MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by keepamovin | 2025-05-14 05:21:36+00:00
I think it's just a general term for things like satellites, space vehicles, ground-based radar or other grounded imaging, drones, etc without being specific as to whether it's optical, IR, radar, etc, and also disregarding its mounting and domain of operation. Sort of in the same sense that "spectroscopy" in science can refer to a wide variety of instrumentation! :)
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-05-14 05:21:46+00:00
China is the only modern country that has both the capability and the lack of bureaucracy to just do things like this. It's simultaneously amazing to see and a depressing reminder of how badly western societies are crippled by rules of their own making. It would take years to make a single new bus route in any city, I don't think I've ever even seen that happen.
by rzzzwilson | 2025-05-14 05:25:02+00:00
Must have:

* cross-platform: Windows, Linux, Apple, Android.

* handle great majority of HTML/CSS "features" handled by the mainstream browsers.

* easy to use bookmarks, allowing sub-folders within folders (see below).

* allow position within each bookmark folder to be remembered on next view.

* ability to seamlessy synchronize bookmarks between versions of the brower on different machines, preferably without having to create some sort of account to do so.

* an effective ad-blocker.

Should not:

* include calendars, email clients, etc.

* have hard-coded bookmark folders like "mobile". Populate the bookmarks with top-level folders like that if you must, but allow the user to delete them. I want to organize my bookmarks my way.

All of the above is just off-the-cuff points I remember. Given time I could probably dredge up a lot more suggestions. Like treating bookmark views almost as a web-page, so you could open a bookmark with either a click (replacing the current view) or as "view in new tab". Opening a bookmark with a click would show the new page and clicking on "back" goes back to the original bookmark view.
by devjab | 2025-05-14 05:26:18+00:00
I think you can have a lot of debate on the design decisions on Rust, but I don't think the need for these articles tell you a lot about the language itself. I'd argue that Python needs articles like this more so than Rust does, but for entirely different reasons. In two decades of more and more programmers who aren't coming from an engineering background, I've yet to see anyone who used a Python generator or slots. Data Classes are less rare, but mainly in the form of pydantics "version". Which doesn't exactly matter for a lot of Python code... This is a world where 4chan can serve 4 million concurrent users an apache server running a 10k line PHP file neither of which have been updated since 2015... so you can be fine doing inefficient and entirely in-memory Python code 95% (or more) of the time.

That doesn't mean you should though. Imagine how much energy is being wasted globally on bad Python code... The difference is of course that anyone can write it, and not everyone can write Rust. I'm not personally a big fan of Rust, I'd chose Zig any day of the week... but then I'd also choose C over C++, and I frankly do when I optimise Python code that falls in those last 5%. From that perspective... of someone who really has to understand how Python works under the hood and when to do what, I'd argue that Rust is a much easier langauge to learn with a lot less "design smell". I suppose Python isn't the greatest example as even those of us who love it know that it's a horrible language. But I think it has quite clearly become the language of "everyone" and even more so in the age of LLM. Since our AI friends will not write optimised Python unless you specifically tell them to use things like generators and where to use them, and since you (not you personally) won't because you've never heard about a generator before, then our AI overlords won't actually help.
Show HN: Made a process management tool to solve a painful issue in my company
by askewbee | 2025-05-14 05:26:55+00:00
When I started building WorkFlawless, I wasn’t trying to launch a product. I was simply trying to solve a problem that was slowing us down—every single day—in my current company.

My current company was trying to scale. And when you scale, a whole new set of problems comes at you. I realized most of them had to do with processes. Undocumented company processes were creating so much chaos and disruption. They lived in someone’s head, or worse, in outdated docs buried in random Drive folders. Onboarding was inconsistent. Everyone had their own slightly different way of doing things, which made it nearly impossible to maintain standards at scale. And when someone left? A big chunk of know-how often left with them.

I've seen it before, I've been working for 12+ years in companies in three different countries. Looking back, I realize this is a very common issue that often goes unnoticed.

So I built WorkFlawless. Not to check every feature box. Not to be another bloated “all-in-one” tool that aim to manage and do everything. But to be the tool I needed. A clean, focused platform that helps teams map, document, maintain their processes and smoothly onboard new personnel in one simple place, without a steep learning curve. Something anyone on the team could start using from day one.

As I was building it, I realized one of the main pain points of using such tools is the manual input of data you need to do when you map processes. I tried to solve it to the best of my means by adding some AI-driven process generation on top of the main features in the app.

Here's the link if you are interested in seeing the end product as the result of this story: https://workflawless.com

I'd be happy to hear some feedback and what you think about it - means a lot to me as I'm a solo dev which started this as a personal project.
by standardUser | 2025-05-14 05:27:34+00:00
I used to be a big defender of AirBnB due to the many amazing experiences I've had with them over the years. But since then I've had several experiences that matched the negative feedback I had been hearing from other people, especially with US-based rentals, and now I'm a skeptic at best.

The CEO knows exactly what the problem is because he spells it out in the article...

> Chesky explains that historically, people used Airbnb only once or twice a year, so its design had to be exceptionally simple.

It's true! I've probably averaged no more than 1-2 AirBnB stays per year for a lot of years. But the average host is probably handling 50+ guests per year. That means the host is the AirBnB customer, not me. I'm about as important to them as their cleaning service. The hosts and the execs are all just trying to make some money, and my dumb ass is in their way asking for extra towels and late checkout. Hotels are essentially just as hostile, except they are good at it. And since the cost savings have essentially disappeared I'm inclined to go with the pros and only look at AirBnB when the location or context give me some reason to choose the complicated option.
by sandspar | 2025-05-14 05:29:22+00:00
Psychologists call this the "psychological moment." You can tell a depressed friend 100 times that they should go for a walk and they'll ignore you. Then for some reason the 101st time it sinks in, they go for a walk and lo, they feel better. Psychological moment applies to all sorts of changes. Telling your abused friend that they should take the kids and leave, telling your aging dad that it's time he gives up his driver's license, asking your husband to stop interrupting you. 100 times they ignore it, 101st time it clicks. Everything is timing.
by stephen_g | 2025-05-14 05:29:51+00:00
Is it not clear that every single one of the example apps the spec cites are text-based UIs, as in curses-style, monospace text, and (yes) keyboard-driven?

My takeaway from that is that if you don't make an app that is (quote) "in the terminal (i.e. a TUI)" but choose to make a web app, then it should look at act like a TUI.
by sjurba | 2025-05-14 05:31:25+00:00
Shit. I had the semi hard problem at my last job and I just realized that the most efficient way I could solve it would be to write a blog post on how proud I was of my (shitty) solution and wait for the snarky commenters to tell me the proper way to do it..

I love this fact about the internet! Thanks guys! Keep it up! Including the snarkyness. It’s part of what makes it great!

(I am aware this is not a novel idea. Posting the wrong solution is better than asking for help.. It is just fun to see it in action)
by mattlondon | 2025-05-14 05:31:31+00:00
> Would you feel the same way about a disabled employee?

No because that is totally different. In the UK (all I have experience of) employers would be expected to make "reasonable adjustments" to avoid "significant disadvantage". But note that is not just bend over backwards, totally capitulate, and do whatever the hell the employee chooses.

E.g. if the office is already totally wheelchair-friendly and there is viable transport etc (which is basically the case for any office building built in the last 20+ years) then they might say that no further adjustments are needed as the employee would not be "significantly disadvantaged", so come on in to the office. It is a balancing act though and every request would be treated independently. Might suck I agree, but there you go. Good luck.
by strken | 2025-05-14 05:31:50+00:00
Don't take this the wrong way, but I deliberately ask how I did because it helps me weed out interviewers who think like this. Not so much "how did I do?" as "now we're close to the end of the interview, do you think we're a good fit for each other?" I give my own feedback and talk honestly about points of friction.

I interview pretty well, but if I go into an interview with a company that wants hungry hustlers and I've spent the whole interview talking about kindness and team spirit, or if you think I don't know enough pl/pgsql to deal with your gnarly legacy backend, or I'm getting the vibe that none of the engineers seem to like working here, then we need to speak honestly about that.
by aunty_helen | 2025-05-14 05:33:11+00:00
I’ve held one of the fuel tanks that came back down around the launch. It was impressively thick and for a kid, very heavy. I sometimes think how much that would’ve weighed if it was standard iron and not titanium.

It came down in a rural field in the south of New Zealand and the secretary of the primary school I went to was of the family that owned the field. It made a fun show and tell item.

At the time no one knew what it was, and titanium was a classified material so they had to wait for the government to show up and then eventually after correspondence with the yanks gave it the all clear.

People wondered if it was extraterrestrial and this wasn’t helped by finding two field mice huddled inside when it was recovered.
by chii | 2025-05-14 05:35:02+00:00
> someone just doesn’t like the sharp flavors which are left uncharred in light roasts?

that is always a possibility.

It why you want to have a pro brew up the best cup that is possible from those light roast beans, and test out the flavour.

If you're a self taught brewer, you might find that you've made mistakes, and also mistakenly took those mistakes as the flavour of the bean, thus incorrectly dislike it.
by brudgers | 2025-05-14 05:35:03+00:00
Reading the brief, the simplest thing that might work is:

1. Spin up an EC2.

2. Install Himalaya.

3. Do some configuration.

Code quality and a sound engineering approach are there.

Personal touches aren’t. Though they look for them, absent domain knowledge they probably don’t want to see them.

Himalaya has documentation and a Github already.

No need to invent the wheel.

Won’t take an unreasonable amount of time.

And looks like a first iteration of a tool.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-05-14 05:35:40+00:00
I don't think COVID is a good benchmark. The whole matter was relatively minor, claiming lives of 0.09% of earth population (by WHO estimates). We can surely survive "COVID for plants" with little damage but that's not at all the scenario I have in mind. I'll try to clarify on specific bullet points.

> I will risk a hypothesis that in "western" world we have enough canned and highly processed food (the one that lies on the shelf of your grocery store and has best before set 2-3 years ahead) to survive "covid but for crops" event.

The "western world" is definitely more prepared but if you want to rely on that during global and desperate famine you'll need to have the guts (and the heart) to machine gun hundreds of millions of refuges rushing into the western world to survive. Or nuke them before they depart.

> We waste massive amout of food on a daily basis. We have a huge variety of food available, and not everything has to be affected.

Absolutely all the food we have is based on the ability of plants to absorb sunlight. Exception would be an electric light greenhouse powered by the nuclear plant. Or by the coal/oil (that's some sunlight we can actually store). Take away the sunlight and the whole food variety goes down with it.

> And after the initial shock we got back to seamingly normal life.

Try to imagine a desperate famine: your kids have nothing to eat and will die in a matter of weeks unless you do something. There's no reason to believe the situation will improve. In such times killing your neighbor who has some food left keep your kids alive a bit longer is not an unusual decision. Someone has to die anyway, that is so.

Now imagine that at a global scale, famine is everywhere.
by xlii | 2025-05-14 05:35:46+00:00
It really depends at what you look.

You say snappy, but what is snappy? I right now have a toy project in progress in zig that uses users perception as a core concept.

Rarely one can react to 10ms jank. But when you get to bare metal development 10ms becomes 10 million of reasonably high level instructions that can be done. Now go to website, click. If you can sense a delay from JS this means that jank is approximately 100ms; does clicking that button, really should be 100 million instructions?

When you look close enough you will find that not only it’s 100 million instructions but your operating system along with processor made tens of thousands of tricks in the background to minimize the jank and yet you still can sense it.

Today even writing in non optimized, unpopular languages like Prolog is viable because hardware is mindblowing fast, and yet some things are slow, because we utilize that speed to decrease development costs.
by quantike | 2025-05-14 05:36:12+00:00
I spent a bit of time reading up on the internals and had a question about a small design choice (I am new to DB internals, specifically as they relate to vector DBs).

I notice that in your core vector type (`HVector`), you choose to store the vector data as a `Vec<f64>`. Given what I have seen from most embedding endpoints, they return `f32`s. Is there a particular reason for picking `f64` vs `f32` here? Is the additional precision a way to avoid headaches down the line or is it something I am missing context for?

Really cool project, gonna keep reading the code.
by dismalaf | 2025-05-14 05:37:07+00:00
The problem with your thesis is that software isn't a physical good, so quality isn't tangible. If software does the advertised thing, it's good software. That's it.

With physical items, quality prevents deterioration over time. Or at least slows it. Improves function. That sort of thing.

Software just works or doesn't work. So you want to make something that works and iterate as quickly as possible. And yes, cost to produce it matters so you can actually bring it to market.
Ask HN: Has Cursor's Michael Truell offered you refunds that weren't honored?
by hyounga | 2025-05-14 05:39:47+00:00
I recently canceled my Cursor subscription and received a personal email from Michael Truell, co-founder of the company. He offered a clear refund proposition in exchange for feedback. His email explicitly stated: > "If you'd like us to refund your account, please just reply to this email to let us know. We'd be happy to." Following his instructions, I replied with honest, thoughtful feedback about my experience and requested the refund as offered. The result? Complete silence. No acknowledgment, no refund, no follow-up whatsoever. I even sent a follow-up email several days later - still nothing. This wasn't some automated system or support ticket - this was a direct communication from the founder himself with a clear promise that was subsequently ignored. What concerns me isn't the money itself, but the dishonest tactics from a company that's trying to build trust in the developer community. Using refund offers as bait to extract valuable user feedback, then ghosting those same users once they've provided what you wanted, shows profound disrespect for your customers. For a company building AI tools that require trust, this behavior raises serious questions about their ethics and how they view their user base. Has anyone else received similar emails from Michael offering refunds in exchange for feedback, only to be ignored afterward? I'm curious if this is a pattern or an isolated incident.
by yorwba | 2025-05-14 05:39:59+00:00
What DeepSeek actually claimed:

"DeepSeek-V3 costs only 2.788M GPU hours for its full training. Assuming the rental price of the H800 GPU is $2 per GPU hour, our total training costs amount to only $5.576M. Note that the aforementioned costs include only the official training of DeepSeek-V3, excluding the costs associated with prior research and ablation experiments on architectures, algorithms, or data." https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19437

They don't even claim to have spent $5M (since they own their GPUs instead of renting them by the hour), it's a purely notional figure suitable for an academic paper. But when R1 got released and started generating hype, it was the only dollar figure anyone had to go on, so it got interpreted as more significant than it is.
by dusted | 2025-05-14 05:40:01+00:00
I'm also liking obsidian a lot, especially that the data lives on the filesystem and in markdown so it's not walled in by obsidian. I made my obsidian project folder a git repository and have a script that runs a few times a day to check for changes, if there are any, it creates a backup commit, and pushes the changes to a remote machine. What initially drew me to obsidian was the graph showing connection between documents, and while most are connected, it's not what made me stay.. What made me stay was the familiar-ish interface (reminds me of vscode, which reminds me of "ultra edit") and the way it does not impose too much structure on me.
by nwallin | 2025-05-14 05:40:31+00:00
The proliferation of Electron apps is one of the main things. Discord, Teams, Slack, all dogshit slow. Uses over a gigabyte of RAM, and uses it poorly. There's a noticeable pause any time you do user input; type a character, click a button, whatever it is, it always takes just barely too long.

All of Microsoft's suite is garbage. Outlook, Visual Studio, OneNote.

Edge isn't slow, (shockingly) but you know what is? Every webpage. The average web page has 200 dependencies it needs to load--frameworks, ads, libraries, spyware--and each of those dependencies has a 99% latency of 2 seconds, which means on average, at least two of those dependencies takes 2 seconds to load, and the page won't load until they do.

Steam is slow as balls. It's 2025 and it's a 32 bit application for some reason.

At my day job, our users complain that our desktop application is slow. It is slow. We talk about performance a lot and how it will be a priority and it's important. Every release, we get tons of new features, and the software gets slower.

My shit? My shit's fast. My own tiny little fiefdom in this giant rat warrens is fast. It could be faster, but it's pretty fast. It's not embarrassing. When I look at a flamegraph of our code when my code is running, I really have to dig in to find where my code is taking up time. It's fine. I'm--I don't feel bad. It's fine.

I love this industry. We are so smart. We are so capable of so many amazing things. But this industry annoys me. We so rarely do any of them. We're given a problem, and the solution is some god forsaken abomination of an electron app running javascript code on the desktop and pumping bytes into and out of a fucking DOM. The most innovative shit we can come up with is inventing a virtual dumbass and putting it into everything. The most value we create is division, hate, fear, and loathing on social media.

I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed.
by Wobbles42 | 2025-05-14 05:41:03+00:00
Content warnings make sense, and I do know what portions you are talking about, but they really are a fairly small part of only one of the books (IIRC the third one?).

I wouldn't describe the entire series as torture-porn just for that, personally, though I would agree that the work would be better if they were removed or at least toned way down.
by doright | 2025-05-14 05:41:04+00:00
I'm feeling similar. Shitty people who are supposed to be your caretakers permanently reduce the brain cycles needed for other things. The damage is a lifelong condition, like diabetes or cancer. Everything that's their fault in an unrelated timeframe becomes your fault when the causal link isn't obvious enough to outsiders. They just assume you should know better because you passed an arbitrary age. Interpersonal relationships suffer (I empathize with the lack of a professional network). It drives desperation and cynicism.

Responders are going to address the lack of job success. The advice is good and actionable. But sometimes no one "normal" (non-therapeutic/paid for) is there to listen to you and the urge to get things off one's chest becomes unbearable. Like the urge becomes so strong you just have to scream it to the world to get relief from anxiety. The negativity is the inevitable result, and it's understandable. It's catharsis and a need being fulfilled. I hope things turn out alright for him.
by Renaud | 2025-05-14 05:41:33+00:00
I find it strange that you relate borrowing and ownership to financial asset management.

From that angle, it indeed doesn’t seem to make sense.

I think, but might be completely wrong, that viewing these actions from their usual meaning is more helpful: you own a toy, it’s yours to do as tou please. You borrow a toy, it’s not yours, you can’t do whatever you want with it, so you can’t hold on to it if the owner doesn’t allow it, and you can’t modify it for the same reasons.
by chii | 2025-05-14 05:41:47+00:00
> lowbrow taste.

liking the "brown" chocolatey/caramelly flavour isn't lowbrow - you found a flavour you enjoy and it is valid.

The idea that only those people who enjoy the light floral type are "true" coffee enjoyers (and everything else low brow - including sugar laden lattes) needs to stop.
by widdershins | 2025-05-14 05:41:54+00:00
> It's fun to nerd out about memory allocators, but that's not contributing to overall improvements of software engineering as a craft which is still too much ad hoc hacking and hoping for the best.

I'm sorry, but it is. Understanding memory layout and (sometimes) using custom allocators can improve performance in ways that no compiler cannot do automatically. And when used correctly they contribute to code correctness too. This is the reason they are used in projects like Chromium.

Regarding your car analogy, you have to remember that developers here are not driving the car: they're building the car. Understanding the differences between and ICE engine and an electric motor are very salient to designing a good car.