MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jdiff | 2025-05-24 20:45:35+00:00
Git repos on software forges are structured, polite, easy to process, and are ubiquitous. You can provide additional information very easily with simple existing tools to enhance learning.

Like I said, the web's the wild west. It'd require sifting through a lot of noise and there's no guarantee you can reconstitute a sane codebase that you can learn something practical from. So yeah, they could do it, and if the net is indiscriminate it will probably be in there, but trying to target it is pretty pointless given the incredibly tiny returns.
by tpm | 2025-05-24 20:45:43+00:00
> VAT can be, and is, much higher than US state/local tax.

> And this means that EU car manufacturers do see a trade advantage in terms of selling to EU...

What is never mentioned in these discussions is that high VAT means higher prices as a whole and that has a chilling effect on consumer spending. German (and all other EU) manufacturers have a disadvantage of a smaller home market. This is then compounded by having other taxes on gas (+VAT too of course), which is much more expensive than in the US. So it's simply less affordable to have a car in the EU. And as a result, a high VAT and other taxes are not a competitive advantage for any local industry. This is different to tariffs or direct support, which are an advantage.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-24 20:46:29+00:00
I can say with a straight face that having rich, well-connected parents hugely raises your odds of success if you have some native talent, for obvious reasons - in music you can buy equipment, hire teachers, PR people, and stylists, spend money on recording, and get easy access to industry insiders.

You can experiment without worrying that you will starve or be homeless if you fail.

Some corners of the arts are full of people like this - some talent, more money, so they get to have "careers" with nothing tangible on the line except loss of face. The family fortune protects them from everything except wilful self-destruction.

The obvious corollary is that failing to have rich, well-connected parents hugely lowers your odds of success, even if you have equivalent talent. Some people still succeed, for all kinds of reasons. But the odds are forever not in your favour.

It's not a binary, it's a significant tilt of the playing field.
by niccl | 2025-05-24 20:46:45+00:00
There was a deep technical reason for it, too. I suspect I'm one of the very few living people that know what it was., so I'll share it with HN so the knowledge doesn't die :-)

A relatively early type of mechanical telephone exchange was the rotary exchange [0]. The pulses from the phone cause a clutch to connect the rotary driver in the exchange which then moved the switching stuff around (details can probably be inferred from the linked article). One of the issues with the rotary exchange is the pads of the clutch wear, leading to unreliable connections. Aotearoa/NZ had an existing number plan when they decided to install rotary exchanges. Some bright spark knew of the wear issue, and calculated that, given the existing number plan, if they had the 1 position on the dial giving 9 pulses (etc.) then the overall wear on the pads would be much lower and so the maintenance requirement would be less. And that's where it started.

And another fun fact. I believe Norway chose the same configuration for their rotary phones. I'm not sure if it was for the same reason, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_system
by everyone | 2025-05-24 20:47:30+00:00
I love scrabble and boggle, but to me there is tension between just playing for points according to a certain set of rules, and playing to form nice satisfying words.. eg. in scrabble you could use all sorts of bullshit scrabble words that are in SOWPODS like "za" and "qi", but imo its sort of undignified and cheesy to do so.
by c0redump | 2025-05-24 20:48:07+00:00
Surprised that I had to scroll this far down to find this comment. I didn’t know anything about the authors upbringing, but just from reading the speech, I had a strong feeling that it was something like this.

The reality is that the people who control the funding don’t want anything to do with the average slob. “Find your people” is a euphemism for “be rich and well connected, and hang out with other elites”
by bgwalter | 2025-05-24 20:49:37+00:00
"If the project is under an open source license, it means that everyone can share a copy – even on GitHub – of the licensed material under certain conditions."

This is disputable. GitHub demands so many additional rights from the uploader, in particular, using the code for AI training. This violates the attribution part of all OSS licenses, so only the original copyright holder can upload to GitHub and give GitHub these rights.
by swampus | 2025-05-24 20:50:24+00:00
Hi HN!

We’ve built *PlankDB*, an experimental key-value database that supports quantum-powered search via Grover's algorithm.

It combines: - Quantum search using IBM Qiskit (Grover's Algorithm) - Java 17 + Spring Boot + Clean Architecture - RESTful API with Swagger - Support for local (simulated) and IBM remote quantum execution

The quantum part isn't just a gimmick — it performs a *probabilistic search* over inserted keys using Grover’s quadratic speedup. We also support classical search for comparison.

The project is fully open-source and actively maintained: https://github.com/swampus/plank-db

Would love your feedback — ideas, bugs, or quantum jokes are all welcome!
by awinter-py | 2025-05-24 20:50:58+00:00
> What is the "Archive" icon even supposed to depict? The lower part of a printer, with a sheet of paper sticking out?

it's a bankers box (a cardboard box for files) which I guess is not a thing one sees often now? skeuomorphism doesn't work on a digital generation because all the real world touchpoints for information have been replaced by digital
by priorityfill | 2025-05-24 20:52:11+00:00
I feel the article is missing the point behind the advice. Reinventing the wheel so you can learn ? Absolutely ! But be objective about what you built, and don't necessarily force your crappy square wheel onto your dev team when better wheels exist ("better" is subjective, it could be in terms of documentation, simplicity, features etc.). This is just like abstractions, they exist so as to make complex systems more manageable, but are not a substitute for not understanding what's behind them (even though in practice, most people don't bother to go deeper).
by allthenopes25 | 2025-05-24 20:52:46+00:00
But you don't need access to ANPR for this, particularly.

You just ask the customer to tell you, perhaps with one of those driving monitoring apps/devices that people use to lower premiums. Pretty commonplace now.

FWIW, having worked on car insurance applications, most insurance companies do not much care about microtargeting consumers in this way. Beyond looking at their claims history and the kind of car they are driving, it is a large-scale numbers game, and the way you know which customers, for example, tend to go out more at night when it is dangerous is to look at their age (more likely very young) and gender (more likely male). And then you just make them all pay more. There's no particular reason to get any more forensic than that; it's more costly and it probably doesn't deliver much extra value.

And if young drivers complain, "hey, I am an excellent safe driver, I've done my advanced test, and I don't take risks", you say: "Great. Use one of our driving monitoring apps or devices, prove it and we'll happily give you lower premiums!"

I could tell you a couple of horror stories I am not going to repeat on the internet because they are old news now and times have changed, but I really must say, it's not necessary to imagine what government data could be used for in the hands of insurance companies: it's much more likely that insurance companies will simply incentivise customers to hand over the data. People who want lower premiums will jump through all sorts of hoops to get them.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-05-24 20:52:57+00:00
>In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.

Nonsense. I've known many writers who are wonderfully eloquent at transmitting their essential message well with text, but fumble their way through live discourse as if they were high-schoolers in their first classroom presentation.

Some people just communicate better by certain means, and with writing, there's a breathing space that some can't manage with speech, in which you can better organize your otherwise interesting ideas.
by Jugurtha | 2025-05-24 20:53:17+00:00
I usually write the README and documentation before writing the code. I then shop it around and ask people if it makes sense.

The initial version of the code is stubs that, if you follow the code examples given in the documentation, return hard-coded values.

I went to the extreme of giving the docs to non-developers who've never written a single line of code in their entire life, giving them an interpreter, and asking them to follow the docs without providing any help. If they could do it, developers wouldn't have a problem.

One must resist the temptation to help and should only observe how the users "misuse" the code. When they make a mistake, it's usually a good indicator of bad design, which is promptly corrected.

There's also a good tool called asciinema[1] that helps you record terminal sessions.

- [1]: https://asciinema.org
by zzo38computer | 2025-05-24 20:53:53+00:00
I also agree to avoid adding complexity through unnecessary dependencies.

> if a library is popular, it contains huge amounts of code that just isn't relevant to your use case.

It is true that many libraries do contain such code, whether or not they have dependencies. For example, SQLite does not have any dependencies but does have code that is not necessarily relevant to your use. However, some programs (including SQLite) have conditional compilation; that sometimes helps, but in many cases it is not suitable, since it is still the same program and conditional compilation does not change it into an entirely different one which is more suitable for your use.

Also, I find often that programs include some features that I do not want and exclude many others, and existing programs may be difficult to change to do it. So that might be another reason to write my own, too.
by martinald | 2025-05-24 20:54:41+00:00
I think this is the biggest alignment problem with LLMs in the short term imo. It is getting scarily good at this.

I recently found a pretty serious security vulnerability in an open source very niche server I sometimes use. This took virtually no effort using LLMs. I'm worried that there is a huge long tail of software out there which wasn't worth finding vulnerabilities in for nefarious means manually but if it was automated could lead to really serious problems.
by NickC25 | 2025-05-24 20:56:53+00:00
He could have been a fraud or not, but you might have been missing his point.

Perhaps his point was that he just genuinely liked to be a decent human being instead of rolling into work each day with an attitude of "I'm better than all of you peons, fuck you and your families, may (deity of your choice) condemn you all to death and perpetual hellfire"

I've been in a position where I shouldn't have been before. I too was kind to everyone. Whether or not I was good at my job or role has no effect on basic human decency, or holding the door, saying good morning, or not cutting someone off deliberately in the company parking lot.

There's two kinds of respect - earned, and given. People seem to not understand that, and see no reason why they shouldn't slam the door in the person behind them's face. You can be kind to everyone, it doesn't cost you anything. Give people props when they deserve it, but don't smash the homeless dude on the street's face when you walk by him - he's human too.

You should support those who do good work, and call out those who don't. But you don't have to be an asshole to them, either.
by awinter-py | 2025-05-24 20:56:55+00:00
engage rationally with build vs buy decisions

accept that there are compatibility boundaries such that it is sometimes quicker to create a new X than locate it on the market, or that X is too expensive and it's time to pursue vertical integration

but teams who can't do build vs buy properly are kind of doomed, sentenced to endless cycles of Not Invented Here syndrome which block other work.

if you're in a meeting and someone says 'we can't launch our website until we develop a platform-native way to host websites' you're in the wrong part of the curve
by perrygeo | 2025-05-24 20:57:37+00:00
Drawing a sample of Saturns from an infinite set of Saturns! It's completely absurd, but that's what you get when you take a mathematical tool for coin flips and apply it to larger scientific questions.

I wonder if the generality of the Bayesian approach is what's prevented its wide adoption? Having a prescribed algorithm ready to plug in data is mighty convenient! Frequentism lowered the barrier and let anyone run stats, but more isn't necessarily a good thing.
by zemvpferreira | 2025-05-24 20:58:12+00:00
Of course there is! Vernacular architecture has been doing this for millenia, all the way to caves.

Take a plain partition wall. If you build it architecturally, it’ll be optimized. Likely out of metal/timber and sheetrock, or bricks. It mainly is what it is and needs full replacement by craftspeople for modifications.

Now take the same wall made vernacularly. Possibly made out of clay and straw, or stones, or timber. Might be two feet wide in certain places. It can be carved, reused, expanded by the user at will.

Efficiency and robustness are a necessary tradeoff. If you live in a cave you can carve out new rooms given a spoon and free time. But most of us would prefer the comforts of modern buildings.
by infamia | 2025-05-24 20:58:27+00:00
> Pyright was released first and was and continues to be open source. Pylance was built on Pyright but has never been open source.

No, the first Python extension that shipped with vscode 1.0 in 2016 was called the "Microsoft Python Language Server" and was based on the Jedi LSP. Below is the deprecation announcement of the Jedi language server in the Pylance launch post below.

> In the short-term, you will still be able to use the Microsoft Python Language Server as your choice of language server when writing Python in Visual Studio Code. > Our long-term plan is to transition our Microsoft Python Language Server users over to Pylance and eventually deprecate and remove the old language server as a supported option. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/announcing-pylance-fas...

> But they are probably worried about Windsurf and Cursor, the latter of which (a billion-dollar company) was caught violating MS's TOS around the plugin ecosystem.

If that were so, I would certainly understand. However, MS started closing vscode and the extensions years before Windsurf and Cursor (initial release in 2023). This was their business model all along get adoption in partly by leveraging the open source community, and then close things off slowly once they have a choke hold (similar to Android/AOSP). I could scarcely agree more that Windserf and Cursor are supremely sketchy and generally scummy companies.

Consider MS launch announcement that focuses on open source, extensibility, open community, and a promise to be transparent with their intentions (i.e., vision) and roadmap...

> From the beginning, we’ve striven to be as open as possible in our roadmap and vision for VS Code, and in November, we took that a step further by open-sourcing VS Code and adding the ability for anyone to make it better through submitting issues and feedback, making pull requests, or creating extensions.

https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2016/04/14/vscode-1.0/#_...

Except they weren't open and did a u-turn on the community a few years later. MS started closing sources and locked things down a few years later despite touting the benefits of being open and open source in the announcement above. Now they have architected the Python extension so it only runs on vscode, and will not run at all on any fork, which is pretty shady after promising transparency and openness.
by Jun8 | 2025-05-24 20:58:30+00:00
Rather than asking for “inventors and donors” or the Government to do this (not that it shouldn’t do it) a few rich people can have tremendous effect with relatively little investment. How?

1. Get them early. Set up nationwide sifts to identify students with aptitude as early as middle school. Mix up the assortment by also adding students randomly selected.

2. Fill up summer. Fund summer schools where students from identified in (1) are gathered, room and board payed. Get world class academics to spend time with them. Think of Terence Tao teaching 30 promising students for a month!

3. Set up the path all the way up. Fund research centers where scientists can gather for critical mass after college.

4. Big shining prizes. Set up prizes for important problems, eg Millennium Problems with hefty prizes.

5. Compound interest learning. Fund development of innovative learning tools, dreamed by high-school and college students and built by the research centers. Then, sell these as kits very cheap, Eg, Geiger counters, personal interferometers, electrophoresis instruments for <$50

3 & 4 are expensive, 1, 2 & 5 are peanuts for guys like Altman, Musk, or Bezos, less than a yacht or a bunker. You also get the philanthropy points.

Which areas to focus on? Choose cheap ones at first: math is cheapest, physics. Biology may be costlier.

I have always wondered why rich people don’t do much of these and just donate to colleges (rather than tax evasion purposes). Some do fund such efforts: Stephen Wolfram has a summer school for high schoolers.
by bxparks | 2025-05-24 20:59:16+00:00
Invisible scrollbars is probably the number one reason why I scream at the computer when I have to use Chrome instead of Firefox. At some point, Chrome removed the option to make the scrollbars visible. The UX people are completely insane.

Case in point: I tried to install ChromeOS Flex on one of my laptops. After booting from the USB drive, the installer went through a series of screens. On the 3rd or 4th screen, it would hang and make no progress. I rebooted and re-installed. Same thing. Tried a third time. Same thing.

On the 4th try, I accidentally discovered that the dialog box had an invisible scrollbar. WTF. If I two-finger scrolled on the dialog box after moving the mouse pointer into it, it would reveal some additional text on the bottom which indicated that it was not hanging but doing some work.

After I had finished installing ChromeOS, I discovered ChromeOS has a Settings option to "always display scrollbar", but the Chrome browser completely ignores that flag. Awesome. I blew away ChromeOS Flex on my laptop.
by libraryatnight | 2025-05-24 21:00:03+00:00
It's sad to think as a high school student reading Wired articles about Google's wonder offices, Don't Be Evil,engineers getting time to work on projects and problems they wanted to work on, my geek friends and I really thought it was a case of the capitalists about to get a hacker/computer culture shake up - they'd penetrated the billionaire class and were going to be different.

A lot of reasons my present day jaded self would call out my younger self for being naive there, but it's still just embarrassing how wrong I was and how quickly the tech community fell in line with standard corporate awfulness. Nothing survives shareholders.
Show HN: DeepShot – NBA game predictor with 71% accuracy using ML and stats
by francescosacco | 2025-05-24 21:00:25+00:00
Hey everyone, I’m an NBA fan and Python dev, and I recently built DeepShot — a machine learning model that predicts NBA game outcomes with about 71% accuracy based on historical stats and rolling performance metrics (EWMA). It features: Real NBA data from Basketball Reference Exponentially Weighted Moving Averages to track momentum Interactive NiceGUI interface with team comparison and predictions Full Python stack and open-source (MIT license) Here’s the GitHub repo: https://github.com/saccofrancesco/deepshot And if you like it, here’s my Buy Me a Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/saccofrancesco Would love any feedback — especially from folks who’ve built sports models or worked on real-time stat tools. Also open to ideas on where to take this next (player-level modeling? betting advice dashboard?).

Thanks!
by esafak | 2025-05-24 21:01:27+00:00
> What is the "Archive" icon even supposed to depict?

A labeled archive box. https://kagi.com/images?q=archive+box

This raises the question of the universality of icons. They are contextual to territory and time. Until recently, a diskette was the universal icon for saving. Yet nobody under thirty today has probably ever seen one.
by simonw | 2025-05-24 21:02:10+00:00
There's a beautiful little snippet here that perfectly captures how most of my prompt development sessions go:

> I tried to strongly guide it to not report false positives, and to favour not reporting any bugs over reporting false positives. I have no idea if this helps, but I’d like it to help, so here we are. In fact my entire system prompt is speculative in that I haven’t ran a sufficient number of evaluations to determine if it helps or hinders, so consider it equivalent to me saying a prayer, rather than anything resembling science or engineering. Once I have ran those evaluations I’ll let you know.
by returningfory2 | 2025-05-24 21:02:25+00:00
I think there's a bunch of different things going on in the US healthcare system. I think for sure part of it is inefficiency.

But I don't really buy the argument that healthcare quality is the same elsewhere. Like, do you really think you're going to get the same care for, say, long term multiple sclerosis in the United States versus Guatemala? I feel a lot of the "the care is the same" comes from younger people who have had relatively easy interactions with the healthcare system. When you're over 70 it's a totally different ball game.
by firesteelrain | 2025-05-24 21:02:28+00:00
Ah yes, the justice system only works when it favors your guy. But sure, 12 random jurors in New York just happened to all get their talking points from MSNBC. Totally not how trials work. Let us know how the appeal goes - third time's the charm, right?

I mean Biden was totally with it his entire term and didn’t have cancer either right?
by tome | 2025-05-24 21:03:14+00:00
> I'm a bit confused at the distinction of "algebraic" vs "non-algebraic" effects. Think you can give a brief example of what you mean?

I don't fully understand what exactly "algebraic" effects are, but I think they're something like the entirety of effects that can safely be implemented with delimited continuations. Since Bluefin doesn't use delimited continuations (just the traditional standard GHC RTS effects: exceptions, state, IO, threads) it's not "algebraic".

> Also, I know you've taken a slightly different direction with Bluefin than other Haskell effects libraries (effects as values vs types). Is this related to the distinction above?

No, it's an orthogonal axis. Here's an experimental Bluefin-style API over delimited continuations (i.e. supports all algebraic effects): https://hackage.haskell.org/package/bluefin-algae
by yegg | 2025-05-24 21:04:21+00:00
If you're looking for justifications as to why, I posted the other day at https://gabrielweinberg.com/p/science-funding-was-already-wa... outlining eleven of them: longevity (living longer), defense (wars of the future), returns (pays for itself), prosperity (only real long-term driver of productivity growth), innovation (better everday products), resilience (insurance for future calamities), jobs (creates them now and better jobs in the future), frontier (sci-fi is cool), sovereignty (reduce single points of failure), environment (new tech needed for climate change and energy efficiency), and power (maintaining reserve currency, among other things).