MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 2025051000 | 2025-05-10 16:35:46+00:00
DeltaChat, when using a self-hosted Chatmail server, has a service that detects incoming mails for a user account, pulls a token ID out of their account info (file in the maildir), and sends a request over HTTP to the push server run by the DeltaChat team. This sends it on through APNS/FCM, then scrubs the data from memory. The notification only wakes up the app. No encryption needed.

The project runs on a shoestring budget and has no problem delivering 15 million+ push notifications per month without charging the users any money
by andrewflnr | 2025-05-10 16:36:23+00:00
Basically, pick something with no value as a store of value. If we want to do that, we can just stick with fiat currency in a database. No reason to pick a material.

If we want a physical store of value, I actually think something of use that can easily be subdivided and combined is ideal. It doesn't even have to be as valuable as gold is today, this makes just as much sense if gold is cheap and plentiful. The natural inflation from creating more of it even helps cut down hoarding. It just gets harder to carry around enough to buy coffee (which of course brings us back to databases).
by mystraline | 2025-05-10 16:36:51+00:00
People who hype IDEs usually lack technical skills.

People who hype autocomplete usually lack technical skills.

People who hype memory-safe languages usually lack technical skills.

People who hype compilers usually lack technical skills.

There was some wordplay, which is just attacking the current technology that makes ttechnology more attainable by more people. However with LLMs, there is one major worry - in that it encourages de-skilling and getting addicted to having a LLM think for us. Now, if you can run your own LLMs, youre resilient to that. But the really bad side is when the LLM companies put pricetags to use the 'think-for-you' machine. And that represents a great de-skilling and anti-critical-thought.

I'm not saying "don't use LLMs". I am saying to run them yourselves, and learn how to work with them as an interactive encyclopedia, and also not to let them have core control over intellectual thought.
by phil21 | 2025-05-10 16:37:02+00:00
> How much more effective would they be if he were more willing to eat his own cooking?

Zero percent. Folks who scream about the hypocrisy of it would not change anything, those who don't care will continue to not care. It would result in some media fluff pieces and that's about it. Sort of like Jimmy Carter living frugally and avoiding conflicts of interest - neat to read about, people might like him more, but it didn't change a damn thing in the larger picture.

A single person no matter how rich or wasteful changing their consumptive behavior simply doesn't matter. It's a systems problem. Putting resources towards changing the system is what matters - not any individual sacrifice.

I learned this lesson the extremely hard way growing up in basic enforced poverty for environment reasons. It was a sacrifice only my family saw, no one else gave any shits other than lip service. It just scales higher when uber-rich. No one changed their behavior after talking to us and seeing how we also walked the walk. We just got some nice platitudes sent our way while they enjoyed far more luxurious lives and laughed at us in private.

Recent world-wide political events should also make it crystal clear "society" cares literally nothing about hypocrisy. It's only used as something to screech about when you disagree with whomever is engaging in it.
by alook | 2025-05-10 16:37:03+00:00
They definitely do train their own models, the founders have described this in several interviews.

I was surprised to learn this, but they made some interesting choices (like using sparse mixture-of-experts models for their tab completion model, to get high throughput/low latency).

Originally i think they used frontier models for their chat feature, but I believe theyve recently replaced that with something custom for their agent feature.
by timeinput | 2025-05-10 16:37:09+00:00
My take away is that it's not a meaningful chart? Just in the first row musl looks bloated at 426k compared to dietlibc at 120k. Why were those colors chosen? It's arbitrary and up to the author of the chart.

The author of musl made a chart, that focused on the things they cared about and benchmarked them, and found that for the things they prioritized they were better than other standard library implementations (at least from counting green rows)? neat.

I mean I'm glad they made the library, that it's useful, and that it's meeting the goals they set out to solve, but what would the same chart created by the other library authors look like?
by ajross | 2025-05-10 16:37:18+00:00
Bell Labs being defunded by a deregulated/competetive AT&T was precisely what led to the attempted commercialization of Unix and the near death of what would eventually be called "open source", though. In history as it stands, we had GNU and Linux and all that we lost was a few years.

But it's easy to imagine a world where that didn't happen and BSD was just killed dead. So no OS X, no iOS, no Android, no ChromeOS, and the only vendor able to stand on its own is the one we all agree had the worst product.

Ironically the world where the Bell monopoly was left in place seems to me to be one where we're all stuck running Microsoft Windows on everything, no?

I mean, fine, there's nuance to everything but the idea that "well, open research isn't so important" seems frankly batshit to me. Monopolies fall on their own all the time (Microsoft's did too!). You can't get stuff into the public space that wasn't ever there to begin with.
by arp242 | 2025-05-10 16:38:29+00:00
I tried setting up some text to speech stuff years ago, and I ended just giving up. Everything kind of worked, except when it didn't.

Linux generally works fine for everything else for me, but this is definitely not its strongest point. My general impression was that many tools were very much developed by people in their spare time, and just not having enough of it. In theory it could all work because all the bits are there, but there's no "chief of accessibility" that can patch things over in the various projects.

The flexibility and decentralisation of the Linux ecosystem is great for some less common use cases; I wrote my own WM and some other X11 tools that work a bit quirky, but works really well for me. This would be very hard to do on Windows or macOS. But for some other less common use cases ... yeah, not so great.
by michaelcampbell | 2025-05-10 16:38:41+00:00
I once knew a guy who had a framed snail-mail letter from Steve Jobs, asking if he'd reconsider his decision to not accept a job offer from Apple. I saw the letter in ~1994, so not sure when it was actually sent. He said he didn't regret the decision at the time as he was a big Sybase DBA expert and didn't figure Apple would be doing much with databases of any sort, much less Sybase.
by creato | 2025-05-10 16:38:41+00:00
It's disappointing to see the historical revisionism in these threads. Say what you will about google now, but the idea that they just bought their way into X industry doesn't seem right. Until maybe 10 years ago, tech people almost universally loved Google's offerings and adopted them eagerly because they were good. I remember the mad scramble on various forums for a gmail invite. I remember when google maps came about, it was a revelation compared to mapquest and so on. You could scroll the map instead of clicking buttons to jump half a screen at a time! For years 0-5 at least, chrome was almost universally loved by tech people. Process isolation, speed, lack of toolbar shitware, etc.

At every company I've been at, half the dependencies came from big tech, and more than half of those were built and maintained by google. bazel, kubernetes, test frameworks, tensorflow, etc. these are just the big ones. There are a lot of smaller libraries from google that we've used too, and more still that aren't owned by google but they invest a lot of engineering time into.

I don't know what the right answer is to the google of today, but the cavalier assumption that google has simply leveraged a monopoly in search to build everything else it has doesn't add up to me.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-10 16:39:06+00:00
If they're dominating or one of only two or three important options in multiple other areas and the index is the only reason... I mean, that's a strong argument both that they're monopolists and that they're terrible at allocating the enormous amount of capital they have. That's really the only thing keeping them around? All their other lines of business collectively aren't enough to keep them alive? Yikes, scathing indictment.
by yladiz | 2025-05-10 16:39:37+00:00
> However with LLMs, there is one major worry - in that it encourages de-skilling and getting addicted to having a LLM think for us. Now, if you can run your own LLMs, youre resilient to that.

Not sure what you mean. Using a local LLM or a cloud one can get you addicted in the same way?
by kgdiem | 2025-05-10 16:39:41+00:00
How do you think that Norway’s wealth tax could impact its ability to draw talent from any other country? Knowing that, should you develop anything (drug, material, etc) and want to spin it out to a startup, you will be taxed on the unrealized valuation would weigh very heavily on me were I a researcher.

Full disclosure, I know that this isn’t everyone’s goal, but this is HN after all!
by delusional | 2025-05-10 16:39:59+00:00
> Also there are lots of lovely projects maintained at high levels by hobbyists, and plenty of abandonware that was at some point paid for

There certainly are. I would never say to disregard anything because it was a hobby project. You just don't get to expect it being that way.

My basic point is that a hobby project can never take responsibility. If you have a support contract you are allowed to have some expectation of support. If you do not, then no expectation is warranted and everything you get is a gift.

A "mature" label carries the same problem. You are expecting the author to label something for you. That's work. If you're pulling from the commons, you must respect that people can label stuff whatever they like, and unmotivated blanket lies are not illegal.
by hedora | 2025-05-10 16:40:11+00:00
I've found this is distro dependent. I'm happily using devuan, an even-more-conservative variant of debian, and it's rock solid.

I had to fix a few hardware-related things and manually switch from pulseaudio to pipewire. It's been fine for almost a year since I did that.

I've reliably had the hole-plugging problem over the last 5 years with Manjaro + Ubuntu LTS.
by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe | 2025-05-10 16:41:14+00:00
You say "harmless" but I'd rather say "non toxic".

To illustrate: cannabis will not create gaping holes in your brain like mercury would, but although I'm convinced there are valid reasons to use cannabinoids for medical purposes, I'm also convinced that recreational use (especially at a young age) has a terrible impact on brain development and personnality developpment.

My personal take is that the proportion of people that subjectively enjoy cannabis at the cost of feeling okay with very bad life decisions is high enough to warrant extreme carefulness when decriminalizing it. The typical example is the stoner apathy that turns into amotivational syndrome.

Re reading your comment I see that it was mainly to get this off my chest. Hope you don't mind.
by troupo | 2025-05-10 16:41:25+00:00
> That's meaningless -- just legal boilerplate.

However legal or meaningless, it's their official stated position. And they did lose close to 20 billion in total before turning a meagre profit.

> so they always hedge by including explicit doom & gloom scenarios in the legal paperwork.

Ah yes, "we may never turn a profit that's why we are a sustainable long-term serious company and you should definitely buy our stock" is a thing that every company writes in their legal boilerplate.

> Similar hedges are present in annual reports for corps of all sizes.

Uber's annual reports were "we lost a billion dollars this year, like every other year before that for 15 years, but look at our growth go brrr"

Same for most of other HN darlings.
by oceanplexian | 2025-05-10 16:41:42+00:00
> Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly.

How so?

A caching proxy costs you almost nothing and will serve thousands of requests per second on ancient hardware. Actually there's never been a better time in the history of the Internet to have competing search engines since there's never been so much abundance of performance, bandwidth, and software available at historic low prices or for free.
by tmpz22 | 2025-05-10 16:42:28+00:00
Big fan of Gemini 2.5 + Cursor but its far from a panacea.

After using Cursor heavily the past few weeks I agree with the authors points. The ability to work outside of Cursor/AI is paramount within small software teams because you will periodically run into things it can't do - or worse it will lead you in a direction that wastes a lot of developer time.

Cursor will get better at this over time, and the underlying model, but the executive vision of this is absolutely broken and at this point I can only laugh at the problems this generation of startups will inevitably go through when they realize their teams no longer have the expertise to solve things in more traditional manners.
by nick__m | 2025-05-10 16:42:42+00:00
It's possible to recover enough to cleanly save the user work and shutdown. You have to mesure of much memory you need for a clean shutdown and allocate a byte[sizeForShutdown] at the start of the application in the top level exception handler (the only one that should catch that error) and free that byte array before doing anything else.

Now you can argue that this is not truly recovering from exception but it is a lot better than what you can do with most of the other Error subclasses. I said most because there are easy to recover from Error like the StackOverflowError where you just have to fail the operation or request that caused the error.
by jonhohle | 2025-05-10 16:42:53+00:00
I haven’t looked at the merits, and I don’t like what the EU is doing to US companies with 20% market share, but I remember feeling the same way about Microsoft over 20 years ago. Fortunately, groklaw provided a constant stream of easily readable, high quality content. That, and I could see some of my favorite companies shutting down because their customers were restricted from doing business with them if they wanted to sell Windows.

This isn’t about search, it’s about their ad monopoly. They are not being punished for search or related products. I’m actually not sure how breaking out the search index helps in this situation. I would think splitting out off-Google advertising is the more obvious break and one that would benefit humanity. (Ad networks can die in a fire.)
by rjmunro | 2025-05-10 16:43:17+00:00
It could, but it's aimed at news style programmes, ingesting information from commercial news gathering systems and turning that into broadcasts. You can reorder the stories and make edits even while the program is live, and e.g. handle breaking news events interrupting your show.

There's support for ingesting from Google sheets, and from a demo app, so you could use those, or develop your own ingest system to create the stories.
by overhead4075 | 2025-05-10 16:43:51+00:00
> cover letter is very important, and please do not use chatgpt to write it (we have automated checkers in place)

Specifically this

> we have automated checkers in place

Do you have any reason to believe that your automated AI checker is accurate or reliable? If anything, you're biasing yourself against neurodivergent applicants or anyone applying using their non-native language.
by jeremyscanvic | 2025-05-10 16:44:32+00:00
I sympathize with your view and I dislike it as much as the next guy when people prove dubious points from poorly convincing stories, but here's how I view things: badly told stories are frustrating, and it is difficult to tell stories well.

The thing with (real) stories is they relate facts in a structured and somewhat neutral way (causality). This allows you, the reader, to learn things that are beyond the author's point. Essays, on the other hand, don't allow that as authors can (should) always leave out everything that does not support their point without compromising the text.
by ttfkam | 2025-05-10 16:44:43+00:00
Not only was a design ready to be built, it was built. Went online 39 years ago. Produced 1.2GWe at peak. Not only produced power on its own but reprocessed spent fuel from other nuclear reactors.

Decommissioned 28 years ago. Because it didn't work? No. Because it wasn't safe? No. Because it wasn't reliable? No, it had a 95% availability rate.

It was taken out of service due to political pressure and legal maneuvering, not technical reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix
by venk12 | 2025-05-10 16:44:49+00:00
Typical agent calls are like saying /run-report — one-shot, no memory. Genie joins convos, reads threads, and understands ongoing context.

Most agent tools are built for solo use. Genie is built for teams — multiple users can interact with the same agent in one thread, like a group teammate.

Calling agents from Slack ≠ making Slack the workspace for agents — and that’s the shift Genie is enabling.
Show HN: Diffwithgpt – Local LLM Summarizer for Git diffs
by sp1982 | 2025-05-10 16:44:53+00:00
Hi HN,

diffwithgpt.com is a proof-of-concept tool that auto-summarizes GitHub diffs using a locally hosted Qwen/Qwen-8B model. It currently indexes a small set of Go/devops repositories and enriches commits with AST-derived context to improve semantic accuracy.(only past 3y of commits for now) The goal is to evaluate whether lightweight, local LLMs can provide meaningful changelog summaries—or if it's just more AI-generated noise. Any feedback welcome.
by yladiz | 2025-05-10 16:45:31+00:00
The issue is that the president and executive in general don’t have the power to do a lot of things they have, like withhold appropriated money, but they do it anyway and don’t care if the courts reprimand them. So yes, in theory only congress, in practice it only depends on if the executive in general (e.g. FBI) acts as if it is suspended.
by oceanplexian | 2025-05-10 16:46:40+00:00
> Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs.

Without Google the researchers who invented the Transformers model might have launched their own startup instead of sitting on the technology for 5 years while it's mismanaged at a big company. We would have had LLMs in 2018 not 2022.
by tedivm | 2025-05-10 16:46:41+00:00
I'm not saying MCP is perfect, but it's better than OpenAPI for LLMs for a few reasons.

* MCP tools can be described simply and without a lot of text. OpenAPI specs are often huge. This is important because the more context you provide an LLM the more expensive it is to run, and the larger model you need to use to be effective. If you provide a lot of tools then using OpenAPI specs could take up way too much for context, while the same tools for MCP will use much less.

* LLMs aren't actually making the calls, it's the engine driving it. What happens when an LLM wants to make a call is it responds directly with a block of text that the engine catches and uses to run the command. This allows LLMs to work like they're used to: figuring out text to output. This has a lot of benefits: less tokens to output than a big JSON blob is going to be cheaper.

* OpenAPI specs are static, but MCP allows for more dynamic tool usage. This can mean that different clients can get different specs, or that tools can be added after the client has connected (possibly in response to something the client sent). OpenAPI specs aren't nearly that flexible.

This isn't to say there aren't problems. I think the transport layer can use some work, as OP sent, but if you play around in their repo you can see websocket examples so I wouldn't be surprised if that was coming. Also the idea that "interns" are the ones making the libraries is an absolute joke, as the FastMCP implementation (which was turned into the official spec) is pretty solid. The mixture of hyperbole with some reasonable points really ruins this article.
Show HN: Kozu – A minimalist tool to manage your YouTube study sessions
by realhardik18 | 2025-05-10 16:47:03+00:00
You can add videos, organize them into playlists, track your progress, and set daily tasks — all in one dashboard.

It’s built for learners who want more accountability without the clutter. Lifetime access is now $10 (down from $12). Feedback welcome!
by kazinator | 2025-05-10 16:47:40+00:00
> But ["hallucination"] can also refer to an AI-generated answer that is factually accurate, but not actually relevant to the question it was asked, or fails to follow instructions in some other way.

No, "hallucination" can't refer to that. That's a non sequitur or non-compliance and such.

Hallucination is quite specific, referring to making statements which can be interpreted as referring to the circumstances of a world which doesn't exist. Those statements are often relevant; the response would be useful if that world did coincide with the real one.

If your claim is that hallucinations are getting worse, you have to measure the incidences of just those kinds of outputs, treating other forms of irrelevance as a separate category.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-10 16:47:50+00:00
https://commoncrawl.org/

This is similar to the natural monopoly of root DNS servers (managed as a public good). There is no reason more money couldn't go into either Common Crawl, or something like it. The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in perpetuity (although storing it elsewhere is also fine imho) as the storage system of last resort. How you provide access to this data is, I argue, similar to how access to science datasets is provided by custodian institutions (examples would be NOAA, CERN, etc).

Build foundations on public goods, very broadly speaking (think OSI model, but for entire systems). This helps society avoid the grasp of Big Tech and their endless desire to build moats for value capture.
by sparky_ | 2025-05-10 16:47:57+00:00
I can appreciate the technical aspect of a translation layer, but I struggle to understand the use case for a tool like this. If your data is inherently relational, then you should be using a relational store anyway. And if it isn't, trying to hammer it on-demand into something that looks relational is going to eat you with performance implications. Unless I'm missing something.
by elteto | 2025-05-10 16:48:14+00:00
Mostly because dependencies are hard and extra so when you need another team using a different language to also neeeds support the same format.

I’d love to pass parquet data around, or SQLite dbs, or something else, but that requires dedicated support from other teams upstream/downstream.

Everyone and everything supports CSV, and when they don’t they can hack a simple parser quickly. I know that getting a CSV parser right for all the edge cases is very hard, but they don’t need to. They just need to support the features we use. That’s simple and quick and everyone quickly moves on to the actual work of processing the data.
by johng | 2025-05-10 16:48:23+00:00
Grew up in New Mexico and this is one of my favorite smells in the world.

That and also new pads on a swamp cooler. When you change out the swamp cooler pads every summer -- its usually in the heat, its a pain, and once you get inside the house, flick on the A/C and have a newly fixed up swamp cooler and you feel that cool air and the pine from the pads.... it's a glorious smell as well.