MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quibono | 2025-05-21 12:36:47+00:00
You're right, I think merged a few things together when writing the comment. What I meant is that (if you ignore PrinceXML and focus on FOSS) you're down to 3 options: - wkhtmltopdf - weasyprint - (headless) chromium with puppeteer et al.

The first one I found to be unreliable, the second one is super slow and the third can be annoying to work with.
by diggan | 2025-05-21 12:36:53+00:00
> This field (SE - when I started out back in late 80s) was enjoyable. Now it has become toxic

I feel the same way today, but I got started around 2012 professionally. I wonder how much of this is just our fading optimism after seeing how shit really works behind the scenes, and how much the industry itself is responsible for it. I know we're not the only two people feeling this way either, but it seems all of us have different timescales from when it turned from "enjoyable" to "get me out of here".
by micromacrofoot | 2025-05-21 12:36:54+00:00
> Millions of software developers continue to benefit from improvements in productivity

You're absurdly naive if you think developers will see the most benefit. We will have fewer developers just as we have fewer farmers and factory workers. When labor is automated it becomes owned by fewer people, this is historically consistent for over a hundred years across every sector. Thousands of towns have collapsed under this sort of change and effects are felt for generations.

> Can you imagine how little pay you'd make trying to sling websites in assembly language at less than 1% of the pace of today

Productivity gains do not align with income gains, this is a complete strawman. Developers today may be 100x more productive, but they do not have a 100x higher income.

Ask yourself, where did that value go — and is that fair? We're creating the automation and someone else is taking the lions share of the benefit. We're being conned.
by germinalphrase | 2025-05-21 12:37:17+00:00
I do not think that labor sentiment has a strong impact on whether or not jobs are automated away. Go watch an old movie from the 40’s or 50’s that features a hotel. The number of small, niche jobs that existed are surprisingly numerous by modern standards: porters, elevator operators, switchboard attendants, and so on. Busy places employing a lot of people. This was undoubtably true across industries, and we have automated away almost all those jobs one way or another without much fanfare. Sure - someone might have complained in the moment, but it’s death by a thousand cuts.
by ckemere | 2025-05-21 12:37:28+00:00
The Met is a serious place. Apparently they developed a laser-based accelerated aging system so that they could measure (and subsequently monitor) how the finishes on these guitars change due to exposure. Also crazy environmental control in the context of millions of people visiting, with the goal of having the instruments preserved for posterity.

The curators are an unusual mix of artist, scientist and engineer. They all have PhDs, and apparently there’s a concept of tenure.
by phillipcarter | 2025-05-21 12:38:04+00:00
The city bus comparison is uneven, but if we consider peak travel times during the week, the density intuitively seems like it works out to less waste. City buses have their numbers and schedule dialed back when you're not in peak hours, and I suspect that it's peak hours where you see the bulk of waste from tires.

My city buses in peak travel hours have anywhere from 20 to 75 people on them. Even if we assume that every one of those folks would have carpooled (which rarely happens), we're looking at a lot of cars, and thus tires, on the road.
by Quarrel | 2025-05-21 12:39:34+00:00
AI can't, as I understand it, have copyright over anything they do.

Nor can it be an entity to sign anything.

I assume the "not-copyrightable" issue, doesn't in anyway interfere with the rights trying to be protected by the CLA, but IANAL ..

I assume they've explicitly told it not to sign things (perhaps, because they don't want a sniff of their bot agreeing to things on behalf of MSFT).
by jackemerson | 2025-05-21 12:39:45+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm an indie developer who was frustrated by YouTube's recent layout change that forces only 3 videos per row on the homepage. It felt like a step backward, especially for users with large or ultrawide screens.

So I built this tool to bring back a more compact and customizable layout. You can choose how many videos or Shorts appear in each row, hide community posts, and even remove Shorts entirely. It works on both Chrome and Firefox, and settings are stored locally in your browser. No login, no tracking, just a simple UI that lets you tweak YouTube to your liking.

Would love to hear your thoughts or suggestions on how to improve it. Thanks!
by adrian_b | 2025-05-21 12:40:08+00:00
The value of the American "IP" consists more in the might of the US government than in the actual value of that "IP".

A few years ago, Huawei was in a clear path of becoming the biggest producer of smartphones in the world, with smartphones that by now were based on their own IP, including CPUs and modems, even if Huawei had started 20 years ago by buying smartphone IP from companies like Siemens (which had been reckless enough to sell it). At that time, the latest Huawei designs were superior in performance to those of Qualcomm and superior in performance per dollar to those of Apple.

The result was that the US government has started a campaign of sabotage against Huawei, because they did not like the result of a "free market".

A couple of years later everything has repeated when there was the danger that Chinese manufacturers of flash memories will overcome Micron.

So the percentage that American "IP" takes in the products of other countries is only maintained by quasi-military actions of the US government, which treats any commercial rivals as enemies against which any sanctions are justified.
by ipsi | 2025-05-21 12:40:29+00:00
And yet that's not enough, even when someone very definitely knows better: https://www.troyhunt.com/a-sneaky-phish-just-grabbed-my-mail...

Turns out that under certain conditions, such as severe exhaustion, that "sus filter" just... doesn't turn on quickly enough. The aim of passkeys is to ensure that it _cannot_ happen, no matter how exhausted/stressed/etc someone is. I'm not familiar enough with passkeys to pass judgement on them, but I do think there's a real problem they're trying to solve.
by limandoc | 2025-05-21 12:40:39+00:00
I have my own reasons why I left Obsidian and now building LimanDoc[1]. The enormous learning curve and a constant OCD itch (that I like to scratch) made me realise I am not actually improving my knowledge system. A constant hoarding is also putting an emotional pressure.

I like the offline part, but for me Canvas was the best tool. I am also building a P2P synchronization feature for LimanDoc, and having offline LLM support is coming soon too

[1] https://limandoc.com/
Ask HN: How do you keep on top of all of the AI tools and new changes?
by limonkufu | 2025-05-21 12:41:46+00:00
I am feeling a lot of FOMO recently as I've found myself spending almost all my free time to read, learn and try on all these AI changes and watch 3-4 youtube videos to get quick updates.

It's not just the AI models anymore as well as. On top of that, there's a lot of AI agentic/agentless tools (VSCode extensions, VSCode forks, new IDEs), CLI tools, web pages (looking at you notebookLM) that all seems to be provide very similar but a bit different things that is supposedly to be best in their field.

This is not touching on the actual products people integrate AIs nicely into at all yet!

As a min/max oriented person, I feel terrible eventhough I have learned more and built prototypes more than I have done ever.

How are you all coping with this? What are some advices or workflows people are doing?
by ehnto | 2025-05-21 12:42:25+00:00
The financials are all inflated by perception of future impact. This includes the current subscriptions as businesses are attempting to use AI to some economic benefit, but it's not all going to work out to be useful.

It will take some time for whatever reality is to actually show truthfully in the financials. When VC money stops subsidising datacentre costs, and businesses have to weigh the full price against real value provided, that is when we will see the reality of the situation.

I am content to be wrong either way, but my personal prediction is if model competence slows down around now, businesses will not be replacing humans en-mass, and the value provided will be notable but not world changing like expected.
by IG_Semmelweiss | 2025-05-21 12:42:58+00:00
Your statement would be true without nuance.

Yes. The mass of US consumers do benefit from penny subsidies of certain foreign product.

However, for every penny of foreign subsidy benefitting US consumers buying finished iron or steel goods, a US metallurgist is losing a job somewhere.

On strictly numbers, we are better off with foreing-paid subsidies yes, but there are losers, and they take the brunt of the downside.

So id update your analogy by adding a twist: your childhood sitter living on anytown, USA was the virtual receptionist of the business. She had no RSUs in the business. She stayed in anytown and declined a career in a larger, growing city because she found virtual work and it made her happy. Now she's stuck with a mortgage, in a dying town, and with no career prospects locally. And all because you offered her a job that incentivized her to move, and then changed the relationship to her job 180 degrees .

Separately, ive only discussed the trade impact on consumers. We arent going into trade impacting producers, for example matters like producers having their inventions stolen, or their investment nationalized, to name a few examples.. -
by weebhek | 2025-05-21 12:43:21+00:00
Hey HN, I built this as a developer who was tired of wiring forms to endpoints and stitching together internal tools. OneShotCodeGen lets you describe the app you want (e.g. “an employee onboarding tracker with HR approvals”) and it generates the full stack: data models, UI config, logic, and live preview—all via an AI agent that runs a multi-step flow under the hood.

You can self-host it (everything’s open-source), customize the AI agent flows, or use the cloud version to try it instantly. Would love feedback from anyone building with Retool/Appsmith or thinking about AI-driven interfaces.

Happy to answer questions or help you set it up.
by arnsholt | 2025-05-21 12:43:52+00:00
I haven't used PBT much, but I did once get a lot of mileage out of it, which was when I was implementing a fairly gnarly edit-distance algorithm. In that case, I used PBT to check that the required properties of metric functions (d(x,x)=0, d(x,y)>0, d(x,y)=d(y,x), d(x,z) <= d(x,y)+d(y,z)) held for my implementation, which helped shake out a fair few stupid implementation mistakes.
by trashcan2137 | 2025-05-21 12:44:53+00:00
> In US, you can start a LLC, get a bank account, a tax ID, all within a few days. The process is completely online. Taxes? A single form for the whole year when you’re starting out. Hiring and laying off employees is relatively easy. How many European countries can claim the same?

In Poland, for example it's remarkably similar. I had an LLC, bank account and EU VAT ID without leaving my home.

Hiring gets a little bit more tricky because we like having accessible health care and don't like throwing people under the bus so you have a notice time of anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 months depending how long that particular person has been your employee.

Taxes? You pay once/month but even then you most likely have an accountant handling that for you.
by jermaustin1 | 2025-05-21 12:45:17+00:00
> Almost no one uses the special query syntax

Source? I'm in multiple current, active development projects with companies, they are all using the LINQ query syntax.

Not to mention all of the legacy code out there that is under active maintenance.

To say almost no one feels very much antithetical to my (albeit anecdotal) experience. I can't imagine, I'm the only c# consultant that has multiple clients that use LINQ queries extensively throughout their applications.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-05-21 12:45:59+00:00
To their point, there hasn’t been any huge breakthrough in this field since the “attention is all you need” paper. Not really any major improvements to model architecture, as far as I am aware. (Admittedly, this is a new field of study to me.) I believe one hope is to develop better methods for self-supervised learning; I am not sure of the progress there. Most practical improvements have been on the hardware and tooling side (GPUs and, e.g., pytorch).

Don’t get me wrong: the current models are already powerful and useful. However, there is still a lot of reason to remain skeptical of an imminent explosion in intelligence from these models.
by debesyla | 2025-05-21 12:46:11+00:00
Really unique footage! This would have looked primal to Romans 2000 years ago, and it's surprising this happened in 60's.

...And this battle do seem fun a bit, as funny as it sounds. :-) Gang up with the boys, throw some spears, get hit, die in tall grasses, looking into sky, wind cooling you... And no email/slack messages to worry about. :-)
by andrewchilds | 2025-05-21 12:46:39+00:00
The point was that we should have some kind of social contract that pushes back against the worst known addictive product choices, and to create public awareness about them. Mobile Safari has some limited functionality built-in like "Hide Distracting Items" and reader mode, but it's not enough. iOS has Accessibility > Motion > Auto-Play Video Previews, but that seems to only impact Messages.
by vessenes | 2025-05-21 12:46:47+00:00
I also feel unhappy when painters get formal art training which summarizes millions of human hours of work. Even worse they then go to Florence and waste their time stealing art by painting..exact copies of other people’s paintings!

I feel a real artist would make their own tools: brushes, paint, canvas, and above all be truly creative by not unfairly using anything that’s gone before. If they did they aren’t creative; they’re a thief.
by robsanna | 2025-05-21 12:46:52+00:00
Hey HN,

We built Koan to help spot real, actionable startup opportunities by scanning forums, reviews, and marketplaces. The idea is simple: instead of brainstorming in a vacuum, we find user pain that’s already out there — with links, context, and patterns.

Every signal in the app comes from actual user frustration: bad reviews, long Reddit threads, niche forums, etc. You can browse some reports for free. If you buy one, you get full exclusivity — we remove it from the feed.

This is still early. We’re looking for feedback on everything — positioning, features, the business model, whatever feels off or promising. Would love your thoughts.

Thanks — Rob from Koan
by adityaathalye | 2025-05-21 12:47:21+00:00
Clojure(Script) apps and systems exist at a bunch of household name places.

- Clojure: https://clojure.org/community/companies

- ClojureScript: https://clojurescript.org/community/companies

Also, a few case studies may interest you: https://clojure.org/community/success_stories and community stories: https://clojure.org/community/community_stories
by K0balt | 2025-05-21 12:47:30+00:00
I’ve been running a solar microgrid on my coffee farm for the last 7years. We started with a few golf cart batteries and 4 panels, these days we’re powering 4 houses, 7 cabins, water extraction, treatment, and RO processing, campus-wide fiber network and switches, path lighting, security systems, and a small server rack.

We’re running 6 inverters on our primary system in a three phase configuration, 35kw of panels and 160kwh of lithium iron batteries. About to add an additional 20kw of panels and a test bank of LiTo cells.

Our panels are a distributed set of rooftop mounted panels on various buildings, which also serves to shade the rooftops reducing cooling loads.

We still have to run a generator to supplement charging on dark overcast days, but it’s typically about 100 hours a year. Hooping to get that running on biomass eventually.

It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean.
by safety1st | 2025-05-21 12:47:47+00:00
I mean I guess this isn't very ambitious, but it's a meaningful time saver if I basically just write code in natural language, and then Copilot generates the real code based on that. I don't have to look up syntax details, or what some function somewhere was named, etc. It will perform very accurately this way. It probably makes me 20% more efficient. It doubles my efficiency in a language I'm unfamiliar with.

I can't fire half my dev org tomorrow with that approach, I can't really fire anyone, so I guess it would be a big letdown for a lot of execs. Meanwhile though we just keep incrementally shipping more stuff faster at higher quality so I'm happy...

This works because it treats the LLM like what it actually is: an exceptionally good if slightly random text transformer.
by jstimpfle | 2025-05-21 12:48:08+00:00
It's a general issue with typed languages. Types are either too fine-grained or too coarse. Some more sophisticated languages can infer a whole lot but static type checking is still confusing and slows down builds. I tend to not worry much about them anymore -- about C language level types (maybe a bit more) is helpful and important for performance, but beyond that (e.g. types get dynamically instanciated from templates by the compiler) returns are diminishing quickly for many tasks.

The biggest robustness gains often come from making the right architectural decisions. That also applies to error handling as you described.
by Hamuko | 2025-05-21 12:48:40+00:00
I would imagine it can't sign it, especially with the options given.

>I have sole ownership of intellectual property rights to my Submissions

I would assume that the AI cannot have IP ownership considering that an AI cannot have copyright in the US.

>I am making Submissions in the course of work for my employer (or my employer has intellectual property rights in my Submissions by contract or applicable law). I have permission from my employer to make Submissions and enter into this Agreement on behalf of my employer.

Surely an AI would not be classified as an employee and therefore would not have an employer. Has Microsoft drafted an employment contract with Copilot? And if we consider an AI agent to be an employee, is it protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act? Is it getting paid at least minimum wage?
by Frost1x | 2025-05-21 12:49:07+00:00
I suppose that depends on your relationship with your employer. If your goals are highly aligned (e.g. lots of equity based compensation, some degree of stability and security, interest in your role, healthy management practices that value their workforce, etc.) then I agree, it’s in your own self interest to push back because it can effect you directly.

Meanwhile a lot of folks have very unhealthy to non-existent relationships with their employers. There may be some mixture where they may be temporary hired/viewed as highly disposable or transient in nature having very little to gain from the success of the business, they may be compensated regardless of success/failure, they may have toxic management who treat them terribly (condescendingly, constantly critical, rarely positive, etc.). Bad and non-existent relationships lead to this sort of behavior. In general we’re moving towards “non-existent” relationships with employers broadly speaking for the labor force.

The counter argument is often floated here “well why work there” and the fact is money is necessary to survive, the number of positions available hiring at any given point is finite, and many almost by definition won’t ever be the top performers in their field to the point they truly choose their employers and career paths with full autonomy. So lots of people end up in lots of places that are toxic or highly misaligned with their interests as a survival mechanism. As such, watching the toxic places shoot themselves in the foot can be some level of justice people find where generally unpleasant people finally get to see consequences of their actions and take some responsibility.

People will prop others up from their own consequences so long as there’s something in it for them. As you peel that away, at some point there’s a level of poetic justice to watch the situation burn. This is why I’m not convinced having completely transactional relationships with employers is a good thing. Even having self interest and stability in mind, certain levels of toxicity in business management can fester. At some point no amount of money is worth dealing with that and some form of correction is needed there. The only mechanism is to typically assure poor decision making and action is actually held accountable.
by Yizahi | 2025-05-21 12:49:30+00:00
Interesting article, but I think it's not contradicting to the OP post. What is a "successful specialized high-quality mid size company"? It's formerly a successful startup, just aiming not to cover as wide audience as possible, but a narrow market. And not aiming to go public or sell out, but retain private ownership and vision of the founders. Think Ebay store vs Valve (Steam) store.

The problem is that to become a mittelstand, company must survive early growth phase, and the OP tweet correctly notices that such possibility is severely hampered both by EU and USA media. To continue my example - "we have Valve at home"(c) i.e. for example EU has CDPR with it's GoodOldGames (GoG) store. Yeah, it also went a bit wide in past years, but not because of lack of trying to be specialized. And they still retain that specialization mostly. But they are far far away from the Steam, and I now suspect the marketing playing a key part in it.

tl;dr - authors message "Germany should focus on developing the Digital-Mittelstand" is wrong. It is wrongly formulated. It's like saying "country should focus on developing successful companies". Yeah, no shit Sherlock, but before that every successful company must somehow be created and grow.

Or, alternatively, we can replace every Mittelstand word in the incentives part of the article and all of the sentences would be true:

STARTUP, however, can leverage remote work to further reduce costs. Employees could live in small towns, enjoy lower living expenses, and maintain a high quality of life thanks to Germany’s good transportation infrastructure. Remote work also translates into lower personnel costs, typically the largest expense for any startup. By tapping into these advantages, STARTUP could achieve both profitability and sustainability without compromising employee well-being.

If you’re already sold on the STARTUP concept, let’s explore the potential products they can create. There’s a wide range of possibilities: (a list of typical software industries)

Rather than pouring large grants into startups with the hope of generating returns for shareholders, the German government should consider introducing tailored incentives to foster the development of STARTUP.

Salary Grants - (applicable to startups? of course)

Simplify Bureaucracy and Regulations - (same)

Expand VAT Exemptions - (same)

English Language Support - (same)

etc. etc.
by srean | 2025-05-21 12:50:43+00:00
The math is general and exact.

Max and Plus at the random variables space becomes product and convolution in their distribution function space.

Distr(X+Y) = DistrX ° DistrY Distr (X ^ Y) = DistrX * DistrY. Where '^' denotes Max and '°' denotes convolution.

Note *, +, ° and ^ being commutative and associative they can be chained. One can also use their distributive properties. This really the math of groups and rings.

However, one can and one does resort to approximations to compute the desired end results.

More specifically, people are often interested not in the distribution, but some statistics. For example, mean, standard deviation, some tail percentile etc. To compute those stats from the exact distributions, approximations can be employed.