MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vlovich123 | 2025-05-10 22:01:20+00:00
You’re ignoring the power of network effects - “shitty but widely adopted” makes “better but just starting adoption harder” to grow. Think about how long it takes to create a new HTTP standard - we’ve had 3 HTTP standards in the past 30 years, the first 19 of which so no major changes. HTTP/2 kind of saw no adoption in practice and HTTP/3 is still a mixed bag. In fact, most of the servers pretend HTTP/1 with layers in front converting the protocols.

Underestimate network effects and ossification at your own peril.
by janalsncm | 2025-05-10 22:02:35+00:00
Because Google has monopoly power, they can charge whatever they want for ads, and every company in the economy has to pay it. So there’s a pretty good argument the economy is being held back by a “Google tax”.

Most of the services you listed above are hardly best in class, and giving them away for free is basically scraps off of the table. The ones which are best in class like Waymo have a good shot at being commercially successful on their own.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-10 22:03:27+00:00
> I don’t know about you but sometimes it’s some small piece of information that isn’t worth contacting the presenter about. I need to call or craft an email, be polite and come up with some nonsense greeting maybe for a bullet point or two or a string I don’t want to rapidly shift focus to duplicate by hand. Then I have to sit around and wait for a response where they have to do the same, and I’m definitely not their priority.

So it’s something critically important for you to get your job done, but also something that’s not worth writing a couple sentence e-mail about, but also going to block your work while you sit around and wait all day for it?

Communication is the foundation of any office job. If you’re in a meeting with these people, just ask in the meeting? If you can’t, send an email during the meeting and you haven’t lost any time. It’s really not as hard as you’re trying to make it sound.

I generally discourage people from using ChatGPT for office communication, but to be honest if writing a simple e-mail request to get something you need for your job triggers this level of overthinking, you might benefit from letting it at least draft the email to get you started and past the analysis paralysis.
by to11mtm | 2025-05-10 22:03:56+00:00
From the Article, if only to be pedantic enough that I agree with 'yes a browser might work'

> The company plans to start rolling out this new Teams feature to Android, desktop, iOS, and web users worldwide in July 2025.

OTOH we will see if there's any type of weasel-wording on whether browser is in fact non-supported (i.e. will go to audio-only mode.)

The other possibility, is that every 'supported' platform has some form of DRM that results in the functionality working even on browser (just thinking out loud about DRM functionality possibilities) means Windows/MacOS/Android/iOS all work but everyone else is out of luck.
Ask HN: How do you organize your business ideas?
by codazoda | 2025-05-10 22:03:58+00:00
Over the next few months I'll be trying a whole bunch of new business ideas. I need a better way to organize them, write notes, and create a few fields to help me calculate which ideas are the best to pursue.

I'm not loving a spreadsheet for this, it gets too wide and doesn't lend itself well to any kind of long form text. My notebooks are sprawling with unorganized ideas.

What do you use to organize or categorize business ideas and your progress with them?
by NKosmatos | 2025-05-10 22:05:40+00:00
There isn’t a single user (presenter) that would ask something like this. Only a presenter that has to follow some strict “high security” procedures would enable something like this. A politician, for example, will have an excuse in case something leaks. The fact that with a simple mobile having a camera you can copy whatever is being presented (or with slightly more technical ways) is irrelevant for laws and procedures ;-)
by ewoodrich | 2025-05-10 22:07:10+00:00
I grew up in the dial-up era but personally think it's incredibly cool how I am able to use a full featured IDE, flash an ESP-32 or my phone via USB, make low latency Zoom/Teams calls with screen sharing, run language agnostic bytecode and utilize low level GPU access, all in a highly secure sandbox on my Macbook, Linux/Windows Thinkpad, $100 Chromebook, tablet and phone.
by to11mtm | 2025-05-10 22:07:22+00:00
> Modern camera phones are wide angle enough that it’s not hard to grab a shot of the monitor out of frame.

Pedantic correction:

'grab a shot of the monitor out of frame of the webcam of the person wanting to take screenshots of the meeting'.

First time I read it I was somehow imagining breaking of laws of physics lmao.

I suppose the biggest irony of this is, most of the shops that might want to enable this are already so sloppy that they half expect folks to screenshot teams presentations for notes later.
by cyberax | 2025-05-10 22:09:26+00:00
> Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies.

I dispute that. Google Docs/Drive/Mail are supported by enterprise subscriptions. Android Auto is also a commercial product that can live off license fees. Fi/Fiber/Pay/Waymo are also not free services, and can survive on their own.

Free GMail/Forms/Groups/Translate can probably survive off ad revenue that they can get from third parties. They are pretty trivial expenses at this point.

Android and Chrome are the main projects at risk.
by yodsanklai | 2025-05-10 22:09:48+00:00
> they can't give a student a 0 when they've obviously used chatGPT (ie cheated) for an assignment.

I used to teach at university level (not in the US). I gave a 0 to a cheating student. Next day, the head of the section came to me in a panic. "omg, what have you done? you can't do that...". Actually, I think he wasn't even worried about legal implications, he genuinely thought this was very unfair to the student and that I was some kind of prick.

Actually, there are very specific procedures to deal with cheating, and it's so time consuming that it's better to avoid them altogether and just close your eyes.

Edit: another anecdote, I refused late students to my class (after warning them several times). Again, I got reprimanded by the head of the department for being too strict.
by hedora | 2025-05-10 22:09:57+00:00
In the US, medical privacy laws serve exactly two purposes:

1) Prevent the patients from suing after a data breach or intentional sale of their medical records, regardless of negligence.

2) Transfer as much money as possible from health care to privately owned businesses in the compliance industry.

Very few computer security lessons from that industry generalize to other parts of the economy.
by yial | 2025-05-10 22:11:06+00:00
Sorry - I should clarify I downshift. I understand the difference. I drove manual most of my life. (Somewhat unusual in the USA )

However, I frequently see drivers fly down the mountain behind me, and then brake heavily. The drivers in front of me, have their brake lights on in front of me usually the entire time or nearly.

However: high compression engines will slow you at a rate similar to light braking in many circumstances, unless your gearing and the slope of the hill is just right.

On my motorcycle, if I’ve downshifted to an amount that it will stop acceleration due to the slope, it will begin to decelerate me.

Even in my current car, the difference between 3rd and 4th is 4th allowing the car to continue to accelerate to ~20 mph over the speed limit, where 3rd will hold briefly but begin to decelerate the vehicle as the slope decreases. While I can shift between them to moderate the speed, it’s not always worthwhile. Again, I’m applying specific scenarios where the “mountain” road is maybe 1-1.5 miles maximum.

The specific scenario I dislike is that if I’m using engine braking(say to maintain 35-43 mph in a 35 zone), and don’t tap my brake lights - people fly down doing 60, and the brake heavily, tailgate for a period, and then follow at a normal distance.

If I tap my brakes to trigger the lights as they approach, they begin to slow further away and don’t do the hard slowdown.

Anecdotal of course.

The difference may be that where I am in the USA many people are not using engine braking.
by arthurcolle | 2025-05-10 22:11:33+00:00
Erlang is strictly better in all ways for my use-case due to its purity, rigorous simplicity, and direct closeness to the BEAM VM. I also wrote a library 10 years ago to do python->elixir and back. https://github.com/stochastic-thread/snek.ex

When building foundational libraries, especially for large-scale distributed systems or agent-based architectures - I find Erlang’s minimalism, mature toolset (like `observer:start` for visual supervision trees), and battle-tested concurrency model invaluable. I also liked Prolog, so I guess if these preferences are strange, that explains them!

That said, Elixir definitely has enhanced the developer experience significantly. The improved syntax, great macros, `mix`, Hex package management, and community-driven tooling are impressive and inviting for newcomers. Interoperability is excellent, so writing foundational libraries in Erlang makes them readily accessible to Elixir applications without hassle.

A few examples highlighting Erlang’s advantages:

* *Minimalism & Predictability*: Erlang's restricted syntax and clear semantics make large-scale codebases easier to maintain and reason about, crucial when debugging complex distributed agent interactions. * *Tooling & Debugging*: Tools like `observer:start`, built-in tracing with `dbg`, and mature profiling support give unparalleled visibility into running systems. * *Closer to BEAM*: By writing directly in Erlang, I have tighter control and deeper understanding of how my code interacts with BEAM’s scheduling, garbage collection, and process handling.

Still—I love Elixir’s conveniences and often reach for it for web-facing layers, prototyping, or anything user-facing. Both languages complement each other well.

And yes, given my project's name (`Agents.erl`), maybe Elixir needs to rename its `Agent` module now.
by dietr1ch | 2025-05-10 22:11:43+00:00
> I'll note that it isn't just PGO/BOLT style optimizations. Largely, it is not that at all, oddly.

Well, it's not required to trim code that you can prove unreachable, true. But I was thinking about trying to measure if a given library really pulls it's non-zero weight, and how much CPU is spent in it.

A library taking "too much time" for something you think can be done faster might need replacement, or swapping for a simple implementation (say the library cares about edge cases you don't face or can avoid).
by ipaddr | 2025-05-10 22:12:01+00:00
The app is dangerous AI slop. We turn what someone says into structured data for a police report.

Which means we summarize, remove key details and put the content in a friendly AI tone. When the police encounter this email? Printed copy? They will have to interview the person to figure out the details. When it gets to court the otherside will poke holes in the AI copy.
by hdjrudni | 2025-05-10 22:12:46+00:00
FWIW, I use forwardemail.net. Been using them a few years and haven't had any issues. They've got a free plan but you have to put your email in the public DNS record, or $3/mo to keep your email private.

https://forwardemail.net/en/private-business-email?pricing=t...

Not affiliated, just a happy customer. The biggest issue now is that my email addresses always confuse humans. They're always like "Your email address is MyCompany@YourDomain.com?" And I'm like yes... I don't work for your company, that's... I don't really want to explain this.
by hintymad | 2025-05-10 22:12:54+00:00
I really hope that capitalism works this time: we bring back our key manufacturing. One may argue that toys are not key manufacturing, but I think that argument misses the point. The point is, a truly industrialized country can produce anything en mass, if needed. Without light industry, we simply can't achieve that. Worse, we become the Soviet Union, letting heavy industry break the country's back. The recent India-Pkistan conflict is a good example.

During the India-Pakistan conflict on May 7, 2025, Pakistan claimed that it used a J-10C fighter jet to shoot down an Indian Rafale jet. The possible reasons below for the Rafale being shot down are quite a read. I listed some below. And I'm not sure how many people realized this: each J-10 sold for only 50M, while each Rafale sold for north of 200M. And when a dark factory in China churns out a thousand PL-15s a day like the US used to be able to do, how do we even fight that if there is indeed a war?

All the technologies list below used to be the envy of China, yet now China can make them. They may not as good as the western, but good enough with cheap enough will win, right?

What's even more sad is that we seemed content that we can export lots of agriculture products and raw materials to China. I thought that used to be what a colony did: Britains mandated that colonies couldn't produce advanced products and could only export raw materials. And our founding fathers fought a war so we didn't have to be a colonized country. Well, history is full of irony.

Now some technical stuff about J-10 vs Rafale:

Radar Performance Gap: The J-10C is equipped with the KLJ-7A active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, which uses gallium nitride (GaN) technology and includes over 1,200 T/R modules. It can detect a 5 m² target at a range of up to 220 km. In contrast, the Rafale’s RBE2-AA radar uses only 836 gallium arsenide (GaAs) modules, with a detection range of about 150 km and weaker resistance to jamming. This allows the J-10C to lock onto the Rafale first, putting the Indian aircraft at a disadvantage.

Missile Range Advantage: The J-10C can carry the PL-15 ultra-long-range air-to-air missile, with a range exceeding 200 km, enabling it to engage targets from a distance. The Rafale is armed with MICA air-to-air missiles, which have a range of less than 100 km. Even when fitted with Meteor missiles, the range is only about 150 km, clearly inferior in comparison.

Electronic Warfare Capability Gap: The J-10C can carry advanced electronic warfare pods such as the RKL-700A, which can disrupt the Rafale's radar and communication systems. Moreover, the J-10C operates in coordination with the ZDK-03 early warning aircraft, which can penetrate cloud cover to locate targets and transmit encrypted coordinates to the J-10C via a jam-resistant data link, enabling a “silent kill.” On the other hand, the Indian Rafale, due to its diverse sourcing and poor data link compatibility, is at a disadvantage in electronic warfare.
by karaterobot | 2025-05-10 22:13:09+00:00
For the sake of argument, let's grant the implication that Google is in danger of going out of business. Even so, if our economy is at the point where one company going out of business would cripple it, it's almost certainly worth the pain of decoupling from that company. It would hurt, but we would get through it, and it would be better in the long run. On the other hand, if we just threw up our hands and said "do whatever you want, Google, you're too important for us to tell you what to do" then we're pretty much at their mercy. I can't imagine things getting better or fixing themselves in that situation.
by johnea | 2025-05-10 22:13:38+00:00
This is highlighted by how many different types of user interface environments are implemented in free s/w platforms, vs the monoculture user interfaces of proprietary OSes.

The resultant windoze brain damage is a co-mingling of "you don't know what you don't know", lack of awareness of just how varied computer interfaces could be, with the "child indoctrination" aspect that nothing else seems quite right when it's not what you were raised on.

After my first programming experiences, on a TRS-80 in the mall radio shack in the late '70s, I was exposed to a variety of user interfaces, but eventually became locked into windows myself, mostly from employer enforcement.

The thing that drove me away in the end was the way various settings were moved around with each new release, and the way my workflow had to constantly adapt to arbitrary changes in the user interface with each revision.

After exploring a wide variety of desktop environments, I've been on fluxbox window manager for many years now and I'm still quite satisfied. All of my configuration options are in my home directory, and my user interface experience is recreated without incident when updating, and even when moving to new h/w.

But the monoculture is wide spread, and continues to inhibit computer innovation outside of what will benefit the mothership...
by watwut | 2025-05-10 22:14:23+00:00
And that is where nerds do massive missteps including horribly ridiculous jumps in the logic. Because nerds and technical people are emotions driven as anyone else. They react to own feelings of anger, fear, frustration etc.

But, since they think emotions dont matter and cant be talked about, they rationalize all above into arguments that sound logical to them and no one else.
by yial | 2025-05-10 22:15:08+00:00
I think perhaps this may be different drivers. The scenario I dislike is that drivers seem to fly up behind me, and then brake even heavier, when I’m using engine braking and then tailgate for a period. (For example, I’m going 40 in a 35, and they flew up behind me going 60).

If I tap my brake lights as they’re approaching, they slow more gradually and follow at an appropriate distance.

This is anecdotal of course.

I think the issue is that I’m using engine braking, while those around me are not.
by neilv | 2025-05-10 22:16:08+00:00
> [...] where his parents run a college-prep consulting business [...]

This is helping affluent students game admission to prestigious schools?

> [...] proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment.

So, is gaming graduation at a prestigious school a natural outgrowth of gaming admission?

> What if they built a program that hid AI from browsers during remote job interviews so that interviewees could cheat their way through instead?

And gaming the job interview, after you cheat your way to admission and graduation.

Why not just dispense with all the theatre? Let rich kids party and hook up for 4 years, and then hand them a well-paying career. Leave university for the people who value it.
by flufluflufluffy | 2025-05-10 22:16:42+00:00
I get that it’s basically impossible to enforce but who are all these people that screencap stuff from Teams meetings? Why do you need to do that? Can you not get the actual material you’re capping via somebody emailing/sharing the actual file? If not, why? Are you not allowed to access it? Or are you all just taking candids of your coworkers for your own devious purposes?
by cogman10 | 2025-05-10 22:17:30+00:00
A fair point, but I'd point out that the research which showed revlimid was a well tolerated cancer medicine didn't happen because of private investment, but rather public NIH grants and funding. The lead author that ran the trials wasn't a pharma employee, but rather a staff member of a cancer research institution.

If someone is going to find that Benadryl can treat a new disease, it won't be a pharma company.
by ramoz | 2025-05-10 22:18:09+00:00
same but the interaction between me and Claude is too dynamic, and my planning framework is more robust than single files. If anything I could speed my workflow up but writing a bash script that calls gemini for my plans - i feed entire codebases or parts of a large codebase (using Prompt Tower) to gemini for the planning - Claude Code isnt as reliable. But even that is iterative with Gemini.
by anfractuosity | 2025-05-10 22:18:26+00:00
You might also be interested in this - https://docs.backyardbrains.com/retired/experiments/Plants_V... where they monitor the electrical spikes of the traps.

You can also apparently electrically trigger the closing of fly trap - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.4161/psb.2.3.4217
by cyclotron3k | 2025-05-10 22:18:27+00:00
In practice, it's not really an issue. In some applications (most notably terminal emulators, where ctrl+c is already used to terminate a process) you have to use an alternative combination (e.g. ctrl+shift+c).

MacOS neatly avoids this issue with the command key, but I'm not sure what happens in Windows.
by vFunct | 2025-05-10 22:18:31+00:00
Should be obvious that whatever AI does, people are capable and resilient enough to naturally respond to it for everyone's benefit. It's just what people do. They don't sit around doing nothing because AI took their job- they'll figure out something else, to fill a new hole in the economy.

Moore's law applies to people's productivity as well, not just transistors on a chip.
by sheepscreek | 2025-05-10 22:18:47+00:00
That’s fair but there’s another nuance that they can’t solve for. Cost and availability.

AI is not a substitute for traditional therapy, but it offers an 80% benefit at a fraction of the cost. It could be used to supplement therapy, for the periods between sessions.

The biggest risk is with privacy. Meta could not be trusted knowing what you’re going to wear or eat. Now imagine them knowing your deepest darkest secrets. The advertising business model does not gel well with providing mental health support. Subscription (with privacy guarantees) is the way to go.
by dietr1ch | 2025-05-10 22:19:31+00:00
> Instead, the problem is one of stability. In a "foundation that doesn't move and cause you to fall over" sense of the word. Consider if people made a house where every room had a different substructure under it. That, largely, seems to be the general approach we use to building software. The idea being that you can namespace a room away from other rooms and not have any care on what happens there.

I'm not sure what the problem is here.

Are you after pinning dependencies to be sure they didn't change? Generally I want updating dependencies to fix bugs in them.

Are you after trusting them through code review or tests? I don't think there's shortcuts for this. You shouldn't trust a library, changing or not, because old bugs and new vulnerabilities make erring on both sides risky. On reviewing other's code, I think Rust helps a bit by being explicit and fencing unsafe code, but memory safety is not enough when a logic bug can ruin your business. You can't avoid testing if mistakes or crashes matter.
by cluckindan | 2025-05-10 22:20:12+00:00
> People with ADHD have low baseline dopamine

That’s one way to have ADHD. There are other ways, like gene polymorphisms of dopamine receptors modifying the receptor density, activity, affinities or other parameters; or gene polymorphisms of monoamine oxidase, or dopamine beta-hydroxylase, or tyrosine/tyramine metabolism, or…
by delusional | 2025-05-10 22:20:28+00:00
> There are some really strange subclasses of Error now that I think about it. E.g. VirtualMachineError

An OutOfMemoryError is a VirtualMachineError. The Java runtime doesn't technically contain the idea of "finite memory". The language sort of assumes there's an infinite amount of memory. When there isn't and the VM is forced to throw an OutOfMemoryError it's technically a breach of the abstraction of the language and the VM is unable to continue working.