MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dgimla20 | 2025-05-21 10:22:44+00:00
This is a good technique but I fear YouTube will always try to sway us away from our interests, and towards what they are soft-promoting.

I've always wanted a YouTube which is basically just a searchbar, with results and just the video, so I created a little private webpage with that. It doesn't have anything unless I searched for it. No autoplay, no trending or recommendations, and no comments. The YouTube API is free up to a certain amount of videos (which is very hard to reach for personal usage).
by ThatPlayer | 2025-05-21 10:22:44+00:00
Spinning steam turbine generators also can't just turn on/off instantly. They need to ramp up/down. If you can't ramp up fast enough to meet demand, you have issues. When solar drops off pretty fast, and people come home from work and start turning on appliances, you suddenly have a huge amount of power needed from generators.

Even has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

The solution of course is more batteries, but you can't really incentivize non-peak generation until you get the batteries. That's part of the NEM3 change that the blog mentions, to change the incentives from just solar to solar and battery.
by Skinney | 2025-05-21 10:22:55+00:00
If I’m deploying a new version of my app, the typical managed solution will spawn a new server instance with that new version, and once a health check has succeeded a couple of times it will reroute trafic to this new instance and kill the old one.

Previously this would be problematic, as the new instance might miss changes made by the old server. Is this fixed by these new changes?
by gloxkiqcza | 2025-05-21 10:22:56+00:00
> Providing problem details to an LLM until it produces something that looks correct

If you're using LLMs to code like this, you're using them incorrectly. You need to specify your intent precisely from the start which is a skill you learn. You can use other tools like OOP languages incorrectly with "working" results as well, that's why code quality, clean code and best practices are a thing.

I'm sure many junior developers use LLMs the way you described but maybe that's exactly what the universities and seniors need to teach them?
by peerplexity | 2025-05-21 10:23:26+00:00
"Fighting AI Cheating: My 'Trap Question' Experiment with Gemini & DeepSeek"

"The rise of LLMs like Gemini and DeepSeek has me, a statistics professor, sweating about exam cheating. So, I cooked up a 'trap question' strategy: craft questions using familiar statistical terms in a logically impossible way.

I used Gemini to generate these initial questions, then fed them to DeepSeek. The results? DeepSeek responded with a surprisingly plausible-sounding analysis, ultimately arriving at a conclusion that was utterly illogical despite its confident tone.

This gives me hope for catching AI-powered cheating today. But let's be real: LLMs will adapt. This isn't a silver bullet, but perhaps the first shot in an escalating battle.

Edited: Used Gemini to improve my grammar and style. Also, I am not going to reveal my search for the best method to desing a "trap question" since it would be used by LLM to recognize those questions. Perhaps those questions need some real deep thinking.
by jm666 | 2025-05-21 10:23:28+00:00
Thank You too; I understand, I'm a long time vi & ripgrep user and honestly do not like wysiwyg editors too much; most of my private notes are still rsynced plaintext.

For me, the valuable usecases for kraa are: small notes shared accross devices/people (desktop/phone, family todos), pw-protected gallery for family, and the possibility to turn a note into a BS-free nice blog post super easily. The BS-free aspect is important, but it also means we will be compromising on features (compared to notion/wp/..).

EDIT (adding):

Also, as for the desktop application storing files localy - we do not plan that now, it is too much of a stretch from colab web app :-) We will however probably support localStorage offline mode & p2p / encrypted documents, but that is still something else.

Kind regards!
by dgb23 | 2025-05-21 10:23:37+00:00
Frontend development is time consuming and difficult because it's often inherently stateful, there is typically a tension between aesthetic and functional dimensions and you're interfacing with people, who are unpredictable and varied.

From my perspective most UIs suck in the sense that they almost always can be better in some way or another.

Anything that helps speeding up feedback loops in this space will be extremely welcome. It will enable developers to push for higher quality and make room for innovation.
by croes | 2025-05-21 10:23:43+00:00
>What you are telling us is that the only way that you can think of to look this stuff up is by putting single words into a general-purpose WWW search engine.

Like most people do.

>Or command names that are common words like MORE, BREAK, DATE, CALL, IF, MODE, MOVE, PROMPT, SORT, TIME, COPY, and PATH for that matter.

Same problem

>Microsoft has published its own command reference for decades

And changes the URLs to that references multiple time. More than one old links lead to nowhere now

>including entire books on commands in Microsoft operating systems, for even longer.

Books with a hefty price tag
Alternative Payment Solution for "High-Risk" Merchants
by raachiid | 2025-05-21 10:23:57+00:00
Let's be honest about the payment processing landscape - many legitimate businesses get unfairly labeled as "high-risk" and struggle with payment processing.

I've been researching alternatives and found this interesting solution called Woopify (https://woopify.shop/) that connects WooCommerce stores with Shopify's payment infrastructure.

What makes this interesting is that it lets you:

- Keep your existing WooCommerce store and all your data

- Process payments through Shopify's robust payment system

- Access global payment methods that might not be available to you otherwise

- Maintain more control over your business data

From what I understand, this creates a separation between your store operations and payment processing. The plugin handles order synchronization behind the scenes, which seems like it could be useful for businesses that need more payment flexibility.

Has anyone tried this approach? Curious about experiences from store owners who've implemented this kind of setup.
by wiktor-k | 2025-05-21 10:24:13+00:00
> That section briefly described that, broadly speaking, using unwrap() is okay if it’s in test/example code or when panicking indicates a bug.

I've come to the conclusion that even in tests unwraps look ugly. Especially in doc tests which serve as examples the code is better off using regular "?" that one would see in other parts of code. (that is: don't treat test code as a "worse" kind of code)

In Signstar we're using testresult which still panics under the hood (which is OK for tests) https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/signstar/-/blob/main/... but the rendered example looks a lot better: https://docs.rs/nethsm/latest/nethsm/enum.OpenPgpVersion.htm...

Note that I'm currently maintaining that crate but the design is described at https://www.bluxte.net/musings/2023/01/08/improving_failure_...
by Filligree | 2025-05-21 10:25:08+00:00
Ask leading questions where the answer they’re leading towards is wrong. You’ll need more than one, and it won’t catch people who understand that failure mode—or who use Gemini instead of ChatGPT—but that probably describes less than five percent of your students.

You can also do everything else suggested here, but there’s no harm in teaching people to at least use AI well, if they’re going to use it.
Show HN: I made a free F1 app to predict race results and beat your friends
by PlatiScript | 2025-05-21 10:25:08+00:00
I built Bet Ur Race, a free F1 prediction app where you compete with friends by predicting Grand Prix. You earn points for both accuracy and bold picks—more risk, more reward.

Before each Grand Prix, users predict all 20 race positions and Q1/Q2/Q3 outcomes? The app features live rankings during races, private leagues, badges for rare picks and streaks, weekly trivia, and a reaction-time mini-game.

Built solo with Vue.js Ionic and Laravel, it has 45k users and is growing.

Would love feedback on the UX, game mechanics, or anything that could make it more fun or sticky.
by virgilp | 2025-05-21 10:25:47+00:00
Indeed the more advanced ones catch this particular one. I could trick phind with "Explain the IEEE 1588-2019 amendments 1588g and i impact on clock synchronization" (g exists, i does not but Phind hallucinates stuff about it). Perplexity catches it, though.

The recipe is the same, you just have to try several models if you want to get something that gets many engines to hallucinate. Of course nothing is _guaranteed_ to work.
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-21 10:26:04+00:00
Bruce Factor and Curtis Priem developed a flight simulator called Aviator for Sun's S-Bus GX graphics accelerator. I had one of them on my SS2, and owned a copy of Aviator on CDROM, and loved to play it.

It was one of the earliest Sun games distributed with a free playable demo that you could unlock by buying a license key. It would let you play for a minute or so and then the simulation would stop abruptly. That inspired me to do the same thing with SimCity for the Sun: you could play for a few minutes, then the simulator would switch to a cellular automata that would scramble your city, until you bought a license key to unlock it.

The GX was an 8-bit display, so it uses a 256 color palette, and drew shaded colors by halftone stippling. You can clearly see that in this video:

Aviator 1.5.1 running on SunOS 4.1.4 on a Sparcstation 20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RQscDJCy4c

Aviator had "aircraftcap" file in the format of (yech) a termcap file, that allowed you to configure your aircraft, and several fighter aircraft, small planes, and a 747 were included.

I heard a story about a fighter pilot who played Aviator, but he noticed something was wonky about how a plane he was familiar with flew. So he too a look at the aircraftcap file, and was able to find the problem, tweak it, and then it flew much more to his satisfaction!

You could dogfight over the network, and the sneaky thing to do was to hack your aircraftcap file to mount your guided missiles far behind you fighter jet, so when somebody was on your tail, you could shoot them in the ass!

Software in silicon: the methodology behind Sun's GX graphics accelerator architecture:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/63673

Sun GX Series Graphics Workstations:

https://old.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc01...

AVIATOR 1.5 FOR SUN NETWORKS OPENS UP GRAPHICS WORKSTATION GAMES MARKET (July 8 1991):

https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/aviator_15_for_sun_netwo...

SGI Users Group Forum: "Aviator" - a flight sim program for Sun GX - does anyone have this installed? Can anyone run it and get screenshots or video?

https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/aviator-a-flight-sim...

Vintage Computer Federation Forums: The "Aviator" flight sim for Sun GX hardware (e.g. SPARCstations)

https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/the-aviator-flight...

Reddit: A request to owners of Sun GX hardware such as SPARCstations: Can anyone post screenshots or footage from the late 80s/early 90s flight sim "Aviator"?

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/y9zfhs/a_...
by sudhar172 | 2025-05-21 10:27:00+00:00
That's a very reasonable concern. Trust has to be earned, especially with software that can take actions on your behalf.

We’re starting with clear boundaries — no hidden actions, full visibility into what the agent is doing, and confirmations for anything sensitive. A local-only mode is in development for users who want full control.

This kind of tool only works if people feel safe using it, so building that trust is a core part of what we’re focused on, not just a nice-to-have.
by rvnx | 2025-05-21 10:28:16+00:00
Absolute shit. Comparing it to Sonnet 3.7 is an insult.

# Is Eiffel Tower or a soccer ball bigger ?

> A soccer ball is bigger than the Eiffel Tower! Here's a breakdown:

> Eiffel Tower: Approximately 330 meters (1,083 feet) tall.

> Soccer Ball: A standard soccer ball has a circumference of about 68-70 cm (27-28 inches).

> While the Eiffel Tower is very tall, its base is relatively small compared to its height. A soccer ball, though much smaller in height, has a significant diameter, making it physically larger in terms of volume.
by hmry | 2025-05-21 10:28:38+00:00
In normal safe code, the compiler ensures your code has no UB. In an unsafe block, the programmer ensures the code has no UB.

Safe abstractions are created out of unsafe operations by making sure it's impossible to violate the operations' preconditions. Either by checking at runtime and returning an error or aborting the program if they're violated, or by using the type system and borrow checker to verify them at compile time (writing the code such that any program that could violate the preconditions must have a type error.)

If Rust didn't have unsafe, the only way to access the underlying unsafe operations would be dropping down to C/C++/Assembly, or hardcoding them in the compiler. This is what other languages do, and it's ergonomically worse because the barrier to adding a whole new language and build system to your project is quite high.
by srean | 2025-05-21 10:28:39+00:00
I don't know if anyone remembers expression templates of C++ nowadays. Once upon a time I had written a library of expression templates primitives to chain streams of computations and maps so that the sub-streams do not need to be fully realized in memory - essentially the old idea of Unix pipelines.

Writing it was a lot of fun. Debugging compiler errors were a lot less fun because the template language of C++ has no static typing, so errors would be triggered very deep in the expression tree. The expression tree got processed and inlined at compile time so there was no to minimal overhead at runtime.

I was very impressed with GCC's inlining and vectorization. Especially the messages that explained why it could not vectorize.
by oblio | 2025-05-21 10:28:42+00:00
> Only if the only things you purchase are exclusively domestic. Turns out, the vast majority of Chinese citizens with any means are interested in foreign products (like most people in the world).

Are they, though? China has its own huge software stacks, cloud providers, car manufacturers, etc? Is China really starving for anything not made in China, except for luxury goods? To which, I would point at Lexus (the archetypal example from Japan, a comparable country) and say that if you're a luxury good manufacturer in the Western world, I would not rest on my laurels, it's just a matter of time: either by development or acquisition, China will be making its own luxury goods and even exporting them, soon.
by xcanchal | 2025-05-21 10:29:01+00:00
Thanks! From my own personal experience, my 3YO daughter loves them and reading those to her as bedtime stories has been very much common lately!

I purchased other custom books created in more "traditional" ways, although I assume there has to be some degree of automation too, and the experience feels similar, she even resembles way more in these than in the traditional ones.
Ask HN: Selling software to company I work for as an employee
by apohak | 2025-05-21 10:29:36+00:00
I am based in the UK. I work as a software/automation engineer in department A. Recently, department B bought software from a big-name company which uses yaml files to steer/control automation framework (think IaC). I don't work for/with anyone in dep. B, but they showcased their new software to few different departments (including mine) - hence I learnt about that software. Now, during presentation, it came up that while controlling everything through YAML files is amazing (thanks to git versioning, webhooks etc.) it was brought up that manging 100s of files and lines of code will be difficult due to amount of places to change single value. When discussed, it was stated that there is no plans to create any frontend by that company to manage all those files and this seemed to upset a lot of stakeholders. The software has been purchased and it's going to be rolled out anyway.

I see this as an opportunity to step in and sell the idea of creating frontend for this tool, however I don't want to do anything for free. Since I don't work in this department directly, I don't know how I should approach this. Perhpas I should create MVP first and engage with some stakeholders and see if they are interested?
by robertlagrant | 2025-05-21 10:30:11+00:00
> Customer might be willing to pay 10k, but if there's two identical quotes, one for 10k and one for 9k they'll go for the 9k

But you see the point. There's a comfortable cushion where everyone can make more money off the taxpayer and have an easier time of it. Spend a bit of it on better marketing to elevate yourself and justify the higher price in people's minds.
by adrian_b | 2025-05-21 10:30:49+00:00
By 1995, PCI had vanquished VL-Bus and a cheap entry PC would have had a PCI bus and a 486 CPU at 66 MHz or 100 MHz with 8 MB of RAM, while a decent PC would have had a Pentium with 16 MB of RAM.

The days of 640 kB memory were long forgotten.

Even in 1990, a decent PC would have had a 386 CPU with 4 MB of RAM, which would have been used as extended memory by the MS-DOS programs, while the cheapest computers would have been PC/XT clones with a NEC V20 CPU and with 2 MB of expanded memory, so still well beyond the 640 kB.
by ForHackernews | 2025-05-21 10:31:38+00:00
(if only HN had eye-roll reacts)

Radio Free Europe was/is not a propaganda outlet any more than the BBC is a propaganda outlet (in fact, this is why Trump hates it). To an authoritarian, free press looks like propaganda.

Showcasing what makes your society great is propaganda only inasmuch as it casts the failures of other models into sharper relief. Liberal democracy is not a propaganda trick, it's just better.
by Joker_vD | 2025-05-21 10:31:57+00:00
> The productivity growth from such new technology would induce more consumption

Whose consumption? There is nothing impossible about a scenario in which there are about 2-3 millions of owners of fully automatic businesses and/or landlords who, with their total output combined, produce more than enough of anything needed for, or desired by, 2-3 million people. The only problem is that the rest of humanity would have to somehow disappear to not sullen this perfectly harmonious market economy of entrepreneurs (which is ironically quite similar to Adam Smith's naive descriptions of it in his own times), but we do have negative fertility rates, after all.

So there is absolutely a path where the well-to-do will just switch to trading with each other, with aggregate output shrinking to match the shrunk demand, and the rest of people could go and drop dead or whatever they want, as long as they don't trespass on the private property. After all, most of what those losers would have would be their ability to work but it just won't be priced competitively: the fair market price equals marginal costs (which for labour is the price of the subsistence minimum), and if robot maintenance is cheaper... yeah. To quote on of the designers of the shock reforms of 1992 in Russia, "what do you care for those people? So, 30 millions will go extinct. They failed to fit into the market".
by voidUpdate | 2025-05-21 10:32:27+00:00
While I don't fully understand rust (not that I've really attempted to program in it much), I do really like the Result<T, E> convention. Before I knew about it, I used a similar construct in a couple of places in my C# code, but I think I'll make my own version of it and try to use it more often. I don't think C# has a builtin version anyway, I know it has a builtin that does the same as Option<T> with its nullable types, like int?, which can either be an int or null
by oliwary | 2025-05-21 10:32:28+00:00
This demo video of Veo 3 on reddit, featuring a variety of characters talking in different scenarios and accents, is one of the most incredible AI demos I have ever seen: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1krmsns/wtf_ai_vid...

Created by Ari Kuschnir
by anal_reactor | 2025-05-21 10:34:35+00:00
I honestly believe that intelligence and self-awareness of average person is very limited. This is frustrating to observe from the point of view of someone who was promised golden age of human creativity and whatnot. But it is what it is. My take is, if you want the humanity to move forward, have kids and teach them to read scientific books instead of scrolling TikTok. Alternatively, exploit the human stupidity to put yourself in a comfortable social position, and then stop giving a fuck.
by WillDaSilva | 2025-05-21 10:34:45+00:00
Assuming the tax is high enough (or grows over time to become high enough) to offset the negative externalities, and that the money raised is used to offset negative externalities, they're better phrase not as "it's fine to burn up the world as long as you're rich", but rather as "it's fine to emit CO2 as long as you sufficiently offset the damage". Accounting for the damage could involve investments into green technologies, or paying ordinary people to make the tax popular, among other things.

Personally I like the idea of setting the price for emitting 1 ton of CO2 equivalent emissions to the realistic cost of capturing 1 ton of CO2. At least, that seems like a reasonable end goal for a carbon tax, since that could fully account for the negative externality. This would of course be obscenely expensive, which would be a strong incentive to lower carbon emissions where possible, and for people to consume less of products that require large emissions to make or use.

The carbon tax would also have to apply to imported goods to be effective, and tracking how much tax should apply to imports would be even more difficult than doing so for domestic sources of pollution.
by ralfd | 2025-05-21 10:35:44+00:00
> It is interesting that, despite being so awful, the Nazis let people write these last letters.

One should be more precise here.

France wasn’t occupied by the SS, but by the German Army, with many officers/Generals being from old aristocratic stock and its old ideals of knightly warrior ethos. For example in 1944 the military commander of France himself was part of the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler and coup angainst the NSDAP (for which he was of course executed).

It is not that the Wehrmacht or common soldiers didn’t do war crimes, and of course there was a command chain to Berlin and Hitler, but a German officer in Paris had a way different outlook on life (drinking good wine, having an affair with a Mademoiselle, going to the theatres, enjoying life at the Seine, waiting that the Americans come so the war can finally be over) than a Waffen-SS brutalist murdering his way through the eastern front.

Side note: The communists were totally confused by the Hitler-Stalin pact. Wiki:

> the French Communist Party had long denounced Nazism and Fascism, but after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact on August 23rd 1939, had to reverse direction. The editors of the Communist Party newspaper, L'Humanité, which had been closed down by the French government, asked the Germans for permission to resume publishing, and it was granted. The Party also asked that workers resume work in the armaments factories, which were now producing for the Germans.
by lesostep | 2025-05-21 10:36:24+00:00
Which makes it soo much worse, actually.

I often go through a few sentences or even entire paragraphs before stumbling onto something that doesn't make sense. And then I have to go back and reread everything.

Microsoft documentation is the worst offender. Their "some parts were translated automatically" notice is hard to, well, notice. And their translation is great! — until it doesn't work, because UI has different translation.