MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by afpx | 2025-06-19 13:14:19+00:00
Not true. That assumption reflects a dated and oversimplified narrative. Most Evangelicals under 50 give no special status to Israel. No scripture instructs modern Christians to give political Israel special treatment.

I'm an Evangelical, and like many others, I don’t prioritize foreign policy through the lens of Israeli politics. Our core mandate is global discipleship, not geopolitical allegiance.
by simiones | 2025-06-19 13:14:40+00:00
The first goals of Starship are putting a human on the Moon (this is what the US government is paying SpaceX for) and decreasing cost-to-orbit (primarily for SpaceX's own use with Starlink). Falcon 9 simply can't fly to the moon, it doesn't have the power. Also, both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are still too expensive for Starlink to make a good profit.

Mars is at best a long term goal for Starship, and far more likely to be just a nice story that Musk uses to motivate his engineers and investors.
by somenameforme | 2025-06-19 13:14:44+00:00
Funding as percent of GDP is a meaningless metric. You need to adjust for inflation, but funding as a percent of GDP was some weird argument made to try to explain why modern NASA has become relatively ineffectual, but it has no meaningful connection to reality.

The Apollo Program cost a total of $183 billion, inflation adjusted, over 12 years. That's about $15 billion a year. NASA's budget has been for the past 40 years has been $20-$30 billion a year. Even the 'burst funding' wasn't particularly extreme relative to what they now regularly receive. The highest their budget ever was was in 1966 in $57 billion (inflation adjusted) dollars.

To visualize the absurdity of this argument imagine somebody claiming that Uganda funding a space program for $5 billion is receiving some serious financial capital, because that happens to be 10% of their GDP. $5 billion is $5 billion, regardless of your GDP. Ok technically there's PPP calculations, but that doesn't apply to the discussion here.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-19 13:15:16+00:00
> People can still do math in their head (and on paper) despite the existence of calculators

Because in the past we recognized the value of teaching people that way first

I don't know about you but when I was growing up we were not allowed to use calculators in class or on tests for years until we started to need them for functions like trig and graphing
by shakna | 2025-06-19 13:15:40+00:00
Have you bothered to look, yet? It's been in use since 2012. Responding to specifics, when someone is acting out of bad faith, isn't generally a good idea. But fine.

> In 294 experiments on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we observed 116 unique fingerprint values, for a sample entropy of 5.73 bits. This is so even though the user population in our experiments exhibits little variation in browser and OS.

https://hovav.net/ucsd/dist/canvas.pdf

https://securehomes.esat.kuleuven.be/~gacar/persistent/the_w...

https://doi.org/10.14722%2Fndss.2022.24093

https://web.archive.org/web/20141228070123/http://webcookies...

https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#finge...
Tell HN: Why my game, DropZap World, is not available in the EU
by amichail | 2025-06-19 13:16:28+00:00
The EU has regulations that are unfriendly to indie game developers:

First, you must make your physical address public. Indie game developers can use a P.O. Box, but it’s still a hassle.

Second, you need a "safety representative" residing in the EU who ensures that your game meets safety standards.

Maybe gamers in the EU should urge their politicians to amend these rules and make them more indie‑game‑developer‑friendly.

P.S.

See: https://igda-gasig.org/what-and-why/demystifying-eaa-gpsr/
Show HN: I Built a Docker alternative for local dev on macOS, without containers
by Hayatoo | 2025-06-19 13:16:50+00:00
Hi HN,

For years, like many of you, I've relied on Docker for local development. It's powerful, but I always found myself wrestling with the same frustrations: endless YAML configuration, my MacBook's fan spinning up like a jet engine, and the notoriously slow file I/O performance on macOS.

It often felt like overkill. I just wanted to switch from PHP 8.1 to 8.3 for a quick test, or temporarily add a Redis service, without rebuilding images and fighting with docker-compose.yml. My focus was shifting from writing code to managing infrastructure.

That’s why we built ServBay. It's our take on a Docker alternative specifically for local web development on macOS, with a key difference: it's not a container-based solution. Instead, ServBay manages native, isolated services directly. This gives you the flexibility you want from Docker, but without the overhead of VMs or containers.

Here’s what it does:

One-Click Version Switching: Manage and run multiple versions of PHP, Python, Node.js, Java, Go, Ruby, Rust, and .NET side-by-side. Switching between, say, Python 3.9 and 3.12 for different projects is just a click. No more conflicting environments.

Integrated Services: It comes with pre-packaged services like MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Memcached that you can spin up instantly.

Blazing Fast & Lightweight: Because it runs native services, it's incredibly light on CPU and memory. It also completely bypasses the file I/O bottleneck that plagues Docker on macOS.

Zero-Config Dev URLs: Every site you create gets an automatic https://*.serv local domain with a valid SSL certificate. Easy Sharing: It has built-in tunneling tools (frp, Cloudflare, etc.) so you can generate a public URL to share your local work with clients or for mobile testing.

We designed this for developers who want to get back to coding, and also for QA engineers who need to quickly spin up different environments to test applications against various language or database versions.

It’s our attempt to solve the "using a sledgehammer to crack a nut" problem for local development. We get the isolation and flexibility, but in a simple, fast, and non-intrusive way. It's free to use, and we'd love to get feedback from the Hacker News community.

You can check it out here: https://www.servbay.com

I'll be around all day to answer any questions. Thanks!
by infecto | 2025-06-19 13:17:15+00:00
>You should consider how much it actually costs, not how much they charge. How do people fail to consider this?

Sure, nobody can predict the long-term economics with certainty but companies like OpenAI already have compelling business fundamentals today. This isn’t some scooter startup praying for margins to appear; it’s a platform with real, scaled revenue and enterprise traction.

But yeah, tell me more about how my $200/mo plan is bankrupting them.
by vitaflo | 2025-06-19 13:18:25+00:00
In my testing no, the MacBooks are fine. It’s the phones that are a problem. Easiest way to tell is get a camera app you can set the shutter speed to 10,000 fps and point it at a screen. If there are black lines across the screen there is a PWM issue. The thicker and darker the black lines the worse it is.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-06-19 13:18:29+00:00
Aren't the companies who say they're doing this actually selling these capabilities to others? So it's in their interest to pretend to be able to do more / better than what they actually can do. Especially when the clients have little capability to verify what actually happens. So no, their saying "we can do it" doesn't actually mean that they can.

As a user who doesn't have a horse in this race (I work for a "captive clients" company, so ads don't help much, nor do we sell any ads), what I notice is that ads I'm served are absolutely absurd. It's either Google Maps trying to sell me some hotel 50 meters from my home (I live alone, so I fail to see any reason why I'd go for that), or Instagram which somehow figured I'd be interested in buying bras for pregnant women (I'm a male, and I'm single).

More recently, Instagram tries to sell me Range Rovers. Where I live, there's a tax on "heavy vehicles", traffic is absolutely crazy, and we have usable public transit (which I use – while scrolling Instagram). Buying a big-ass car wouldn't help me in any conceivable way, and would be an all-round nuisance.

What leaves me flabbergasted, is that my only interactions with Instagram are around photography. I only follow photographers, who shoot landscapes and similar, I always leave the app when I'm presented with naked girls or other "reels'. So I could maybe, possibly, be convinced to buy some new camera or photo gear. Guess what I never see advertised on Instagram?
by whatamidoingyo | 2025-06-19 13:20:30+00:00
Haha, awesome. Working with tools is an essential skill, for sure.

Winter does slow down, especially in the north. I live in Florida now, though, so painting is done year-round. I don't paint anymore, but I do miss it.

> But reaching over your head with a brush or roller for 8-12 hours a day will eventually cause RSI.

Absolutely.
by MBCook | 2025-06-19 13:22:08+00:00
They are, but it’s an odd critique.

If we ignore the tone, they’re basically suggesting that it’s unfair for people without impairments (A) to boost posts from the visually impaired (B) complaining about issues, because the As don’t face the issues.

Which would reduce the number and visibility posts dramatically. Effectively silencing the B users to a large degree.

But I don’t that’s truly intended. This piece seems pretty clearly born out of frustration and emotion.
by caudena | 2025-06-19 13:22:15+00:00
First of all, at Caudena, we are not involved in crypto projects or investments ourselves. Our expertise lies in analyzing blockchains and providing deep technical insights into how various blockchains operate. We focus on tracking and understanding the flow of digital assets, often in support of government agencies investigating scams, fraud, and other illicit activities.

That said, we absolutely believe that blockchain and cryptocurrency will shape the future of the financial system. When you look beyond the noise of scam tokens, speculative NFTs, and high-profile scandals, there is significant and meaningful financial innovation happening. This extends beyond DeFi to include the tokenization of RWA, where major institutions like BlackRock and JPM Chase are actively exploring and implementing blockchain-based solutions. Numerous projects are driving real progress, and there’s a slow but steady movement toward a more decentralized and transparent financial ecosystem.
Ask HN: Would you use an AI tool to generate and deploy your back end?
by mayowaibitola | 2025-06-19 13:22:26+00:00
I’ve been working on a tool called BackendIM(https://backend.im), it takes a natural language prompt like “a leaderboard API with player login” and generates a full FastAPI backend, deploys it, sets up a test UI, handles logs, and lets you export everything to GitHub or ZIP.

The goal is to automate repetitive backend setup auth, CRUD, DB, env vars, deploy, so developers (especially frontend/mobile devs) can go from idea to live backend in minutes.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-19 13:23:00+00:00
Yeah, I'm really conflicted here

I don't think that we should not use tools to offload tedious work

However there must be tradeoffs, right?

Take physical fitness for an example. We built machines to automate a ton of physical labour for us. Many of us no longer work long hours in hard labour jobs. A single excavator driver can move more earth faster than a team of people with shovels could even hope to

How's our physical fitness as a society these days? Yes part of that problem is that we eat terrible foods, but still. The sedentary lifestyle plays its part in the obesity epidemic too

I think it's reasonable to speculate that "we no longer need to think much, just pilot the AI" will similarly decrease our mental capabilities
by falcor84 | 2025-06-19 13:23:54+00:00
> Biologists don't try to reason everything from first principles.

What do you mean? The biologists I've had the privilege of working with absolutely do try to. Obviously some work at a higher level of abstraction than others, but I've not met any who apply any magical thinking to the actual biological investigation. In particular (at least in my milieu), I have found that the typical biologist is more likely to consider quantum effects than the typical physicist. On the other hand (again, from my limited experience), biologists do tend to have some magical thinking about how statistics (and particularly hypothesis testing) works, but no one is perfect.
by busterarm | 2025-06-19 13:25:02+00:00
While maybe a bit of a stretch, writing on his Substack can be considered freelancing, especially if he earned money off it through ads/sponsorships. If this is the case it likely would have violated the freelancing restrictions on his F1 visa while he was a student anyway. That would also be a justification for CBP deportation in the future.

Journalism is free speech but it is also work. If you want journalistic protections, like to protect your sources, then you're doing work. If you're doing work in violation of your student visa, well...
by dhagz | 2025-06-19 13:25:42+00:00
Really, you don't need to know how to program to do Strudel. Like, yeah, it's a programming language - but it's not like you need to know the fundamentals of software engineering to write something with Strudel. You just start typing and keep what sounds good. There is no difference between figuring out the melody and harmony and all the other parts of the song - you just type and edit until it sounds good. You get immediate feedback since it's constantly looping and trivial to work in your changes.

Compare that to piano: sure, you can walk up to a piano and plunk out a melody easy enough - but once you start venturing towards harmony and song the skill required ramps up exponentially. Suddenly you need to have both hands doing independent things, know where to place your fingers so that you can comfortably play the notes for the current beat and future beats (there's a ton of technique here and it's not the most intuitive thing ever - entire books are written to drill it), the list goes on.
by xtracto | 2025-06-19 13:25:59+00:00
Right, just freaking stop going there. Americans have made it loud and clear (by voting with majority) that they don't like outsiders.

Stop going to the US. Is it pretty? There are way better places on earth. Is it fun? There are way funnier places ok earth. There's no reason to submit to all that degrading behavior.

Good riddance. Let the. Keep their decadent country to themselves until it crumbles.
by alganet | 2025-06-19 13:26:38+00:00
I think you're wrong, and copyright law is the unexpected ally of the people in this matter.

Big studios already got their death sentence. Smaller independent productions, even individuals, will get the larger slice of the pie eventually. This shift is already happening.

Pretend you're a small producer working on something for years. A YouTube series or something. Then an AI company ingests your content and outpaces you, reproducing your style (either directly or "serving it as electricity" to others, while making money off of it). That is a nightmare scenario for culture. Training data hungry AI should not be able to eat whatever they want.

We need this precedent to be set, it will be important. And big studios are going to die anyway, AI or not, no reason to fear monopoly. Let's use their sacrifice to estabilish good laws for the small fish.
by _fat_santa | 2025-06-19 13:27:35+00:00
I'm currently building a similar app for my company. Apps like this are built pretty much entirely around prompting. The basic path is:

User Enters Prompt > Combine with Internal Prompt > Feed to AI > Return Results.

That's pretty much it but realize the "internal prompt" will take you months of work and refinement. There are many many tiny edge cases around using AI like this. One problem for example is you can tell the AI to return you it's data in a standard JSON object that you app can use, but if you set the temperature to high then the output will stop conforming. So you start having to do "pass-offs" between conversations with different temperatures.

And this is just one of a litany of issues around using AI like this. And really this is no different than a "traditional" SaaS app that doesn't use AI, I have a side project and that project has a litany of issues that must also be fixed.

Bottom line is building something like this is not any easier than building a traditional SaaS, just different flavors of problems.
by shakna | 2025-06-19 13:28:49+00:00
Only if that was a singular system, however, it is not. [0]

For example... The nerve cells in your gut may speak to the brain, and interact with it in complex ways we are only just beginning to understand, but they are separate systems that both have control over the nervous system, and other systems. [1]

General Intelligence, the psychological theory, and General Modelling, whilst sharing words, share little else.

[0] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119673

[1] https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau9973
by surfingdino | 2025-06-19 13:29:01+00:00
Meanwhile https://dev.to/rishabdugar/crafting-structured-json-response... and https://www.boundaryml.com/blog/structured-output-from-llms

You are confusing API response payloads with Structured JSON that we expect to conform to the given Schema. It's carnage that requires defensive coding. Neither OpenAI nor Google are interested in fixing this, because some developers decide to retry until they get valid structured output which means they spend 3x-5x on the calls to the API.
by actsasbuffoon | 2025-06-19 13:29:19+00:00
Soon the AI companies will have different tiers of plan based on carbon output.

For $200 per month they’ll only use carbon-free power sources for your prompts. At $100 they’ll use nuclear, then $20 per month for coal, and then there will be a free tier where your prompts are powered by throwing baby seals into a furnace.
by larrled | 2025-06-19 13:29:29+00:00
Amazed to see such a take after what happened in LA. Obviously the median immigrant has strong feelings of loyalty to their mother soil as can be witnessed by the huge Mexican flags and the direct testimony of many individuals. Should we deport all those people who swear loyalty to “La Rasa”? If we want immigrants, and we should because we need them to lead us into the future, we need to be realistic about their loyalties. People are proud of their race/nationality, and immigrants often even moreso.
by pastage | 2025-06-19 13:30:22+00:00
I know freedom is a tricky subject in the US. This whole deal with freedom at the border seems like a sticky issue, why should we let border crossings be so unsafe? Is it because I am in a position of power and will probably never be bothered by border patrol?

If someone looks closely enough I am sure there is a reason to make me a criminal, at least at the border.
by rabbittail | 2025-06-19 13:32:42+00:00
Absolteuly, I made a WebSocket-based persistent memory system that stores conversation context in DynamoDB and automatically injects it into subsequent AI interactions. Instead of context switching, you get a consistent collaborative relationship where the AI maintains full project awareness across sessions. I use the websocket to so Claude Code makes seperate calls to the api so it will autonomously fill the DB with knowledge.
by jamessb | 2025-06-19 13:33:32+00:00
Looking at the page source shows that it is vanilla JS [1] with a few libraries:

* https://anseki.github.io/leader-line/

* https://barba.js.org/docs/getstarted/intro/

* https://swiperjs.com/

[1]: https://uclab.fh-potsdam.de/arete/assets/js/application.js
by nyrikki | 2025-06-19 13:34:01+00:00
'Reducibility' is a property if present that makes problems tractable or possibly practical.

What you are mentioning is called western reductionism by some.

In the western world it does map to Plato etc, but it is also a problem if you believe everything is reducible.

Under the assumption that all models are wrong, but some are useful, it helps you find useful models.

If you consider Laplacian determinism as a proxy for reductionism, Cantor diagonalization and the standard model of QM are counterexamples.

Russell's paradox is another lens into the limits of Plato, which the PEM assumption is based on.

Those common a priori assumptions have value, but are assumptions which may not hold for any particular problem.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-06-19 13:34:08+00:00
> like a burger chain advertising itself on the brutality of its factory farms

It’s rather more like the burger chain decrying the brutality as a reason for other burger chains to be heavily regulated (don’t worry about them; they’re the guys you can trust and/or they are practically already holding themselves to strict ethical standards) while talking about how delicious and juicy their meat patties are.

I agree about the general sentiment that the technology is dangerous, especially from a “oops, our agent stopped all of the power plants” angle. Just... the messaging from the big AI services is both that and marketing hype. It seems to get people to disregard real dangers as “marketing” and I think that’s because the actual marketing puts an outsized emphasis on the dangers. (Don’t hook your agent up to your power plant controls, please and thank you. But I somehow doubt that OpenAI and Anthropic will not be there, ready and willing, despite the dangers they are oh so aware of.)
by dcminter | 2025-06-19 13:34:25+00:00
I (no expert, hopefully one will be along in a minute) have heard that in Swedish the letters äöå all evolved from corresponding diphthongs - so ae oe and ao respectively. Because the pronounciation changed from what one would assume from the literal spelling it made sense to create new letters to keep things consistent. They are considered to be entirely different letters by the way - much as you wouldn't consider O and Q to be the same letter with an accent.

In Swedish dictionaries those letters are added to the end of the alphabet - it's surprisingly hard to internalise that and remember to look up Å words at the end of the dictionary and not the front...

Edit: tokai below says Å was AA originally not AO so I (unsurprisingly) stand corrected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44317851
by hombre_fatal | 2025-06-19 13:34:29+00:00
Right, but the problem is that with async communication, you don't need a synchronous ack handshake.

Instead you can pipeline both messages: `[hello][are you coming to lunch with us?]`, and that's more convenient and efficient for the receiver and sender.

The problem that TFA is referring to is that context switching is very expensive for the receiver, so without pipelining, the receiver pays a huge cost just to send back the ack and then again to finally reply to the payload once it is sent. The receiver is asking that you send all messages; it prefers to buffer them.
by 9rx | 2025-06-19 13:34:58+00:00
Unless you are doing something crazy like letting the fuzzer run on every change (cache that shit), the full test suite taking a long time suggests that either your isolation points are way too large or you are letting the LLM cross isolated boundaries and "full testing suite" here actually means "multiple full testing suites". The latter is an easy fix: Don't let it. Force it stay within a single isolation zone just like you'd expect of a human. The former is a lot harder to fix, but I suppose ending up there is a strong indicator that you can't trust the human picking the best LLM result in the first place and that maybe this whole thing isn't a good idea for the people in your organization.