MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by muzani | 2025-05-27 14:27:29+00:00
Persevere. Get emotionally invested. Be a little stubborn. Commit 100%. As investors say, strong opinions, weakly held.

The stages of grief are a biological checklist:

1. Denial: Is it a measurement error? A fluke? Not enough time? Unexpected disadvantage?

2. Anger: Am I a coward for abandoning this? Why did I do this in the first place? Does the new path go against my moral values?

3. Bargaining: Is there a way around this problem? Do I need to give up or can I concede something?

4. Depression: At this point, you accept it is over. Mourn the idea. Have some kind of ritual. Blog about failure. Separate from it cleanly.

The trick is to approach each stage logically.

People tend to be completely irrational. They'll call the data fake, blame the sources, blame luck, blame privilege, government, etc. People get stuck on this for years. They become scared of failure. They burn through the passion, then rely on discipline. Then they burn through the discipline too and settle wherever they are.

Go through the grief, but treat it like a form. You have to deal with each stage, especially depression and the burial of that goal. Sometimes you get stuck at bargaining - "I'll come back to this project later."
by mandeepj | 2025-05-27 14:27:49+00:00
> Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp

> there’s now an Arc-to-JS called Lilt, and an Arc-to-Common Lisp called Clarc.

> But Clarc’s code isn’t released, although it could be done:

> Releasing the new HN code base however wouldn’t work:

I'm not sure if I follow all that. If the Clarc is not released, then how does HN run on it?
by diggan | 2025-05-27 14:27:50+00:00
I feel like this best explains what added benefits LumoSQL tries to add:

> LumoSQL is a derivative of SQLite, the most-used software in the world. Our focus is on privacy, at-rest encryption, reproducibility and the things needed to support these goals. [...]

https://lumosql.org/src/lumosql/file?name=doc/project-announ...

I'm unsure what Phase 1 was about, or if there is a planned Phase 3, but seems to outline what they're currently aiming for at least.
by xela79 | 2025-05-27 14:28:03+00:00
I'm using this custom instruction in a "project" folder for "absolute" mode to cut the crap and fluff:

System Instruction: Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user’s present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered — no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.

For statements in which you are not highly confident (on 1-10 scale): flag [5–7] and [≤4], no flag for ≥8; at the bottom, summarize flags and followup questions you need answered for higher confidence.
Ask HN: What's missing from customer retention tools?
by itstoka87 | 2025-05-27 14:28:29+00:00
I've been digging into why so many SaaS companies struggle with churn, and I keep hitting the same wall: the tools that exist either tell you someone left after it's too late, or they're these massive enterprise platforms that take forever to set up. Most founders I talk to are flying blind on retention. They know their churn rate from Stripe, maybe get some usage data from analytics, but there's this huge gap between "user hasn't logged in for 10 days" and actually doing something about it. I'm curious what you've experienced:

What early signals do you wish you could catch automatically? (Like someone stops using a core feature, or their usage pattern changes) What manual work are you doing around retention that feels like it should be automated? If you've tried retention tools, what made you stop using them?

I'm particularly interested in the small-to-medium SaaS perspective. It seems like most solutions are built for companies with dedicated CS teams, not founders wearing 10 hats. What would a retention tool need to do to actually be useful in your day-to-day work?

Thanks!
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-27 14:28:41+00:00
I don't think symbolic logic is a great tool for most people and most applications. For that, syllogistic logic is a better fit.

The modern Fregean paradigm was motivated by the need for a formalism to solve mathematical problems. It was advanced from a position of complete indifference to the relationship between logic and language/grammar. However, the Aristotelian tradition that dominated logic for two thousand years before Frege is motivated explicitly by the desire to clarify, draw out, and make conspicuous the logical structures within grammar so that arguments can be better evaluated for soundness.

For a rudimentary introduction to this space, Joseph's "The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric" is a good resource. For something a bit more thorough and specifically focused on logic, Coffey's two volumes of "The Science of Logic" comes highly recommended[1][2].

[0] https://a.co/d/61YNOCC

[1] https://a.co/d/3VNAGst

[2] https://archive.org/details/thescienceoflogi01coffuoft/page/...
by spwa4 | 2025-05-27 14:29:31+00:00
BGP has classes attributes that it forwards. While it is true that it forwards route attributes it doesn't know about, this was an attribute that it DID know about and knows it shouldn't forward.

In fact it's a bit strange just how lenient Juniper's software was here. If a session is configured as IBGP on one end and EBGP on the other end, it should never get past the initial message. Juniper not only let it get past the connection establishment but forwarded obviously wrong routes.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-27 14:29:55+00:00
> I don't really think AI was ever meant to make us do "better" work

I understand what you're saying, but I hear all the time from AI boosters about how when AGI comes that it will let us do things like discover brand new theories, cure diseases, etc. (singularity, blah blah blah).

Even from the less hyperbolic types, I think a goal of real AI has always been "as smart or smarter than humans", despite what the current reality or limitations of LLMs are.
by vanviegen | 2025-05-27 14:30:13+00:00
It's just the most common example, as thanks to Microsoft it comes preinstalled on just about any computer. Given the typically short list of fonts to pick from, many people will (would?) pick Comic Sans when they want their text to look a bit 'different'.

However, I do agree that making fun of people picking the wrong font is a bit elitist. At least Comic Sans is easy to read, so one could do worse.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-05-27 14:30:34+00:00
Those protestors mostly went to government schools, and were likely radicalized because of their time in them. Being in school doesn't make the hate in your heart go away. It forces you to rub shoulders with the exact kind of people you believe are subhuman - and even gives more ammunition for them to use in their mind when arguments against racism are made to them.

There's a reason why conservatives are so obsessed with school choice, LGBT book bans, etc.
by noosphr | 2025-05-27 14:32:57+00:00
For general text you run some type of vector search against the full-text corpus to see what relevant hits there are and where. Then you feed the first round of results into a ranking/filtering system which does pair wise comparison between each chunk that you've had a good score from the vector search. Contract/expand until you've reach the limit of the context window for your model and run against the original query.

For source code, you are even luckier since there are a lot of deterministic tools which provide solid grounding, e.g., etags, and the languages themselves enforce a hierarchical tree-like structure on the source code, viz. block statements. The above means that ranking and chunking strategies are solved already - which is a huge pain for general text.

The vector search is then just an enrichment layer on top which brings in documentation and other soft grounding text that keeps the LLM from going berserk.

Of course, none of the commercial offerings come even close to letting you do this well. Even the dumb version of search needs to be a self-recursive agent which comes with a good set of vector embeddings and the ability to decide if it's searched enough before it starts answering your questions.

If you're interested drop a line on my profile email.
by krapp | 2025-05-27 14:33:17+00:00
Depends on what you consider "monetization." Are there ads? Not explicitly, but YC startups do advertise themselves in threads here, and aspiring entrepreneurs do use visibility on HN (both to users and YC) as part of their strategy. If you think this is just a forum of nerds engaging in organic conversation and intellectual diversion, you'd be mistaken. Your attention is currency here as much as anywhere.
by fallinghawks | 2025-05-27 14:33:23+00:00
The Cooper's hawk is known to falconers and rehabbers as fitting perfectly inside a (clean) Pringles can. ;)

I must correct you on hacking, though. This process starts with just-fledged raptors, already grown to full size, fully feathered, but raised in closed quarters. They are put in a shelter surrounded by plenty of space for flying where they can see the outdoors, and they are fed daily for a few days to acclimate. Then the shelter is opened and they're allowed to explore. Food continues to be provided daily. The day that one of the birds doesn't come back for its daily feeding indicates it has caught something on its own, and is ready to be recaptured and trained as a falconry bird.

This process allows the birds to learn flying and hunting as if they were wild raptors. It reduces certain negative behaviors you get in human-imprinted birds, and gives them "street smarts" i.e. recognizing and avoiding other predators. These days of course we put telemetry tags on them so they're easy to locate and recover.

As metaphor it would be training to deal with the wide wild world, which HN has a bit of too.
by orwin | 2025-05-27 14:33:58+00:00
I work in network security, specifically on the automation team. As we articulate more and more processes, products, monitoring together, new demand is created, and our scope grows (unlike our team right now).

Being able to automatically write unit tests with minor inputs on my part, creating mocks and sometimes (mostly on front end work or on basic interface) even generating code makes me more 'productive' (not a huge increase but we work with a lot of proprietary stuff), and I'm okay with it. I also use it as a rubber duck under advices from someone on HN and it was a great idea.
by java-man | 2025-05-27 14:34:29+00:00
"On 23 May 2025, President Trump signed four executive orders on nuclear power, intended to speed up approvals of and reduce regulatory burdens on new nuclear reactors in America. Buried in one of them was a requirement that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reconsider its use of ‘Linear No Threshold’"

I don't know a physicist named Donald Trump.
Show HN: Malai – securely share local TCP services (database/SSH) with others
by amitu | 2025-05-27 14:34:40+00:00
malai is a peer to peer network, and is a dead simple to share your local development HTTP server, without setting up tunnels, dealing with firewalls, or relying on cloud services.

In malai 0.2.5, we have added TCP support, which means you can expose any TCP service to others using malai, without opening the TCP service related port to Internet. With malai installed on both ends, any TCP service can be securely tunneled over it.

It can be used to secure your SSH service, or securely share your database server.

GitHub: https://github.com/kulfi-project/kulfi (star us!)

Would love feedback, questions, or ideas — thanks!

PS: We have also added `malai folder`, which lets you share (readonly) the content of a folder with others.
Show HN: Second Brain – AI Visual Board and Knowledge Base
by secondbrain_io | 2025-05-27 14:35:11+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Dom, a solo founder. I built Second Brain to solve a common issue I had with AI chats: the knowledge disappears. There’s no structure, no memory, and no way to reuse or build on them.

So I built a tool that combines AI chat with a visual, interconnected knowledge system.

Key features: - Save AI responses into editable docs (Notion-style Pages). - AI Visual board with multiple content & chat nodes (like Miro meets ChatGPT). - Add and chat with YouTubes, TikToks, Audio, PDFs, GitHub repos, Looms, websites, etc. - Organize using Projects and Smart Tags — then chat with full contexts. - Chrome extension for saving anything in 1 click. - Built on GPT-4.1, Claude Sonnet 4, Grok 3, and DeepSeek R1.

Privacy: user data is never stored on AI providers or used for training.

Would love your feedback or ideas. Demo: https://youtu.be/4prRwP2BjxM

Happy to answer any questions about the tech or why I built it!

— Dom
by pmx | 2025-05-27 14:35:44+00:00
I have a hard time accepting that this would fly in the UK. We have strong consumer protection laws in the Consumer Rights Act 2015 that I think this would run afoul of. Terms can't be unfair, and are deemed so if "contrary to the requirement of good faith, it causes a significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations under the contract to the detriment of the consumer." and a product must be fit for purpose for 6 years - if this ceased to be the case the consumer is entitled to a full refund or replacement.
by gbalduzzi | 2025-05-27 14:36:58+00:00
This looks very promising but I'm a bit cautious not to fall in an hype trap.

I was experimenting with something similar for a custom local-first app with multi device support.

Would it be possible to add optional E2E encryption to this? While reading the docs, by adding encryption to the event payload you would be almost there already, even though it would prevent log compaction on the server
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-05-27 14:37:16+00:00
You have the story of Flacco the owl who lasted 1 year in Manhattan after having spent his entire life in captivity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaco_(owl)

Even his death (due to a collision with a building) was likely less because of his ability to survive, since he managed to learn all the skills necessary, and more due to the fact that his primary food source, rats in and around the city, were laden with rat poison.

We have consistently and regularly underestimated non human animals cognitive abilities which is frankly strange if you understand evolution since it would be strange for only humans to have a certain evolutionary feature such as intelligence and every other species to not have it at all.
by rtkwe | 2025-05-27 14:37:32+00:00
> I've always found it weird that you need teaching certification to teach basic concepts to kindergartners but not to teach calculus to adults.

I think this is partially due to the age of the students, by the time you hit college the expectation is you can do a lot of the learning yourself outside of the classroom and will seek out additional assistance through office hours, self study, or tutors/classmates if you aren't able to understand from the lecture alone.

It's also down to cost cutting, instead of having entirely distinct teaching and research faculty universities require all professors to teach at least one class a semester. Usually though the large freshman and sophomore classes do get taught by quasi dedicated 'teaching' professors instead of a researcher ticking a box.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-27 14:38:31+00:00
I think this is a very cool project, but when I saw this statement, "Running Postgres at scale is hard. Eventually, one primary isn’t enough at which point you need to split it up.", I was reminded about this recent article about OpenAI, now one of the most visited apps/sites in the world, running on a single pg primary:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44071418

Quite from the article:

> At OpenAI, we utilize an unsharded architecture with one writer and multiple readers, demonstrating that PostgreSQL can scale gracefully under massive read loads.

Of course, if you have a lot of write volume this would be an unsuitable architecture, but just a reminder that pg can scale a lot more than many people think with just a single writer.
by ghaff | 2025-05-27 14:39:18+00:00
They’re mostly just paying money into a pension fund someplace. (Though maybe not enough.)

An individual can farm out investments to a target date fund at Fidelity or wherever.

The argument/issue isn’t really that it’s hard for individuals to make investments relative to pensions but that many don’t. So we need to not make it an option and do it for them.
by kragen | 2025-05-27 14:39:45+00:00
The home page says, "LumoSQL can swap back end key-value store engines in and out of SQLite. LMDB is the most famous (but not the only) example of an alternative key-value store, and LumoSQL can combine dozes of versions of LMDB and SQLite source code(...)" and also, "Encryption and corruption detection, optionally per-row".
by tayo42 | 2025-05-27 14:40:07+00:00
I just tried this with claude 4 and ascii art.

The out put was verbose, but it tried and then corrected me

> Actually, let me clarify something important: what you've described - "every point equidistant from the center" - is actually the definition of a circle, not a square!

here's the prompt

> use ascii art, can you make me an image of a square where every point is equidistant from the center?
Show HN: Created a POC of escape room game using Salesforce as the back end
by felineflock | 2025-05-27 14:40:13+00:00
I've created this POC of an "Escape Room" game in a Salesforce flow exposed via Lightning Out. It is not required to login to play.

Some things I've found out while creating and testing this POC:

1) There is a degree of difficulty in configuring the CSS for the flow to appear decently on mobile.

2) LightningModal component and the dialog HTML tag didn't work in Lightning Out. I had to reimplement a modal dialog using HTML/CSS.

3) Flow screen actions didn't work in Lightning Out either. I had to replace them with LWCs.

Except for one Apex action and the LWCs, the flow is quite simple. Play, escape the jungle and the game will show buttons with an explanation of the flow at the end.

Tips: There are buttons for navigation and - where applicable - buttons for actions. If you refresh the page or leave and reopen, the game restarts (progress is not saved). There are 2 ways to win: a good way and a bad way. The items you collect along the way may have to be used in places where you've been before.
by potato-peeler | 2025-05-27 14:41:45+00:00
> Since I am now a senior engineer myself, I’ve started reflecting on what kind of senior engineer I want to be.

Over time you will realise that senior engineers will be at the front of the firing squad for any mistakes your team make, or worse invite the ire from middle managers if you resist attempts from them to push unrealistic deadlines or features, all in the hope of protecting your team, and the market in general. (Like putting AI into everything)

It’s a thankless position.

Some engineers have the energy to adapt to this and learn how to handle this. We call this as “stakeholder management”

Some engineers get tired over this process and lash out, and will be labelled as “bitter”.

I think more than “Staying humble” in this industry, achieving financial and intellectual freedom to pursue anything, is more important. You do what you have to do, to get there.

That gives you the ability to view yourself as a consultant and look at your employer as a client, not as a bread provider.

If they align with your values, you stick around and work. If they don’t, then you don’t feel stuck. You just move on.
Show HN: Meteosource – Hyper-local weather API based on improved ML models
by Sikara | 2025-05-27 14:41:48+00:00
Hi HN,

I am excited to share the new version of my weather API with you. It offers even more accurate forecasts than before, thanks to updates to our proprietary ML model.

My weather forecast website initially started as a personal project. Later, it became more professional, and recently, we have evolved into an advanced weather API. Our goal from the beginning has been to offer affordable yet superior services.

To achieve high accuracy, we incorporated machine learning into our calculations. Our forecasts pull data from multiple sources and use proprietary numerical weather models. These models also learn from historical data to reduce bias. This applies to hyper-local forecasts as well, where each point is further refined based on surrounding data.

In addition, you will find advanced features like a minute-by-minute forecast for the next hour, updated every ten minutes.

I would be grateful for all your thoughts and any ideas!
by OskarS | 2025-05-27 14:41:51+00:00
I was just having a discussion with our customer support manager for an coming update to our software. He made this point, ”I really like it when buttons have names. Then I can tell the customers ’click the EXPORT button’ instead of ’click the little button that kinda looks like a square with an arrow pointing out of it’”.

It really is a very good point.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-27 14:42:07+00:00
> I understand what you're saying, but I hear all the time from AI boosters about how when AGI comes that it will let us do things like discover brand new theories, cure diseases, etc. (singularity, blah blah blah).

I get that. I do think there are three different levels we must distinguish between when considering this though:

1) What those who are selling AI want us to believe so we buy it

2) What those who are selling AI want

3) What AI actually will do based on its fundamental properties, and the emergent effects of mass human instinct operating on it

I was referring more to 3 and tangentially 2, not really to 1, which in my opinion is as relevant as a used car salesman telling you that that used Ford Fiesta in the corner is the most reliable thing you'll buy in the next ten years.

> I think a goal of real AI has always been "as smart or smarter than humans", despite what the current reality or limitations of LLMs are.

True, I think that's a goal of AI researchers, or at least AI computer scientists like the team who eventually build Deep Blue and similar folk. Though, the goal of the companies today are probably just "build it as good as it gets to get the money".
by floating-io | 2025-05-27 14:42:13+00:00
Do you think that "being competent at design" is the only requirement for designers?

I would say that it's more important to be competent in determining how design is going to be understood and used by users in their individual workflows. Few are more competent to judge that than the users themselves.

I'm pretty sure most folks have seen and experienced the negative impacts of designers changing things for the sake of change (or to justify their paychecks).
by SpaceL10n | 2025-05-27 14:42:50+00:00
I had the privilege of a meeting with one of the founders at NVDA. We were integrating it into to our computer kiosks and Michael Curran joined the call and helped guide us on how best to achieve our goal. It is obvious to me that the NVDA team cares deeply about equal access. Their goal is a noble one worthy of donations. We did not have the same experience swimming around the waters of Martha's Vineyard.