MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JCM9 | 2025-05-03 14:59:27+00:00
Modern AI tools are amazing, but they’re amazing like spell check was amazing when it came out. Does it help with menial tasks? Yes, but it creates a new baseline that everyone has and just moves the bar. Theres scant evidence that we’re all going to just sit on a beach while AI runs your company anytime soon.

There’s little sign of any AI company managing to build something that doesn’t just turn into a new baseline commodity. Most of these AI products are also horribly unprofitable, which is another reality that will need to be faced sooner rather than later.
Ask HN: What do you use for spell and grammar checking?
by bjourne | 2025-05-03 14:59:46+00:00
I've tried Emacs's various spell-checking modes, but they are bad. They are all based around dictionary lookups so not very useful for agglutinative languages. Nor do they work with text containing markup or text containing multiple languages (e.g., English cites, but text in a different language). I don't think neovim fares much better.
by kordlessagain | 2025-05-03 15:00:19+00:00
Assholes will rationalize any way they can, and a lot of the population is "set up" to hear these excuses and evaluate them. So, for a small percentage of assholes, they will have such good excuses nobody holds them accountable.

Funny how calling out well-dressed manipulation bothers some people more than the manipulation itself. Almost like some folks need the illusion to stay intact.
by ModernMech | 2025-05-03 15:00:38+00:00
I try to do something like this when I ask the AI to generate tests -- I'll cook up a grammar and feed it to the LLM in a prompt, and then ask it to generate strings from the grammar. It's pretty good at it, but it'll produce mistakes, which is why I'll write a parser for the grammar and have the LLM feed the strings it makes through the parser and correct them if they're wrong. Works well.
by ComplexSystems | 2025-05-03 15:01:24+00:00
<iframe> is different from what the author is asking for, it has its own DOM and etc. He wants something like an SSI but client side. He explains some of the problems right after the part you cut off above

"We’ve got <iframe>, which technically is a pure HTML solution, but they are bad for overall performance, accessibility, and generally extremely awkward here"
Show HN: What do you think of my new project implementation partner?
by reuben-cruise | 2025-05-03 15:01:28+00:00
Hi there! I made this tool called Finish UP to help me do exactly that with my personal projects and work tasks.

I found that I had a few problems that cross-cut the majority of my projects:

1. I have loads of new ideas for projects, or tasks to do like learning German, but I do not always know where to start

2. I open a kanban board and then do not know what type of tasks to start with, how detailed they should be, or to what extent they can overlap

3. I started using ChatGPT and equivalents to help me ideate and put in place initial plans, but as soon as I asked questions about certain parts of the plan, the chat got very messy and complicated to manage, scrolling up and down and managing the chat history

So I made Finish UP to try and help me with these problems!

With Finish UP you can:

1. Generate comprehensive project plans from scratch using a questionnaire, yielding a complete skeleton of a project which you can tailor to your needs or get started straight away implementing tasks

2. Track and manage project and task progress in the same place that it is generated (no more messing around with distributed tools

3. Open implementation tracks for specific subtasks which you can use to ask questions about task implementation or generate detailed solution steps, ensuring you have clear instructions on what exactly you need to do next to get towards a completed project!

These are a few of the key functionalities that I found helpful for getting my projects done! I have a number of extra ideas I want to implement, but I thought I needed to share this with you all first to see what you think. I would love to hear how you get on with the tool and what you would like to see added, removed, or changed :)
by gruez | 2025-05-03 15:01:55+00:00
visual studio gets a pass because you need an editor/IDE to write/test/run code in the first place, so you might as well have docs for a popular one. I'd be peeved if they were blocking the community from contributing docs for competing IDEs (eg. Rider), or they were adding plugs for random ancillary services (eg. github or azure app service).
by Svip | 2025-05-03 15:02:17+00:00
No, originally frameset[0] and frame[1] were the solution to this problem. I remember building a website in the late 1990s with frameset. iframe came later, and basically allowed you to do frames without the frameset. Anyway, frameset is also the reason every browser's user agent starts with "Mozilla".

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
by bambax | 2025-05-03 15:02:35+00:00
> We’ve got <iframe>, which technically is a pure HTML solution, but they are bad for overall performance, accessibility, and generally extremely awkward here

What does this mean? This is a pure HTML solution, not just "technically" but in reality. (And before iframe there were frames and frameset). Just because the author doesn't like them don't make them non-existent.
by rchaud | 2025-05-03 15:03:05+00:00
"Includes" functionality is considered to be server-side, i.e. handled outside of the web browser. HTML is client-side, and really just a markup syntax, not a programming language.

As the article says, the problem is a solved one. The "includes" issue is how every web design student learns about PHP. In most CMSes, "includes" become "template partials" and are one of the first things explained in the documentation.

There really isn't any need to make includes available through just HTML. HTML is a presentation format and doesn't do anything interesting without CSS and JS anyway.
by Linux-Fan | 2025-05-03 15:04:12+00:00
Isn't this what proper framesets (not iframes) were supposed to do a long time ago (HTML 4?). At least they autoexpanded just fine and the user could even adjust the size to their preference.

There was a lot of criticism for frames [1] but still they were successfully deployed for useful stuff like Java API documentation [2].

In my opinion the whole thing didn't stay mostly because of too little flexibility for designer: Framesets were probably well enough for useful information pages but didn't account for all the designers' needs with their bulky scrollbars and limited number of subspaces on the screen. Today it is too late to revive them because framesets as-is wouldn't probably work well on mobile...

[1] <https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-frames-suck-most-of-the...> - I love how much of it is not applicable anymore and all of these problems mentioned with frames are present in today's web in an even nastier way?

[2] <https://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~ee553/ee402notes/html/figures/JavaD...>
by kordlessagain | 2025-05-03 15:04:23+00:00
The irony is that Wikimedia already pays for the cost of serving pages — it's just invisible to users because donors cover it. Micropayments via Lightning aren't about "charging for knowledge," they're about sustainable access models in the face of high-frequency bot loads (especially from AI). If AI crawlers are consuming massive resources, it's not unreasonable to explore accountability — not for readers, but for automated extractors.

And, even better, those micropayments could be shared with the volunteers. How about a big party for them, or gifts on Amazon for good behavior? How about a simple birthday card? There's a lot that can be done with resources like this!
by littlestymaar | 2025-05-03 15:04:56+00:00
The agricultural revolution did in fact reduce the amount of work in society by a lot though. That's why we can have week-ends, vacation, retirement and study instead of working from non stop 12yo to death like we did 150 years earlier.

Reducing the amount of work done by humans is a good thing actually, though the institutional structures must change to help spread this reduction to society as a whole instead of having mass unemployment + no retirement before 70 and 50 hours work week for those who work.

AI isn't a problem, unchecked capitalism can be one.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-05-03 15:05:07+00:00
The interesting result here is not the performance against human players, which DeepMind tries to upsell. The interesting bit is their approach to bridging the sim-2-real gap by iteratively training in a simulation and fine-tuning in real-world games. The approach is described here:

i-Sim2Real: Reinforcement Learning of Robotic Policies in Tight Human-Robot Interaction Loops

https://sites.google.com/view/is2r

The sim-2-real gap is a real obstacle in adopting RL for rotobics and anything that pushes the envelope is worth the trouble. On the other hand, I can't tell how well this approach will work outside of Table Tennis.

Note that on top of the RL work there is, AFAICT a metric shit ton of good, old-fashioned engineering to support the decision-making ability of learned policies. E.g. the "High Level Controller" (HLC) that selects "Low Level Controllers" (LLC) using good, old-fashioned AI tools, tree search with heuristics, seems to me to be hand-crafted rather than learned, and involves a load of expert knowledge driving information gathering. So far, no bitter lessons to taste here.

Oh and of course the HLC is a symbolic component while the LLCs are learned by a neural net. Once more DeepMind sneakily introduces a neuro-symbolic approach but keeps quiet about it. They've done that since the days of AlphaGo. No idea why they're so ashamed of it, since it really looks like it's working very well for them.
by kordlessagain | 2025-05-03 15:05:16+00:00
Because I evolved the prompt from something that was off to something that made sense. I don't see using any resource as a problem as long as the content is bang on.

The "prompt" as you call it, isn't a sinlge prompt. It's a long discussion that includes the article (which I copy pasta'd) and other references I've worked on recently (I write crawlers and have for years)
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-03 15:06:17+00:00
> our silicon AI is going to become not only a lot smarter, but also a lot cheaper too.

It is entirely possible that silicon is just strictly not capable of reaching the computational capacity of meat

It is almost certain that silicon cannot reach the complexity of a human brain in the same "fits inside a human skull" footprint that brains have to adhere to
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-05-03 15:06:41+00:00
Didn't grow up in the city, but relatives came from there, I still have an "ear to the ground" so to speak, am Saints fan and visit occasionally.

Pros: - Great food

- History (relative to the US at least)

- Laid back culture

- Decent public transit. Not as good as NYC or SF, but in the city and even outlying areas like Metarie the streetcar gets you alot of places

- Interesting architechture in places like the Garden District and French Quarter

- All-in-all, one of the most unique places in the US

Cons:

- Weather is shyte, although winters tend to be mild (ironically it can get cold at times, even worse than say the SF Bay)

- K-12 education outside of private and parochial Catholic is mostly, not good

- The politics. Depending your perspective, you get the worst of both worlds (batshit insane conservatives running the state vs. corrupt liberals running the city)

- Every other commercial you see will be for personal injury lawyers. The tort decisions there are out of control and insurance rates are high.

All this is probably OK for childless young adults. I'd think twice before settling down there though
by fanatic2pope | 2025-05-03 15:07:12+00:00
> Dendrochronology has dated the felling of the oak tree of the panel to 1483, which, accounting for the seasoning of the wood, suggests a date for the painting of soon after 1500.

Sounds like they have only dated the wood in the frame to 1500. Hopefully they will do some more research and get more proof.

For reference, Han van Meegeren used old frames and old canvases to forge his works. The article on his career is fascinating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_van_Meegeren
by austin-cheney | 2025-05-03 15:07:25+00:00
So, HTML did have includes and they fell out of favor.

The actual term include is an XML feature and it’s that feature the article is hoping for. HTML had an alternate approach that came into existence before XML. That approach was frames. Frames did much more than XML includes and so HTML never gained that feature. Frames lost favor due to misuse, security, accessibility, and variety of other concerns.
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-03 15:07:30+00:00
Same. I've only done bisect debugging a few times. I'm almost always able to use more traditional debugging especially if I have a good idea about where the bug must be from behavior.

Bisects are good when the bug is reproducible, you have a "this used to work and now it doesnt" situatiuon, and the code base is too big or too unfamiliar for you to have a good intuition about where to look. You can pretty quickly get to the commit where the bug first appears, and then look at what changed in that commit.
by littlestymaar | 2025-05-03 15:07:54+00:00
Only if it can do it in an affordable fashion.

If you need a supercomputer to run your AGI then it's probably not worth it for any task that a human can do, because humans happen to be much cheaper than supercomputers.

Also, it's not clear if AGI doesn't mean it's necessarily better than existing AIs: a 3 years old child has general intelligence indeed, but it's far less helpful than even a sub-billion parameters LLM for any task.
by jFriedensreich | 2025-05-03 15:08:14+00:00
JJ just surpassed a milestone for me personally where there were no hick-ups for more than 6 months and it feels genuinely superior to git and also to sapling for performance, stability and UX. If you ever considered switching i think it might be now. Colocated mode does not feel like a second class citizen and works really well too so there is always the option to use a sophisticated git client like fork for certain tasks. VisualJJ is also a great albeit not open source vscode extensio n that is slowly catching up to ISL. (If you are used to ISL and think visualJJ looks empty and lacks features: most things are hidden in the context menu which takes some getting used to.)
by bee_rider | 2025-05-03 15:08:25+00:00
I’d like to see more:

Main character tortures a low-level grunt

Gets false confession

Goes off on wild goose chase based on that confession

Bad guys get away with their plot as a result

“Yes, you were torturing me, I’d obviously have said anything to get you to stop.”

I feel like I’ve seen this sequence once or twice, but I can’t remember what it was in. It actually seems like something that is more likely to be put in a comedy, where the protagonist can be shown to be stupid occasionally. Maybe Brooklyn 99, or Barry, or something like that?
by anticodon | 2025-05-03 15:08:27+00:00
Rusofobia started in middle ages, long before Putin was born. And it never ended.

> Some of it is also caused by the pervasive hostility to the values important to most humans,

USA started with a genocide of a whole continent. Started more wars than any other nation/state in the human history. Probably killed more civilians than any other nation in history (Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, just to name a few countries with huge losses among civilians, not even counting those who died from hunger or illnesses caused by US wars and deliberate destruction of agriculture and infrastructure).

So what? Do you read every day that it is the most belligerent and aggressive state on Earth, although it really is?

> pervasive disinformation efforts

I've already wrote in the original message, how Russia is portrayed by the media and Hollywoold. Is it a really true information? Not propaganda and disinformation?
by hedora | 2025-05-03 15:08:37+00:00
They starved about 10 million and they murdered another 10 million:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_t...

Their total losses were about 26.6M. For comparison, German concentration camps killed about 6M, but Russia was on our side, so we don’t like to compare these two numbers.
by davidw | 2025-05-03 15:08:57+00:00
Landlords would be happy if rents never fell though. They're not dropping them because "gosh, maybe we charged too much during the pandemic". New housing was built and landlords had to compete for tenants. Dropping prices during a time when inflation is still a thing is a pretty big deal, and very beneficial to thousands of people.

The housing market is, indeed, anything but free. That's a core idea behind the YIMBY movement: make it legal to build more kinds of housing, rather than just meet demand by outward sprawl.

> But supply and demand do apply and it has been a political goal for decades to ensure that supply will be constrained.

That's what YIMBY is about: fighting back against those constraints. They have hugely detrimental consequences for people, the economy and the environment.

In terms of "capitalism", I think most YIMBYs are pragmatic - capitalism is the system we have in the US, so we need to leverage it as much as possible to get the housing we need. If we could get Vienna style social housing, I think a lot of YIMBYs would be happy to sign up. You still need Vienna style zoning and building codes to get that, though.
by propter_hoc | 2025-05-03 15:09:30+00:00
With much love for my angel investors, angel investing is absolutely a mug's game.

If the company doesn't get off the ground (vast majority of investments) you lose all your money.

If the company does get off the ground, you are the lowest on the pref stack, and you have no ability to follow on to protect your position. You're not a contributing employee or meaningful future source of capital so your piece of the pie is just dead weight on the cap table. This means every single subsequent investor (and the founders, if they care more about money than their relationship with you) has an incentive to cram you down.

So net net the chances of success from passive angel investing are only slightly better than playing the lottery.

Best approach would be to make very few investments, where you're able to build a special relationship with the founder, and ideally get a board seat to defend your stake.

===

Edit - to be clear, I don't think startups should be giving board seats to angel investors. It does happen in exceptional cases where the angel is uniquely valuable to the company, and those are the cases where the angel can defend themselves. But they are rare, which is why it's mainly a bad game to play.
by ac29 | 2025-05-03 15:10:07+00:00
> If everyone builds non-tracking arrays, power during peak will become almost worthless if solar is a big part of overall generation capacity

During peak solar yesterday in California wholesale power was $5-6/MWh (<1c/kWh).

The CA grid is routinely over 100% renewables during springtime. The excess is handled by having a lot of batteries, exporting energy, and curtailments.
by hectormalot | 2025-05-03 15:10:20+00:00
Having some experience with both, I think they are quite different. N8n looks quite polished and seems primarily concerned about connecting pre-made blocks. There are custom code blocks (JS and Python only, with limited ability to import libraries), but it’s not something you’d use by default. I thinks it great for less-technical users when compared to windmill.

Windmill OTOH supports a bunch of programming languages for steps (Go, Rust, Python, TS, etc.) and seems to have a much more “code first” approach. Reusable blocks are more like code templates compared to n8n.

Hard to say which is better. I really like the ability in windmill to just write code for each step and it comes across more powerful, but it feels less polished and intuitive when compared to n8n.
by ChrisGammell | 2025-05-03 15:10:21+00:00
A while back I used it to glue together a bunch of APIs to make a geofence on top of a WiFi location service my company offers. Super easy to prototype external computation without something like severless/lambda (which would be the likely path for production)

https://blog.golioth.io/a-2-geofence-wi-fi-location-here-com...
by rekabis | 2025-05-03 15:10:55+00:00
Radical idea:

Have the government step in and say, “if you want to sell your drugs in America, you can only sell them to me.”

Then the government hammers that price down as low as it can go, and buys in bulk. A small rider is added to everyone’s federal taxes - a few dollars at most - to pay for it all, and the drugs are provided for free with any prescription.

It’s called single-payer healthcare, and most any advanced country uses that method to turn a $2,000/mo drug that the end user would pay either directly or through income-reducing insurance, into a $50/mo drug that is paid indirectly through federal taxes at less than 1/100 the cost.

But nooooooo… America can’t do this because “socialism is evil”.
by ibaikov | 2025-05-03 15:11:16+00:00
It is great to make chatbots in my opinion. Personal automations, AI, etc. I have friends who use it to prototype products and it works using n8n as backend for users. I mostly don't do this, only prototypes that only I can access. It has pros and cons vs coding, and you probably have to make something using n8n to see if it works for you.
by c_hastings | 2025-05-03 15:11:30+00:00
From their GitHub:

“ What does n8n mean?

Short answer: It means "nodemation" and is pronounced as n-eight-n.

Long answer: "I get that question quite often (more often than I expected) so I decided it is probably best to answer it here. While looking for a good name for the project with a free domain I realized very quickly that all the good ones I could think of were already taken. So, in the end, I chose nodemation. 'node-' in the sense that it uses a Node-View and that it uses Node.js and '-mation' for 'automation' which is what the project is supposed to help with. However, I did not like how long the name was and I could not imagine writing something that long every time in the CLI. That is when I then ended up on 'n8n'." - Jan Oberhauser, Founder and CEO, n8n.io”
by jmg2227 | 2025-05-03 15:11:35+00:00
Base Power | Onsite | Austin | Full-time | https://www.basepowercompany.com/careers

At Base we're building a distributed fleet of energy storage systems to fix the nation's power grid. We build and manufacture power converters, deploy them across the power grid, and build the algs, ingestion and commanding platforms that operate the fleet in response to real-time grid conditions.

Our team is made up of engineers from top infrastructure and energy companies (Apple, Anduril, Starlink, etc) and we have several years of runway from top firms (a16z, Valor, Thrive, Addition).

We are looking for: - platform engineers - firmware & controls engineers - embedded software engineers

Sampling of exciting upcoming problems include: - Home load prediction algorithms - Resilient factory execution software platform - Automated hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test system
by amarant | 2025-05-03 15:11:44+00:00
It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter? Or is it all just pointless busy-work invented since the industrial revolution to create jobs for everyone, when in reality we would be fine if like 5% of society worked while the rest slacked off? Don't think we'd have as many videogames, but then again, we would have time to play, which I would argue is more valuable than games.

To paraphrase Lee Iacocca: We must stop and ask ourselves, how much videogames do we really need?