MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by giraffe_lady | 2025-06-04 14:45:53+00:00
I agree with what I think is your overall point, that there are other solutions that adequately solve the problems BEAM does but in different ways.

I really strongly disagree with the idea that there's no modern use for BEAM because of these other solutions. It's not simply that we've convinced ourselves that "if it isn't solve the exact same way that BEAM does, then it must ipso facto not be as good as BEAM" though I understand how you could see it that way.

Frankly what it is is that BEAM has an exceptionally well chosen position among the possible tradeoffs of solving these problems, which you are otherwise on your own to figure out and which are in themselves some of the most difficult practical considerations of systems design.

So again it's not that only BEAM can possibly do it right, but it's that BEAM does do it right. Having seen so many other attempts to do it better fail, at tremendous expense, it's an easy choice for me for systems that are expected to encounter these problems.
by close04 | 2025-06-04 14:46:56+00:00
> they were speaking from the perspective of developed countries

But that's just creatively selecting the data that supports the point. You can do that with everything else. We solved a lot of things "in the lab" or "in mice".

Did you know that we conquered Alzheimer's? It's safe to say I mean in countries like Guinea-Bissau, Somalia or Chad with under 100 cases per 100k people.
by underlines | 2025-06-04 14:47:24+00:00
afaik, guessing anything not 00000 or 11111 at first step will lead to an optimum strategy of 3 steps. because you introduce possible "right digit at wrong place" as a third state.

guessing 00000 or 11111 removes that third state and leaves you with simple substitution of wrong cells, which leads to an optimal 2 step strategy.

but obviously the shortest strategy is just guessing it right on the first try :D lol
by robocop_legacy | 2025-06-04 14:47:45+00:00
From the article:

“Every cockatoo exhibited slight variations in its plan of attack. But the general strategy was the same: Each placed one or both of its feet on the fountain’s twist handle, then lowered its weight to twist the handle clockwise and prevent it from springing back up. As the parrots slurped water from the bubbling spout, their sharp beaks often left behind chew marks on the fountain’s rubber top.”
by KaoruAoiShiho | 2025-06-04 14:47:47+00:00
I might've conveyed myself poorly. Never said Dostoevsky wasn't great or not a relevant read! I was just reacting to the OP who seemed to say it's still the best ever. But we've improved everything, art, kites, the wheel. It's the same for literature, but you do have to get pretty deep into lit to see though.

The main criticism for I have for Dostoevsky is that he's overdramatic. Yes it's great fun fiction and a vast improvement over the simpler, more idealized writing of much of his era, but some of the angst of his characters is simply cultural. He has a lot of religious influence in his work (which don't appeal to me as an atheist) and their struggles for the human soul is a symptom of his time. A Buddhist might say, just calm the fuck down man. Most people don't react to horrible situations by "crashing out", but via coping and rationalization and making the best of their situation, that's how you get consistent improvement and accrue generational uplift.

Later writers like Virginia Woolf is able to better integrate a variety of responses to suffering, post modernists like Tao Lin even gets overly detached (everyone hates post modernists). But I think the best novel about the human condition ever written, which handles the drama, but realistically, is probably by Elena Ferrante in 2011. I'm not highlighting any underrated work here lol, it's widely acclaimed, including called the best book of the 21st century by the NYT.
by bee_rider | 2025-06-04 14:48:19+00:00
I sort of wonder if it is just a matter of multitasking imposing a cost, maybe one that you can afford in the cases where you are really good at the thing?

Like I’m pretty good at programming, bad at writing, and ok at following the plot of a TV show (that’s hardly a skill I’m proud of, haha). But, I can code fine with a TV on in the background (I will be decent at programming and forget the plot of the TV show/miss plot beats). Or I can slow my writing even further, to an absolute crawl, while simultaneously missing TV plot points. Multitasking!
by Uehreka | 2025-06-04 14:48:59+00:00
> We memed so damn hard.

I still don’t get this obsession that startup founders have with “memes”. Like I get it, everyone loves internet jokes, but when I hear CEOs use the verb form and talk about it like it’s a core strategic practice (this seems to be commonplace among founders who like Elon) it has a strong ring of “How do you do fellow kids?”
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-04 14:49:02+00:00
Unfortunately the evidence that vaping is as bad as smoking is mostly from faulty studies, p-hacked studies, or misinformation. Which will ultimately blow up in the face of those trying to push it. The same way "Weed will make you jump out a window" just made kids blanket distrust all "weed is bad" messaging.

I'm not arguing for or against vaping, just stating that the negative health effects from vaping appear to be rather minor. In it's pure form its just nicotine and propylene glycol. Nicotine is well studied and similar to caffeine in harm (outside the addiction) and PG is used in medical inhalers (along with almost everything else, seriously its used in food and cosmetics everywhere).
by throwaway173738 | 2025-06-04 14:49:08+00:00
One of the things I learned in Therapy is that other people’s emotions are their own. I can recognize them without living them myself and that’s okay. And I can be present for someone else by acknowledging how they feel without trying to change it. And it’s also okay to let other people know when you think they’re not seeing something that might change how they feel.
Show HN: Kleks – declarative documents with live preview (in Rust+WASM)
by sagering | 2025-06-04 14:49:38+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on Kleks, a developer-oriented tool for generating documents like invoices, reports, contracts etc. using a declarative, code-based approach.

What it is Kleks is a local-first app written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, running entirely in your browser. It combines:

A template-based system with a configuration language called Kel

Modular widgets, similar to how UI frameworks like Flutter work

Live preview that updates as you type

A focus on developer experience from document authoring to serving

Think of it like a toolkit for documents.

Try it out https://www.kleks.io (on desktop, mobile experience is not great)

No signup needed. It runs locally in your browser.

Tech Rust + WebAssembly

Custom configuration language (Kel)

Inspired by Flutter’s widget system

Documents built from reusable components

What’s next Dynamic document serving via REST/gRPC

New widgets (images, layout transforms)

Language server for Kel

More docs and examples

Feedback? I’d love to hear what you think—especially about the language design, DX, and real-world use cases you’d like to see. You can also reach me at kleksdev@gmail.com.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-06-04 14:49:39+00:00
Because these are the primatives that are in use when programming in any language, and there is a benefit to learning the primatives before learning higher level abstractions. For instance we teach arithmetic before calculus.

I see lots of people become pretty helpless when their framework isn’t working as expected or abstraction becomes leaky. Most people don’t really need to know assembly in order to get past this, but the general intuition of “there is something underneath the subtraction that I could understand” is very useful.
by gus_massa | 2025-06-04 14:49:41+00:00
It's a few months late but: Welcome! Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Prof of concepts can be posted if they are interesting, whatever interesting mean and whatever the hivemind thinks is interesting.

For something like this post, a site that works only in one city may be fine, but a waiting list no.

For personal projects you can take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html but similar criteria apply to other projects like blog posts. It's not necessary that they are 100% finished, but they usually get more traction when they are well written and interactive and it's clear it's not a stupid thing that the author did in 5 minutes. Warning: You may get unrequested feedback!

PS: Looking at your comment history, most of them are too short. It's generally better to write longer comments. It's not a hard rule, but it takes a few years to guess when a short comment is a good one.
by PaulMest | 2025-06-04 14:51:37+00:00
Sadly this is still the case. Cloud Run helped us get off the ground. But we've had two outages where Google Enhanced Support could give us no suggestion other than "increase the maximum instances" (not minimum instances). We were doing something like 13 requests/min on this instance at the time. The resource utilization looked just fine. But somehow we had a blip in any containers being available. It even dropped below our min containers. The fix was to manually redeploy the latest revision.

We're now investigating moving to Kubernetes where we will have more control over our destiny. Thankfully a couple people on the team have experience with this.

Something like this never happened with Fargate in the years my previous team had used that.
by horsawlarway | 2025-06-04 14:51:44+00:00
They have to want to understand any of those things first.

Be very careful that you're not going to just kill enthusiasm for programming as an activity entirely with this approach.

I see this happen a lot (I did a lot of robotics/programming mentoring), and then adults wonder why their kids don't like any of the stuff they like - and the reason is that the adult was really a dick about making them learn the things the adult liked, and ignored most of the fun aspects of the activity, or the wishes of the kid.
by esafak | 2025-06-04 14:52:05+00:00
I wouldn't bother; the time for this is past. It is not worth curating tags/ontologies. Let the computer do it for you, or don't: just search. Google was right.

The problem is acute in organizations, where the question of ontology ownership crops up. The last place I worked at had a dedicated engineer on the job. And marvel at the elaborate systems Wikipedia and StackOverflow have to manage their ontologies. It is best to avoid that stuff and improve search instead, which is likely why an ontology was sought in the first place.
by bediger4000 | 2025-06-04 14:52:12+00:00
There will be follow-on effects, too. Like "wellness" ending up on the same tier as "medicine". Without the research, who's to say? This will also compound the Qanon fascination with "medical freedom", where the patient gets to dictate to the doctor what to do (i.e. use ivermectin against COVID, or whatever other superstition rises to the top of the Qanon imagination cauldron).
Show HN: Mongo Analyser – A TUI for MongoDB with Integrated AI Assistant
by habedi0 | 2025-06-04 14:52:16+00:00
Hi everyone,

I’ve made an open-source TUI application in Python called Mongo Analyser that runs right in your terminal and helps you get a clear picture of what’s inside your MongoDB databases.

Mongo Analyser is a terminal app that connects to MongoDB instances (Atlas or local), scans collections to infer field types and nested document structures, shows collection stats (document counts, indexes, and storage size), and lets you view sample documents. Instead of running db.collection.find() commands, you can use a simple text UI and even chat with an AI model (currently provided by Ollama, OpenAI, or Google) for schema explanations, query suggestions, etc.

I believe if you’re a developer, data engineer, data analyst, or anyone dealing with messy, schema-less data stored in MongoDB, this tool can help you understand what your data actually looks like and how its structure could be improved.

Project's GitHub repository: https://github.com/habedi/mongo-analyser
by kstrauser | 2025-06-04 14:52:18+00:00
Absolutely! I have a document scanner that names inbound files with the (ISO, of course) date and title of the doc (as gleaned from OCR), but once a week I process its inbox to fix up name problems and move files to their forever home.

I use Hazel on my Mac to auto-rename bank statements etc like “$closing_date Visa statement.pdf” and move them to the right place automatically as soon as I save them to the ~/Downloads folder.

All my new files look exactly like you’re describing. I give my accountant a set of files like “2023-06-08 Goodwill donation receipt.pdf”

It’s slightly more effort to do this work up front, but pays off in spades when I need to actually retrieve something. Even without any fancy search software, just looking for files named like “2023receipt*” locates them.
by steveBK123 | 2025-06-04 14:53:05+00:00
OK for the pedants let me be more clear - "NYPD writes tickets to people drinking beers in the park but not to smokers, for reasons".

Anecdote lines up with actual data from GOOG: In a three-year period, the NYPD issued a total of 440 tickets for public smoking violations.

vs

In the period between January and March of this year, the NYPD wrote over 7,000 tickets for public drinking. This represents a significant increase compared to the same period in 2022, with roughly 5,000 more tickets issued.
by nine_k | 2025-06-04 14:53:06+00:00
Going anywhere the evil isn't involved is hard. I'd say that the human nature has the capacity for evil, as much as it has the capacity for good. Anywhere you go with the intent to do good, you have prospects of seeing evil, because you're going to work with humans, and especially their social structures.

Maybe one can get into e.g. pure mathematics. Proving a conjecture usually does not have a direct societal impact, so it's can't be evil. By the same token, it doesn't do anything obviously good.
by astuteficus | 2025-06-04 14:53:11+00:00
Tired of manually feeding your AI niche knowledge from expert Telegram communities? I've been working on a way to turn Telegram channels into an auto-updating knowledge base for AI assistants like NotebookLM. The idea is to get specific, deep answers by tapping into expert discussions without the constant manual effort of exporting and updating data.

This builds on the concept of using AI to structure and analyze information from Telegram channels, effectively "learning" from experts you follow. The goal is an AI that operates on specific, current, and deep knowledge rather than just generalized data. While one approach involves manual periodical exports, we aimed to automate this.

How it Works (MVP with Junction Bot): Our tool, Junction Bot, has been around since 2017 for Telegram automation (content aggregation, filtering, etc.) and is used by over 17,000 people monthly. We've extended it for this use case: - Collect from Telegram: Point Junction Bot at expert Telegram channels (public, or private if you connect your account). It can copy existing message history and then automatically fetch new messages. For this AI expert scenario, you'd typically focus on text content. - Auto-Sync to Google Docs: The bot automatically transfers the collected content into Google Docs. These documents act as a continuously updated knowledge base. If a document hits Google's size limit, a new one is created. - Feed to NotebookLM: Use these Google Docs as sources in NotebookLM. You're providing the LLM with a rich, specific, and current context. You can also add your own internal business documents as sources.

What You Get: An AI assistant that provides qualitatively different, deeper, and more current answers based on the curated expert content. This transforms the AI into a partner that helps extract insights and make decisions based on professionals you trust, automatically staying updated with their latest articles. We use it to do business analysis, feeding it also with internal company documentation.

Current Status & Call for Feedback: This is an MVP for this specific scenario, built within the broader Junction Bot product. It's experimental, and we're keen to hear if this approach is useful. Junction Bot is a paid tool (basic plan is €3/mo, full GDocs automation from €12/mo), with a free trial available. We're exploring this application actively. Please share your thoughts and experiences if you try it!
by jerf | 2025-06-04 14:53:17+00:00
The question is about stellar collisions.

If you reframe the question as "will the collision of the galaxies cause problems for some hypothetical civilizations who may be living there" the probability of that is simple, it's 1. The good news for such civilizations is that they'll have literally hundreds of thousands of years of warning to deal with them. Planets may have problems but if a civilization is based on space stations and other off-planet structures they'll hardly notice the problems since they'll be so slow to occur.
by catigula | 2025-06-04 14:53:23+00:00
Unfortunately there's no current or proposed medical treatment for the inevitability of death and degradation on that path, so the only real treatment is philosophical.

At least in Western society, if any of you have experienced this struggle with an older relative burning through resources to desperately cling to life you know that we seem to lack some fundamental ability to approach or handle this topic philosophically.

In no time I'll in the same boat. Secular society doesn't really have a great answer here.
by tharmas | 2025-06-04 14:53:35+00:00
Shouldn't the issue with porn be the people in those films are heavily exploited and most often abused and in some cases even worse. In particular women.

Why the absolute focus on demand side and none on the supply side?

I guess the issue is they just want to stop young people from seeing porn? That's it? That's all society is concerned about, regarding porn?
by 9rx | 2025-06-04 14:53:50+00:00
> and yet nowhere on that page is the Haskell-solution mentioned

What do you mean? Much of the discussion around errors from above link is clearly based on the ideas of Haskell/monads. Did you foolishly search for "monad" and call it a day without actually reading it in full to reach this conclusion?

In fact, I would even suggest that the general consensus found there is that a monadic-like solution is the way forward, but it remains unclear how to make that make sense in Go without changing just about everything else about the language to go along with it. Thus the standstill we're at now.
by 59nadir | 2025-06-04 14:53:54+00:00
> The best agents can, more or less, crank out working code after a few iterations, but it's brittle, and riddled with bad decisions.

You're right, I'm very likely overestimating the output even though I'm on the skeptical end of it.

> The places where the AI really shines are in boilerplate situations -- it's great for writing an initial test suite

I definitely do agree with this; and I would add that at that point you can really make do with tab-completion and not a full agent workflow. I used this successfully even back in 2021-2022 with Copilot.

> In my more cynical moments, I start to wonder if the people who are most eager to push these things are 0-3 years out of coding bootcamps

I think it's all in all a mix of a lot of factors: I think spending your time mostly on well-trodden ground will definitely give you a sense of GenAI being more useful than if you aren't, and I think most newer programmers spend most of their time on exactly that. They may also be given tasks even at work that are more boilerplatey in nature; they're definitely not making deep design decisions as a rule, or having anything to do with holistic architectural decisions.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-04 14:54:05+00:00
> I have tried to convince people that ASM is reasonable as a first stage teaching language.

Unless you're teaching people preparing for engineering hardware perhaps, I think ASM is absolutely the wrong language for this. The first reason is that programming is about problem solving, not fiddling with the details of some particular architecture, and ASM is pretty bad at clearly expressing solutions in the language of the problem domain. Instead of programming in the language of the domain, you're busy flipping bits which are an implementation detail. It is really a language for interfacing with and configuring hardware.

The more insidious result is that teaching ASM will make an idol out of hardware by reinforcing the notion that computer science or programming are about computing devices. It is not. The computing device is totally auxiliary wrt subject matter. It is utterly indispensable practically, yes, but it is not what programming is concerned with per se. It is good for an astronomer to be able to operate his telescope well, but he isn't studying telescopes. Telescope engineers do that.
by ed | 2025-06-04 14:54:29+00:00
Quicksilver[1], app switcher [2]… Sherlock[3].

Now that Apple knows what to build, they’ll build it.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_(software)

2. https://www.folklore.org/Switcher.html

3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Accusati...
by uludag | 2025-06-04 14:54:33+00:00
In the showcase video on their site I saw it generate an AI reply to friend group.

A.C.K.: Wanna get [drinks] before? Sky: Drinks at Trick Dog before dinner work for you guys?

That's kind of cool I guess. I can imagine it useful for those friend groups that sometimes get demanding or overwhelming.

I can also imagine it being really good at getting a high valuation and selling for millions/billions of dollars.
by techjamie | 2025-06-04 14:54:58+00:00
> I believe porn use by minors is going up.

In correlation, no doubt, with how many minors have cell phones that can be used anywhere, with a good expectation of privacy. It's not like how it was when I was a kid, where the average kid had access to maybe the family computer or, if they were lucky, a laptop.

> E.g., “decent, well-willing” people pay taxes but, “shady, probably unmonitored,” people don’t. Yet we don’t say, “there shouldn’t be taxes,” on this basis.

The better comparison would be with another vice. I don't particularly care about marijuana, but given the choice, is it better as a society to give people legal, certified, safe weed choices, or should it be relegated to street dealers that might cut their product with other stuff?
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-06-04 14:55:54+00:00
Yeah, I enable quicker forms of authentication if I know I am going to need to access my phone often (like when using maps, or the camera). Then I set it back when I notice it doesn't prompt for a password.

I think it is a good practice from a security perspective as well.

I am used to doing these things though. For example, I use NoScript in the browser with deny all as the default setting. To me, it is worth taking some extra steps to prevent unwanted alteration of my behavior.
by skydhash | 2025-06-04 14:56:35+00:00
The best way to go about that is to use a simulator for an old cpu like EdSim51[0]. Can do a lot of things with just a few lines of code.

> it's complexity in the sense of "I put the wrong bit in the wrong spot and everything is broken with very little guidance on why, and I don't have the mental model to even understand

That's the nice thing about assembly, it always works, but the result may not be as expected. But instead of having a whole lot of magic between what is happening and how you model it, it's easy to reason about the program. You don't have to deal with stack trace, types, garbage collection and null pointer exception. Execution and programming is the same mental model, linear unless you said so.

You can start with assembly and then switch to C or Python and tell them: For bigger project, assembly is tedious and this is what we invented instead.

[0]: https://edsim51.com/about-the-simulator/