i see GDPR violations daily.
by throwaway519 | 2025-05-13 14:12:41+00:00
10 million requests per month for $5 is about 4 requests per second, correct? Which is about 3 orders of magnitude less than nginx serving static html.

As a comparison, that's akin to a person walking 4 km/day vs. flying 4,000 km/day,

It's still not a great comparison as the $5 VPS is already paid for. But to take it as you suggest, I agree it's up to the website owner whether they prefer to have 4km/day workers who can sometimes clone themselves in different parts of the world but only for a limited time until they costmore, or a 4000/day flying suit.

Still a bit apples to oranges.
by pkd | 2025-05-13 14:13:07+00:00
Like OJFord mentions, it is a bit far from amenities despite the straight line distance to them not being great because it's built on an island in the river and you have to cross the bridge to get to the downtown area.

But more importantly for me, my usual life is not in Montreal. I love Montreal but moving there would require quite a few sacrifices in personal relationships that I don't feel like making. And government services in Quebec are also worse than in Ontario (where I am now).
by rendall | 2025-05-13 14:13:09+00:00
Yes: do remember that your coworkers are enduring similar stresses as you.

Yes: do not snap, blow your top, yell, throw temper tantrums, act like a child.

However, no: in many places and industries, you do not have to rely on the good recommendation of your former boss or coworkers to get your next job. In fact, it may even be illegal for employers to disclose more than your dates of employment and job title. So, check the norms and laws in your region before staying in a toxic job, if you're there only hoping things will get better enough for a decent recommendation.
by K0balt | 2025-05-13 14:13:20+00:00
Sure, resource potential is important. But putting all of your eggs in one basket can push you into a corner, especially in the sense of -feeling- cornered. Options, even if they exist primarily in theory, are a force multiplier.

For example;

If you have a “good” job, but it is trending toward a flat trajectory, and you have a set of skills that requires a complex set of circumstances to be employed, it may be too risky to move to a new location simply because the downside is so severe. It can be a 1:4 bet paying 10:1 odds, a bet you definitely should take, but if losing means your family doesn’t eat, you can’t take the risk.

If you know you can find a way to get by even with day labor if things go badly until you can stabilize your situation, you can take those beneficial risks.

It’s a matter of being prepared to roll with the inevitable punches, and being able to make decisions based on the knowledge of that readiness. Being less fragile, even antifragile.
by lesuorac | 2025-05-13 14:14:35+00:00
Pretty interesting how before 2008 it seems like 300k+ was the normal annual number and after 2008 it has downward trend to 200k.

I guess we did a pretty good job engineering the economy with money printing. Too bad the other half of Keynes's ideas (increase taxes during the good times) was never done so we could keep the trend going.
by kapitanjakc | 2025-05-13 14:15:21+00:00
Haven't tried Frigate solution.

Actually we are web developers with expertise in python, flask, django etc so we aren't familiar with it.

We developed some sites for the said client and they said you are experts on python so figure out a solution for this.

I am thinking that it'd be better to go with existing solution instead of creating a custom thing. Such as HikVision or something.
by Bender | 2025-05-13 14:15:32+00:00
In my opinion conspiracy theorists are curious people lacking enough data that just like AI will speak too confidently without having the appropriate levels of information. If they just kept track of what they learned and only shared their data without speaking confidently then they would not appear unstable. They should also find a way to share data that makes it easier for proper investigative journalists assuming those still exist to piece it all together without the overly confident assumptions or wild emotions. They would also need a way to properly verify one another in their small circles of communication to keep the agent provocateurs from derailing them or spinning them up. They need a way to stay grounded and reeled back to earth. All it takes is one person with many sock puppet accounts intentionally sounding whacky to throw off a fun and challenging investigation.
Show HN: Scira-multilingual – Making AI search available in 14 languages
by andrew-herndon | 2025-05-13 14:16:13+00:00
Hi everyone! I’m Andrew. I work at a startup called General Translation, which makes open-source i18n libraries.

I wanted to demo our Next.js library’s capabilities with one of my favorite open source projects – Scira.

Scira is an open-source AI-powered search engine created by Zaid Mukkadam. The original interface was only available in English – now you can use it in American English, British English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Hindi, Bangla, French, Arabic, German, Gujarati, and Vietnamese, and Mongolian.

Check it out

In English : https://scira.generaltranslation.app

In Spanish : https://scira.generaltranslation.app/es

In Japanese : https://scira.generaltranslation.app/ja

Watch my demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23NIBd55qXE

If you think this is cool I’d really appreciate a star on our open-source library https://github.com/generaltranslation/gt
by eloisius | 2025-05-13 14:16:39+00:00
As an interviewer it's too hard to tell if a candidate was indeed a victim of circumstance, like an acquisition that turned into a shitty job, or if they are just a disgruntled malcontent who will also be disgruntled and malcontent at your company. The downside of hiring a malcontent is huge. An interviewer can assume that most quality candidates are also aware of this dynamic and will wisely choose to represent the positive aspects of their job history. Hire a shrink to vent about the toxic shitty job.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-05-13 14:17:04+00:00
Sure, it may not be precise repetition, but my idea here is that none of B', B'', etc. are really different than B (they may even compile down to the exact same bytecode), they're just the same thing but written differently. And in fact, none of these are really faster than A, even if they're all "changes". But it's the same issue as any other form of p-hacking, where you keep trying more and more trivial B-variations until you eventually get the result that you're looking for, by random chance. (Cf. the example in xkcd 882, which does change the experimental protocol each time, but only trivially.)

There is, in fact, "something wrong" with this, which is what GP was pointing out. It's literally covered under "Playing with multiple comparisons" in TFA.

(Personally, to combat this, I've ignored the fancy p-values and resorted to the eyeball test of whether it very consistently produces a noticable speedup.)
by bityard | 2025-05-13 14:17:12+00:00
In companies with highly compartmentalized roles, too much work to do, and annoying co-workers, it's easy to say, "that's not my problem, go away." (With a bit more diplomacy, I'd hope.) I have always prioritized trying to be the stereotypical helpful person who might not know the answer to your question, but usually knows who to ask. The more your name comes up in the context of "who knows how X works?", the better your job security and future prospects through networking.
by hamburga | 2025-05-13 14:17:33+00:00
Seems like a fellow traveler with the Wolfram Model of physics. But they’re also making falsifiable predictions. According to Gemini 2.5 Pro:

“Based on the content of the provided PDF, "RBT_v1.0_release.pdf," the research presented is not connected to the Wolfram Model. Regarding experimental results and falsifiable predictions, the document explicitly states that the theory of "Recursive Becoming" is falsifiable. It further outlines six concrete, parameter-free predictions that are intended to be testable before the year 2030: * Test 1: Ring-aperture X-ray line (XRISM) * Test 2: Axial-lepton phase shift (MAGIS-100) * Test 3: EDM sign (CASPEr) * Test 4: Missing-energy bump (Super-Charm) * Test 5: Curvature waveguide loss * Test 6: Immersive VR power budget”

We just need to have some art and theology in place by 2030 to make human sense of this :)
by mvkel | 2025-05-13 14:17:46+00:00
Interview 20 people who -could- be customers, but not pitch them.

Get their honest take on what sucks about their current solution/process. Ask for their expertise.

Build the thing that emerges from the 20 interviews. Not the thing they ask for, but the thing they truly need.

Craft a solid pitch from the common themes of the 20 interviews, focused on being a painkiller, not a vitamin.

Go to the place where you found those initial 20, except this time, talk about the thing you made. Not in a salesy way.

If people 1. Aren't interested; 2. Aren't converting to customers, then the thing that was built didn't properly address the pain
by blkhawk | 2025-05-13 14:18:00+00:00
yes, exactly - it has an "AutoUpload" function that worked super well. Make a photo and by the time you put the phone down its on a folder on your desktop read for say putting something on eBay.

it stopped working well or at all over the last 2 years or so. I think if a simple "allow access to the photo folder" would have fixed it they out have used it. maybe it doesn't get the events when a photo is made?
by Retric | 2025-05-13 14:18:10+00:00
That doesn’t require a conspiracy just incentives.

You’re a farmer considering which crop to plant and you realize tobacco is the most profitable option. Do you plant it or worry about the heat impact on smokers? That’s the kind of moral quandary which most people simply never consider in the moment.

> "Just incentives" doesn't fly when the incentives themselves come from a single source, directed by unelected administrators, who may be subject to considerable private pressure.

Taking that 40% figure at face value is crazy when losing the entire US market would only be a ~40% loss of total sales.

As to government programs resulting from lobbying, every company has the exact same incentives for such lobbying if a program doesn’t exist they would be happy for it to be created. The only thing different in this case is the degree to which their lobbying is effective.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-05-13 14:18:51+00:00
A central issue is that specifying what you require is difficult. It's hard for non-programmers to specify what they want to programmers, it's hard for people (programmers or not) to specify what they want to AIs, it's hard to specify exactly what requirements your system has to a model checker, etc. Specifying requirements isn't always the hardest part of making software, but it often is and it's not something with purely technical solutions.
by gruez | 2025-05-13 14:19:21+00:00
>Quite naive take, you don't have to use any of your examples to deploy to Android, Windows, Linux or MacOS. It would be more like Microsoft charging a per-install fee on using the Win32 APIs which sounds outrageous.

"sounds outrageous" is a pretty weak justification for regulator action. Paying for a browser probably sounds equally as outrageous, but with the way anti-trust is going with Chrome/Google, that seems like a very real possibility. Moreover, why should the government should be in the basis of regulating business models? If Apple wants to charge for access to its SDKs, and it pays the price through less apps for its users, so be it.
by agentultra | 2025-05-13 14:20:09+00:00
I work in card payments transaction processing and IO dominates. You need to have big models and lots of data to authorize a transaction. And you need that data as fresh as possible and as close to your compute as possible... but you're always dominated by IO. Computing the authorization is super cheap.

Tends to scale vertically rather than horizontally. Give me massive caches and wide registers and I can keep them full. For now though a lot of stuff is run on commodity cloud hardware so... eh.
by inetknght | 2025-05-13 14:20:51+00:00
> without all those pointless rewrites many of us would not have a job.

I hear arguments like this fairly often. I don't believe it's true.

Instead of having a job writing a pointless rewrite, you might have a job optimizing software. You might have a different career altogether. Having a job won't go away: what you do for your job will simply change.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-05-13 14:20:54+00:00
> if they are just a disgruntled malcontent who will also be disgruntled and malcontent at your company. The downside of hiring a malcontent is huge.

Honestly, I get much better along with malcontents than with these "annoyingly positive" people. So, tastes differ.

> An interviewer can assume that most quality candidates are also aware of this dynamic and will wisely choose to represent the positive aspects of their job history.

Many highly qualified candidates are bad actors and/or bad self-promoters.
by bestwillcui | 2025-05-13 14:21:02+00:00
For official courses, we go over the generated course with the creator to vet the content. Generally they're pretty impressed but have a few things they'd like to change/add before publishing.

For self-created courses, it's generally been quite accurate and we're playing around with some eval metrics to make it as good as possible, but it's definitely a concern.