MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by twoquestions | 2025-06-04 13:31:53+00:00
Hardest possible concur with everything OP said.

Knitting and other fiber arts are the grandmother of computer programming, and I'd go so far as to say your CS education is incomplete without at least passing knowledge of fabric weaving and especially weaving machine history.

Ignorance is not your fault, unfortunately they can't teach you everything in college, and people tend to downplay the importance and history of "women's work", much to all our detriment.

https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stor...
by IggleSniggle | 2025-06-04 13:32:45+00:00
The customer's in-house developers raised their hackles and had reservations about using the product, even though the customer's in-house solutions were terrible, because the customer's in-house developers wanted to build it themselves. I'm not sure if the article wasn't well worded and you misunderstood, or if it's me who doesn't see the irony.
by riehwvfbk | 2025-06-04 13:32:56+00:00
Well, this is a very one-sided take. Imagine being a dev tasked with evaluating a product that makes you look redundant and also costs the company license fees in perpetuity. Whereas building a homegrown solution ensures that you keep your job, and get to look like a rockstar who saved the company money. Gee, I wonder which one the devs picked.
by jihadjihad | 2025-06-04 13:33:39+00:00
> But my admiration for Middlemarch and Bleak House goes beyond their portrayal of the psychological interiority of their characters. [...] Both novels succeed at something else: they invite us to think across multiple scales of experience—and to make causal and associative connections between those different layers.

To toss another into the ring, I can't think of any novel I've read that could rival The Brothers Karamazov in this regard. Possibly East of Eden, but as great as it is it plumbs nowhere near the moral and psychological depths of Dostoevsky.
by genocidicbunny | 2025-06-04 13:33:48+00:00
DiffX is a bit younger than the tooling I've written, but I have added custom diffing tools to the SVN client for one team I worked with. I've also written plenty of tools that used the information provided by a VCS (sometimes even poking around in the server-side data), but external to it. So given a few days to refresh my memory on the interfaces, I could probably whip something up for SVN pretty quickly.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-04 13:33:57+00:00
> Flow of control is obvious and traceable with explicit errors—they are not some “other” to be dealt with.

That's a different discussion entirely. And even so, whether any statement can terminate early should not be very relevant: that's why we have try-with-resources/finally/defer and other similar mechanisms.

> Exceptions in many languages are gotos, except you don’t know where you are going to and when you might goto.

No, they are not, in any language with exceptions except Common Lisp and Windows SEH. Exceptions in all common languages are early returns, they return to the calling function. Of course, if the calling function doesn't catch them, it will also return early to its calling function. Tracing where control flow will continue after an exception is thrown is exactly equivalent to tracing where control flow will continue after an error is returned in Go.

> Can this method fail? Who knows!

Java has checked exceptions to explicitly mark functions that can throw. While there were some problems with that, especially around the lack of generic exceptions support, this seems like the right way to go, and it mostly got a bad rep simply because of a different zeitgeist in programming at the time.

> What exceptions can be thrown by this? Impossible to say… better to simply `catch Exception` and be done with it.

This is exactly the same in Go, where every single function returns `error`, and there is very rarely any documentation to say what types of errors it might actually return; and virtually all Go code does "if err != nil", which is exactly the same as catch(Exception). Not to mention that most errors used in most Go code are fmt.Errorf, so they don't carry any type information to begin with.
by twic | 2025-06-04 13:34:06+00:00
> We were constantly faced with product leaders (VPs of Product, CPOs, PMs, etc.) who were very excited about adding Cord to their existing product. They saw the value unambiguously. And then we’d get to the dev team and face a stonewall of NIH syndrome alongside a clear preference for building it all themselves, even when that meant shipping a vastly less-useful product to their end users.

From the other side, this looks like "management signed up for some flashy product based on marketing, but it turned out to be useless". Not recognising that seems like a substantial blind spot.

It would be interesting to hear from anyone who evaluated Cord and decided not to use it. I wonder if the risk that the company might fold entered into the decision.

Still, excellent of them to have open-sourced it; it superficially looks like they've put a lot of effort into making it usable.
by aapoalas | 2025-06-04 13:34:09+00:00
Hi, thanks for the question. No particular reason: it might be the one we settle on eventually. For now, Wasm hasn't been in my focus and thus hasn't received any work. When it does become a focus, it might rather be brought in as macro assembler kind of thing, based on the assumption that effectively all Wasm bytecode has been emitted by an optimising compiler and thus trying to reoptimise it is not worth it.

Maybe Cranelift might offer that out of the box? If so, it'd be a great choice. If it doesn't, or if the only lever to pull is simply a runtime "how much optimisations should we do" one then Cranelift might not be such a great choice, since we'd want to avoid bringing in big and heavy dependencies that only use a particular subset at runtime.
by fullStackOasis | 2025-06-04 13:34:16+00:00
> On a whim I went 'whole food, plant based', which means no processed foods or animal products

Plant-based can include some animal products, though. That's the definition I'm familiar with.

Anyway, I'm curious to know how you get your food without packaging. Do you literally grow and can everything yourself?

When I buy salad, it comes pre-washed in a large plastic container. Even when I buy the far more expensive locally grown stuff in the summer, it comes in a plastic bag.

I can get berries in small cardboard boxes, but only during the short window when they're growing locally. Otherwise, if I want berries, my choices are to get them frozen in a plastic bag, or fresh and in a plastic container.

I do buy some foods in steel cans, like beans. If I bought dried beans, they'd come in a plastic bag. Our lentils are shipped in a box and wrapped in a sturdy plastic bag. Then we can get tomatoes in glass bottles.

There are a few things I get without any packaging: bananas, apples, potatoes, onions, broccoli. But those things are in the minority. They are mostly shipped from far away, in bulk in cardboard boxes, I believe. There's another small window when you can get them locally.
by cometapi | 2025-06-04 13:34:33+00:00
GPT-4.5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro represent two of the most advanced large language models (LLMs) available today, each showcasing distinct approaches to scaling AI capabilities. Launched by OpenAI and Google DeepMind respectively, they set new benchmarks for performance in reasoning, multimodal understanding, and real-world application. This article examines their origins, architectures, capabilities, and practical trade-offs, providing a comprehensive comparison between GPT-4.5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro.
by jmathai | 2025-06-04 13:34:39+00:00
I write this from the ER after my dad took an ambulance for chest pain (he is fine).

I imagined that the job of the EMTs were difficult. But I also felt the real tangible impact they had in ways that I haven’t in 25 years of being in tech.

No value judgement in profession. But boy can I relate. And so many others my age ~45 (some in tech, not all) that I talk to can as well.
by anaisbetts | 2025-06-04 13:34:57+00:00
This is a lesson that a ton of developers / engineers can learn, and it's hard to truly learn it via any other way but The Hard Way and I definitely sympathize with OP; making a great product isn't always the same as making a profitable product and a great business. Once you get to "selling something on the Internet", it gets a lot harder and the rubber hits the road, so to say. Thanks for the insightful write-up
Show HN: Which LLM Finds Obscure Knife-Brand URLs Cheapest? (8-Model Benchmark)
by p-s-v | 2025-06-04 13:34:59+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building *new.knife.day* (https://new.knife.day), a crowd-sourced database of every cutlery maker—from Al Mar to brands so small they barely show up on Google. That means I need an automated way to fetch each brand’s official website, even for fringe names like “Actilam” or “Aiorosu Knives”.

So I threw the task at eight web-enabled LLMs via OpenRouter:

• gpt-4o and gpt-4o-mini • claude-sonnet-4 • gemini-2.5-pro and gemini-2.0-flash • llama-3.1-70b • qwen-2.5-72b • perplexity sonar-deep-research

Prompt: Return *only* JSON { brand, official_url, confidence } Data set: 10 obscure knife brands Scoring: exact domain = correct; “no official site” (with reason) = correct Costs: OpenRouter prices on 31 May 2025 (Perplexity billed separately)

Highlights ----------

• Perplexity hit 10/10 but cost $9.42 (860 k tokens!). • GPT-4o-mini & Llama-3.1-70B got 9/10 for ~2 ¢ per correct URL. • Gemini Flash managed 7/10 for $0.001 total—great if you can QA the misses. • Half of Gemini 2.5 Pro’s replies were HTML tables my parser rejected.

Full table, code, and raw logs are in the post (and on GitHub).

Take-aways ----------

1. 90 % accuracy + quick human review often beats 100 % accuracy that costs 45× more. 2. Structured output is part of model quality—validate JSON on arrival. 3. Promo pricing moves fast; always ping the price API before large runs.

Next step: wire GPT-4o-mini into *new.knife.day* so visitors get verified manufacturer links. Crawling ~250 brands now costs under $5.

Curious what you’d improve, and which model you’d bet on for similar “find the canonical URL” tasks. AMA on the setup, prompts, or results!
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-04 13:35:28+00:00
I think Samsung stopped preinstalling Facebook's weird services a while back. Xiaomi still seems to be shipping Facebook last time I checked, though.

Even outside of Samsung a lot of "normal" apps come packed with Facebook crap because of Facebook's SDK (for the "log in with Facebook" button). There was that one incident where many/most iOS apps didn't open anymore because Meta fucked something up on their servers that crashed every app with the Facebook SDK inside of it (https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-sdk-ios-apps-spotify-ti...).
by kiitos | 2025-06-04 13:35:51+00:00
> I absolutely agree that the code yielding the error cannot know (again, with the exception of panic, but I believe that we agree that this is not part of the scope of our conversation). Which in turn means that every function should document what kind of errors it may return, so that the decision is always delegated to client code.

As long as the function returns an error at all, then "the decision [as to how to handle a failure] is always delegated to client [caller] code" -- by definition. The caller can always check if err != nil as a baseline boolean evaluation of whether or not the call failed, and act on that boolean condition. If err == nil, we're good; if err != nil, we failed.

What we're discussing here is how much more granularity beyond that baseline boolean condition should be expected from, and guaranteed by, APIs and their documentation. That's a subjective decision, and it's up to the API code/implementation to determine and offer as part of its API contract.

Concretely, callers definitely don't need "every function [to] document what kind of errors it may return" -- that level of detail is only necessary when it's, well, necessary.
by vharuck | 2025-06-04 13:36:00+00:00
Yup. A lot of people blame environmental hazards for perceived clusters of cancer patients in neighborhoods. But behaviors are much bigger contributors to cancer risk these days. The best ways by far to avoid cancer these days are (1) don't smoke, (2) maintain a healthy BMI, (3) don't drink, and (4) eat plenty of vegetables. If you want to further reduce your risk of dying of cancer, (5) get the recommended screenings, and (6) get regular physical checkups and talk to your doctor about any new health problems.

Reducing one's cancer risk is well within the power of any person. But "People should just have more willpower" is an ineffectual public policy.
by rishabh16 | 2025-06-04 13:36:06+00:00
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE | WORLDWIDE

Location: India

Remote: Yes, full-remote (5+ years)

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Product Management, Growth Marketing

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1920g_elqcSAYFKSHnS3-vkw4...

Email: rishunk16@gmail.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rishabh16/

Open to full-time, part-time & contract opportunities. Please reach out to rishabh@roasexpert.com
by mplanchard | 2025-06-04 13:36:14+00:00
So? The better these tools get, the easier they will be to get value out of. It seems not unwise to let them stabilize before investing the effort and getting the value out, especially if you’re working in one of the areas/languages where they’re still not as useful.

Learning how to use a tool once is easy, relearning how to use a tool every six months because of the rapid pace of change is a pain.
by rishabh16 | 2025-06-04 13:36:27+00:00
Location: India

Remote: Yes, full-remote (5+ years)

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Product Management, Growth Marketing

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1920g_elqcSAYFKSHnS3-vkw4...

Email: rishunk16@gmail.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rishabh16/

Open to full-time, part-time & contract opportunities. Please reach out to rishabh@roasexpert.com
by supplied_demand | 2025-06-04 13:37:01+00:00
==it's not most people's personal choices that determine if plastic ends up in the ocean- it's either incompetence or downright deliberately deceptive actions by someone else-==

It is your personal choice to consume goods packaged in plastic. If you, as a consumer, continue to eat pre-packaged peaches and apple slices rather than just eating apples and peaches, you are consciously adding to the known problem. Blaming "someone else" doesn't change the decision that you, as an autonomous individual, have made.

Your stance uses the same logic that people use to excuse their impact on climate change. People who are generating trash (specifically plastic trash) are at fault for worsening the problem of excessive plastic trash, full stop. The same way that burning coal worsens the climate problem. The justification that the problem is so big that individuals can't (or shouldn't) change their behaviors is a coping mechanism. It's borderline nihilistic.
by marklubi | 2025-06-04 13:37:07+00:00
In an app, if you have a string of network requests to your own services, there's no particular point in logging multiple (or any) 'no internet connection' errors. They won't make it to you, and having those doesn't provide much value. That's an end user problem.

I have plenty of monitors to ensure my services are available (four-nines uptime for almost a decade). Internet unavailable errors are useless to log.
by bearjaws | 2025-06-04 13:37:07+00:00
I recently started using claude code and added in mysql mcp[0]

It's been pretty amazing to watch it figure out schemas, perform queries to understand data, but its definitely limited. It struggles to figure out relationships that aren't direct via foreign keys (I know bad design, but its a 20 year old database).

Overall it's shifted my opinion on LLMs and agents, I am sure Anthropic is going to spend significant effort improving these MCP connections. Long term when you add in developer tab access, network info, etc... It's going to be incredibly powerful.

[0] https://github.com/benborla/mcp-server-mysql
by breckenedge | 2025-06-04 13:37:11+00:00
Yea, it shouldn't. However many PMs I've worked with over the last decade seem to think that development is the slowest part of the process -- that requirements need to be completely understood and designs completely buttoned up -- before major software work begins, because of this misconception that it's a slow and risky process. Now there's even less evidence to back up that misconception since GenAI can be writing the code in parallel to all the communication.
by Wilduck | 2025-06-04 13:37:47+00:00
The irony is that a valid reason for in-house developers to not want to use an external product is concern about the long term support availabilty for that external project. You could make a case that this product shutting down is proof the in-house developers were right not to trust it.

I don't think that's totally fair in this case, since it seems they open sourced their software. But also, in general, I think NIH syndrom gets a bad rap. Sometimes a "worse" solution you control really is more reasonable compared to a technically superior solution made by an external company.
by catlifeonmars | 2025-06-04 13:37:51+00:00
I don’t think that’s quite right. Disagreement for the sake of disagreement is not particularly meaningful. The basis for science is iteration on the scientific method. Which is to say: observe -> hypothesize -> falsify.

Anti science means to make claims that have no basis in that process or to categorically reject the body of work that was based on that process.
by dig1 | 2025-06-04 13:39:16+00:00
> I love Google Cloud Run and highly recommend it as the best option

I'd love to see the numbers for Cloud Run. It's nice for toy projects, but it's a money sink for anything serious, at least from my experience. On one project, we had a long-standing issue with G regarding autoscaling - scaling to zero sounds nice on paper, but they will not mention you the warmup phases where CR can spin up multiple containers for a single request and keep them for a while. And good luck hunting for unexplainedly running containers when there are no apparent cpu or network uses (G will happily charge you for this).

Additionally, startup is often abysmal with Java and Python projects (although it might perform better with Go/C++/Rust projects, but I don't have experience running those on CR).
by sarreph | 2025-06-04 13:39:20+00:00
I find that an uncharitable take to assume lack of usefulness.

It’s more likely literally what the author says - getting engineers onboard for something they themselves didn’t choose is difficult. I’ve been in the same position - lots of buy in from leadership / solving a real problem and providing real value. Then it takes months to implement due to having to corral a dev team who simply doesn’t care about your integration.
by spamizbad | 2025-06-04 13:40:33+00:00
That hasn't been the case in like 20 years. Engineering salaries are around 40K USD, although they can even stretch into the six figures for major companies with deep pockets wanting to attract elite talent. The band is pretty wide and is largely based on whether you work in a body shop consultancy (low end) or a major tech company like Google (high end).

And, like many things in this world, you'll find you'll pay for what you get.
by anasmidoul | 2025-06-04 13:41:03+00:00
We’re a small team building Llamalo, a voice AI agent that can both answer and make phone calls for ecommerce stores. Think of it as ChatGPT with a voice, trained to handle customer support, sales, order confirmations, reminders, and more.

The agent can speak naturally, understand customer intent, manage objections, and even sync with tools like Shopify or Make to fetch/store information in real time. It’s customizable for each business, so you can define the tone, knowledge base, and behavior.

We’ve been testing it with early users and now opening up the private beta. If you run an ecommerce store (or are just curious), we’d love your feedback.

Here’s a short demo: https://llamalo.ai/

Happy to answer any questions!
by close04 | 2025-06-04 13:41:11+00:00
> and have conquered yellow fever, consumption, diabetes, knee failure, glaucoma, smoking related lung cancer, prostate cancer, hookworm, environmental lead poisoning, environmental arsenic poisoning, black lung, breast cancer, and syphilis.

What's your definition of "conquered"? In the US breast cancer is the most common type of cancer, and together with lung cancers account for ~500k cases each year. 100k of those people will die within 5 years.

Now we created new issues to replace the old. Microplastic, PFAS, antibiotic resistance, obesity, etc.

And my knees want to have a word with your assessment :).
by codebytrial | 2025-06-04 13:41:15+00:00
Thanks, that’s a fair point.

To be more specific: I’m a senior full-stack developer with strong experience in React, React Native, Node.js, and TypeScript. I've also worked with Python for AI/ML integrations and backend scripting. My specialty lies in quickly understanding product needs, implementing robust UI/UX, and writing maintainable, production-ready code. I’ve shipped full apps from scratch and contributed to scaling production systems.

You’re right—domain-specific knowledge is crucial. My “one-day trial” offer is not about replacing deep context or long onboarding. It’s simply a fast way for someone to assess how I approach problems, how I write code, and how I communicate. It works best for teams who already have a clearly scoped, self-contained task in mind.
by andrepd | 2025-06-04 13:41:26+00:00
> Would probably have to be done in Russia or some other country that doesn't respect international copyright though.

Incredible, several years of major American AI companies showing that flaunting copyright only matters if it's college kids torrenting shows or enthusiasts archiving bootlegs on whatcd, but if it's big corpos doing it it's necessary for innovation.

Yet some people still believe "it would have to be done in evil Russia".
by jmathai | 2025-06-04 13:42:42+00:00
Lots of studies show that people who give to others (time, money, etc.) live better lives when measured by happiness, low stress, physical health. This requires you to believe what you do can matter.

Parenting is the ultimate exercise in giving.

There may be more than a comfy little pool to swim in :)

https://www.andrews.edu/services/development/annual/the-joy-...
by GENIXUS | 2025-06-04 13:42:44+00:00
The ref_core Gist URL shared above has been confirmed to work properly with GPT. The structure-based judgment circuit successfully triggers meaning-based responses, rather than relying on command-style prompts.

If you’ve tested it and received unexpected outputs, please feel free to share them. Semantic interpretation can vary depending on the circuit design and the surrounding prompt context.
by JohnFen | 2025-06-04 13:42:50+00:00
I read it that way because the essay doesn't actually contain any "carrot" -- it's not explaining why people should start using this tech or inspiring curiosity. It just takes a bit of a scolding tone and makes unflattering assumptions about why there are devs who aren't eager to jump onboard. That's the manipulative high-pressure sales tactic I mentioned: "jump on the bandwagon or be left behind" is one of the most basic of such tactics.

I'm not really intending to single out this essay for this, it's just another in an increasing stream of similar essays. I find it odd because I'm hard-pressed to think of another tech that devs had to be strong-armed into using. In my experience, when devs find value in a thing, they just start using it naturally.