MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sillyfluke | 2025-06-27 06:40:46+00:00
> There is a small group of companies that create the reputation on which everybody lives

>> Also called luck.

Startup skill is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. You also need luck. I doubt YC would claim otherwise.

Let's say each startup is a planet. Whoever gets hit with the most asteriods wins. Every conscious right decision and technical prowess that constitutes skill increases the size of the planet. The bigger the planet the more likely that more asteriods hit it. But space is a hig place, the largest planet is not guarenteed to have the most asteriod hits. A smaller planet could actually win. So it is with luck.

>YC investors cannot articulate what made them successful, or else they'd have better results.

Again, I doubt YC would contest this. But the power law so far has allowed them to be successful without having to guess correctly who in their pool would become the unicorn.

>You could flip a coin and beat YC

Where are you flipping this coin exactly? Are you flipping a coin in a pool containing all the startups in the world? If that's the case I'd like to see you take that bet. But if you flip a coin on Demo day, I'm sure you can beat some YC partners who additionally invest in a personal capacity.
by b0a04gl | 2025-06-27 06:41:01+00:00
these layouts break kerning rules. render engines expect horizontal flow, steady spacing. but with same sizer or echoed lines, glyph logic goes off path. spacing's no longer font native, it's forced by layout. font stops being just visual, becomes part of layout logic. whole engine ends up doing things it wasn't ment for. then layout will start mutates typography logic iteslf
by CiaranMcNulty | 2025-06-27 06:41:48+00:00
It's sad how the bloat of '00s enterprise XML made the tech seem outdated and drove everyone to 'cleaner' JSON, because things like XSLT and XPath were very mature and solved a lot of the problems we still struggle with in other formats.

I'm probably guilty of some of the bad practice: I have fond memories of (ab)using XSLT includes back in the day with PHP stream wrappers to have stuff like `<xsl:include href="mycorp://invoice/1234">`

This may be out-of-date bias but I'm still a little uneasy letting the browser do the locally, just because it used to be a minefield of incompatibility
by joha4270 | 2025-06-27 06:42:13+00:00
LOX halfway to orbit is significantly more expensive than the same LOX delivered to the launchpad.

Its not the cost, its the mass you're trying to reduce. So far, the engineering challenges have made it unfeasible, but its not a surprise that people look at the hundred tons of LOX on a rocket and imagine exchanging it for payload (or aircraft style re-usability).
by tannhaeuser | 2025-06-27 06:42:17+00:00
I had done a couple of nontrivial projects with XSLT at the time and the problem with it is its lack of good mnemonics, discoverability from source code, and other ergonomics coupled with the fact that it's only used rarely so you find yourself basically relearning after having not used it for a couple of weeks. Template specifity matching is a particularly bad idea under those circumstances.

XSLT technically would make sense the more you're using large amounts of boilerplate XML literals in your template because it's using XML itself as language syntax. But even though using XML as language meta-syntax, it has lots of microsyntax ie XPath, variables, parameters that you need to cram into XML attributes with the usual quoting restrictions and lack of syntax highlighting. There's really nothing in XSLT that couldn't be implemtented better using a general-purpose language with proper testing and library infrastructure such as Prolog/Datalog (in fact, DSSSL, XSLT's close predecessor for templating full SGML/HTML and not just the XML subset, was based on Scheme) or just, you know, vanilla JavaScript which was introduced for DOM manipulation.

Note maintainance of libxml2/libxslt is currently understaffed [1], and it's a miracle to me XSLT (version v1.0 from 1999) is shipping as a native implementation in browsers still unlike eg. PDF.js.

[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/913
by kergonath | 2025-06-27 06:44:18+00:00
> They did in contemporary depictions (Trajan's column) so this is only as much artistic license as real Roman artists would take, and for the same reason - it's more visually impressive.

The point is that Trajan’s column was propaganda. So this depiction is second-hand fiction (rehashing ancient propaganda with modern values).

The whole point of the series is that the scene is completely wrong from a historical point of view.

> Well, this wasn't typical, but you fight with the army you have

He makes the point that this was way outside the normal composition of a Roman army, not slightly off. And that as a result it would be terrible for Roman tactics and would have no hope to survive such a battle. Also, medieval siege engines in a pitch battle is just silly, there is no defending that.

I enjoyed the movie but I think that we can completely drop the assumption that it has any grounding in historical reality. It’s fiction, just slightly more realistic than Games of Thrones. Then we can appreciate the movie for the silly entertainment it is (and he does not dispute that).
by vessenes | 2025-06-27 06:44:31+00:00
Just read (most) of the ruling.

The ruling is fine. The judge is not Alsop but he’s not technically incompetent either, which is good.

The torrent comments in general are nothing to get het up about; in summary

1) Meta wanted to download but not upload libgen and Anna’s after they couldn’t find anyone with rights to license that would talk to them.

2) they didn't want to distribute; just download. An engineer put in evidence that they restricted seeding successfully.

3) late in the case Silverman et al claimed while they hadnt been seeding they had been leeching and that counts as distribution (?!)

Judge commented as follows

1. just downloading is probably fine because it could be for purposes of fair use, and fair use concerns generally trump even good faith and fair dealing

2. Nobody could get llama to spit out more than a 60 token quote from a plaintiff book; thus llama is not made for infringement

3. We will need more briefing on this leeching thing which it is alleged is a form of distribution.

The judge lays out what he thinks a workable claim to get to the supreme court would be, which is that these llms defeat the purpose of our copyright laws by reducing the amount of human creativity and expression available to those who want to create economic value through creativity. Eg where will the jobs for biographers go?

I will say that debate is an active topic worldwide right now and a good question, with answers ranging from: “this maximizes human creativity bro” to “laser printers disrupted lead type foundries, that was great” to “nobody will ever write again and we are murdering our creative class and burning down their craftsman mid century modern homes.”

It seems to me this will get taken up next session with SCOTUS but also that it’s a little early; we just don’t know where this is going exactly. Either way, I expect our current judge will learn that leeching is precisely NOT seeding once the defense legal team has time to brief him.
by Mawr | 2025-06-27 06:46:57+00:00
I'd say you already get like 70% of the benefit of a type system with just the basic "you can't pass an int where string is expected". Being able to define your own types based on the basic ones, like "type Email string", so it's no longer possible to pass a "string" where "Email" is expected gets you to 80%. Add Result and Optional types (or arguably just sum types if you prefer) and you're at 95%. Anything more and you're pushing into diminishing returns.
Show HN: MemX – Shared memory for LLM agents
by mmmehulll | 2025-06-27 06:47:32+00:00
Hey everyone — I built this and wanted to share as its free to use and might help some of you:

https://mem-x.vercel.app

GH: https://github.com/MehulG/memX

memX is a shared memory layer for LLM agents — kind of like Redis, but with real-time sync, pub/sub, schema validation, and access control.

Instead of having agents pass messages or follow a fixed pipeline, they just read and write to shared memory keys. It’s like a collaborative whiteboard where agents evolve context together.

Key features:

Real-time pub/sub

Per-key JSON schema validation

API key-based ACLs

Python SDK

Would love to hear how folks here are managing shared state or context across autonomous agents.
by jjav | 2025-06-27 06:48:08+00:00
> Signal is notably not proprietary.

See parallel response. Open source is not the same as an open interoperable standard.

> And email is de-facto owned by a small handful of service providers.

No, not really. Yes there are large providers who manage a lot of people, but it is not owned by anyone.

> Telling Joe Shmoe that he should run his own email infrastructure

That's not necessary either. Joe can get his email from any of thousands of providers ranging from large to tiny if he doesn't want to run it. Service can also be delegated in various ways depending on comfort and convenience. For instance, one mixed setup is to manage receiving by one provider (which could be oneself, to guarantee you can't get locked out) and delegating sending to a different provider (self or others).

It's also easy to delegate to a tech-savvy friend or family member. I run email for my own domains but also for most family members and a few consulting businesses in our circle.

This is the power of open standards codified in RFCs. It is what the Internet was meant to be. Walled gardens was never part of the plan.
by Incipient | 2025-06-27 06:48:19+00:00
>The judge is claiming that because the use is of the books are “so transformative,” the usage of these books to train an llm is fair use.

"you're doing something so critical to our (country's) success, that we're ok to waive copyright. I get that, if the US doesn't do it, then China will(is).

Interesting judgement, and it's implications, if you are correct haha.
by alexjplant | 2025-06-27 06:49:01+00:00
One of my first projects as a professional software engineer at the ripe age of 19 was customizing a pair of Google Search Appliances that my employer had bought. They'd shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to rack yellow-faced Dell servers running CentOS with some Google-y Python because they thought that being able to perform full-text searches of vast CIFS document stores would streamline their business development processes. Circa 2011 XHTML was all the rage and the GSA's modus operandi was to transform search results served from the backend in XML into XHTML via XSLT. I took the stock template and turned it into an unholy abomination that served something resembling the rest of the corporate intranet portal by way of assets and markup stolen from rendered Coldfusion application pages, StackOverflow, and W3Schools tutorials.

I learned quickly to leave this particular experience off of my resume as sundry DoD contractors contacted me on LinkedIn for my "XML expertise" to participate in various documentation modernization projects.

The next time you sigh as you use JSX to iterate over an array of Typescript interfaces deserialized from a JSON response remember this post - you could be me doing the same in XSLT :-).
by nine_k | 2025-06-27 06:49:22+00:00
XSLT's weaknesses are the extension of its strengths. It's the first homoiconic, purely functional language that enjoyed widespread adoption among "normal" developers, not type theory wonks.

But XML's syntax sucks, and so inevitably does XSLT's, because XSLT is just XML. Were it s-expressions, the syntax could suck slightly less. It was (is!) a small price to generate XSLT using XSLT, which makes XSLT very powerful and expressive if you hold it right, almost like a Lisp. This saved me a few times around year 2000 or so.
by ggm | 2025-06-27 06:49:24+00:00
The historical precedent is very old.

Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not" is Hilaire Belloc, 1898.

More recently in the 1980s. ITAR, the international traffic in arms laws, restricted European digital telephone switch sales to the USSR and allied nations. The US used this to secure contracts for Rolm with special permits. I worked briefly with a company in the UK which was prosecuted for selling Vax 11/780 parts behind the iron curtain, in this time.

And of course the entire history of Netscape and encryption leading to Mozilla/Cryptzilla in the early 2000s, export restrictions on Kerberos from MIT, the magic vlsi design tools, you name it. The BBN butterfly router, sent to UCL in London in the mid 1980s had export restrictions on who could operate and see inside it.

China is building its own euv capable vlsi, precisely because of the export restrictions. AMSL isn't allowed to sell them the fab machines they sell to TSMC.

What justifies this is force majeure: we have the Maxim gun, and they don't.
by samedtosun | 2025-06-27 06:49:56+00:00
I’m excited to share SumApp, a new tool designed to streamline your workflow and boost productivity. Whether you’re a freelancer, entrepreneur, or just someone juggling multiple tasks, SumApp’s got your back with its intuitive interface and powerful features. Here’s what makes SumApp stand out:

Record and summarize: Record your meetings and get meeting minutes in seconds.

Upload and summarize: Upload your documents, PDFs, audio, video files, and images to have a summary.

YouTube Video Summary: Don't lose time watching the whole video, input the link get the summary.

Track your usage.

We’re thrilled to hear what you think! Have you tried similar tools? What features do you love or wish SumApp had? Drop your thoughts, questions, or feedback below.

Thanks in advance.
by ohthehugemanate | 2025-06-27 06:50:22+00:00
Particularly interesting is that when they split the dataset by sex, the transitions were present and at a similar magnitude in both sexes. We make much in western culture of the (peri-)menopausal change in women. I read this as an indicator that at least significant parts of the transition in this age range for men - acknowledged for a long time now - are just as big as menopause.

I don't remember noticing that the last time this study came around, but then again, I am in my mid 40s. :)
by sjducb | 2025-06-27 06:50:47+00:00
I think this is great. It’s similar to the rights that brands have.

Imagine I drew a Coca Cola logo in paint. Now I own the copyright to my picture of the Coca Cola logo. Next I stick it on my new brand of soda. That’s not allowed.

Coca-cola own rights to their logo. You should own rights to your face and voice.
by ethan_smith | 2025-06-27 06:52:26+00:00
For comparing those brands (EcoFlow, Anker, Jackery), you might want to check the wh/$ ratio - it's basically the best way to compare power station value (for newer LFP systems). I went through this same analysis recently - gearscouts.com [1] has a pretty good comparison table that tracks actual street prices vs capacity.

I've found the sweet spot is usually in the 500-1000Wh range for emergency backup. Enough to run a fridge for 8-12 hours but not so big that the solar panel costs get crazy. The LFP (LiFePO4) models tend to last way longer than the regular lithium ones - worth the extra cost if you're planning to use it regularly.

Your lawn mower experiment sounds like it was a good learning experience! Those small Harbor Freight panels are great for tinkering. I started with something similar before going to a full house system.

[1] https://gearscouts.com/power-stations
by sirbread | 2025-06-27 06:53:15+00:00
Totally understand your doubts. I mainly made this program to solve a tiny issue that got annoying and repetitive, so I asked myself, "Can I automate this?" 1. Since I mainly use Windows (for school software to run), I cannot simply do this, considering our school blocks any 3rd part app that isn't in their whitelist. 2. Sure, it doesn't _replace_ a USB drive, but it makes it a lot easier, which can _lessen_ the use of a USB drive. 3. Again, I really just made this for myself and a couple of friends at my high school so we can share projects without too much hassle. I just wanted to share it with the world because maybe someone else has the same dumb problem, which could help them too. It's not meant to be a business, just a tool. I'll call that a win if it saves one other person from emailing a file to themselves.
by petesergeant | 2025-06-27 06:54:01+00:00
XSLT is great fun as a general functional programming language! You can build native functional data-structures[1], implement graph-traversal algorithms[2], and even write test assertions[3]!

1: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/xslt-fever-dream/blob/main/ut...

2: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/xslt-fever-dream/blob/main/ut...

3: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/xslt-fever-dream/blob/main/ut...
by 55555 | 2025-06-27 06:54:48+00:00
I think the curriculum areas you're referring to are for learners in the beginning and intermediate stages. In which case, fair enough, although I still think you could get pretty far by just prompting an LLM, as the LLM has read hundreds of books teaching how to learn each language. But that's not really my point; my point is that once you're an advanced learner (they claim this is their target market) who knows about 12,000 words, I think you know almost all of the grammar, and the remaining bits will get picked up along the way effortlessly via immersion. What you need help with in this stage is slogging through the next 10,000 vocab words you need to learn to get to extreme fluency or the next 25,000 you need to learn to become plausibly native-level, as well as the speaking and reading practice to make your reading faster (if it's a different character set to your native language) and make your speaking effortless.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-06-27 06:55:06+00:00
> "You can't concentrate on a task? Must be ADHD.", "You don't feel like doing something productive? Oh, that's ADHD for sure", "Do you frequently procrastinate and feel guilty about? Yup, that's ADHD" and so on ...

Only someone who has no idea about ADHD and has done absolutely no research would believe that these are the symptoms.
by rossant | 2025-06-27 06:56:47+00:00
I made a website based on XML documents and XSLT transformations about 20 years ago. I really liked the concept. The infrastructure could have been made much simpler but I guess I wanted to have an excuse to play with these technologies.

After spending months working on my development machine, I deployed the website to my VPS, to realize to my utter dismay that the XSLT module was not activated on the PHP configuration. I had to ask the (small) company to update their PHP installation just for me, which they promptly did.
by NanoCoaster | 2025-06-27 06:56:49+00:00
There's cinny, which is a pretty polished Matrix client that is very, uh, inspired by Discord in its look, that might soon add voice rooms: https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny/pull/2335

I played around with this implementation and it's looking pretty good. Not there yet, obviously, but we're in the ballpark I'd say. Obviously, there's lots more to Discord than just voice rooms and a similar-enough UI. But we're slowly getting there.
by uamgeoalsk | 2025-06-27 06:58:12+00:00
Turning 44 this year and none of this has hit me at all? Still staying up all night on weekends, working harder than I ever did (not more hours, though), feeling more motivated to take on both paid and unpaid work outside of my job. And my sex drive just as strong (and just as unfulfilled!) as in my 20s and 30s.
by yvely | 2025-06-27 06:58:25+00:00
I like that you chime in on this and think better cooperation makes more sense here. I assume you also have no interest in enshittified, slower, more expensive, environmentally worse, lower quality Internet. From your point of view, what are potential options/directions to approach to solve some of the issues arising from f.x. crawlers, bota, and other detection-avoiders? I am genuinely curious here
Humans operate using a combination of fast and slow thinking. AI,does not
by yeeyang | 2025-06-27 06:58:35+00:00
Humans operate using a combination of fast and slow thinking. AI, by default, does not.

This presents a huge opportunity for asynchronous Agents.

When an Agent is handling a real-time task, like a phone call, it needs to respond quickly while also maintaining accuracy. This is a classic scenario that demands both fast and slow thinking.

My approach is to have a 'Strategist' behind the 'Executor.' The Executor handles the 'fast thinking'—the immediate, in-the-moment responses，while the Strategist handles the 'slow thinking'—the deeper analysis and planning.

This is the core design of the AI Agents I'm building. Does that make sense to you?
by cyphax | 2025-06-27 06:59:33+00:00
In my first job, when .net didn't yet exist, xml + xslt was the templating engine we used for html and (html) e-mail and sometimes csv. I'd write queries in sql server using "for xml" and it would output all data needed for a page and feed it to an xsl template (all server side) which would output html. Microsoft had a caching xsl parser that would result in less than 10ms to load such a page. Up until we though "hey, let's start using xml namespaces, that sounds like a good idea!". Was a bit less fun after that! Looking back it was a pretty good stack, and it would still work fine today imho. I never started disliking it, but after leaving that job I never wrote another stylesheet.
by enqk | 2025-06-27 07:00:14+00:00
I worked in the same period for a finnish startup (iobox.fi) that ended up being acquired by telefonica.

Our mobile and web portal was made of j2ee services producing XML which were then transformed by XSLT into HTML or WAP

At the time it blew me away that they expected web designers to work in an esoteric language like that

But it was also nicely separated
by jbaiter | 2025-06-27 07:01:17+00:00
Does anybody remember Cocoon? It was an XSLT Web Framework that built upon Spring. It was pretty neat, you could do the stuff XSLT was great at with stylesheets that were mapped to HTTP routes, and it was very easy to extend it with custom functions and supporting Java code to do the stuff it wasn't really great at. Though I must say that as the XSLT stylesheets grew in complexity, they got *really* hard to understand, especially compared to something like a Jinja template.
by chrismorgan | 2025-06-27 07:02:56+00:00
I’m disappointed that this uses a custom XML format, rather than RSS (tolerable) or Atom (better). Then you could just drop it into a feed reader fine.

A few years ago, I decided to style my own feeds, and ended up with this: https://chrismorgan.info/blog/tags/fun/feed.xml. https://chrismorgan.info/atom.xsl is pretty detailed, I don’t think you’ll find one with more comprehensive feature support. (I wrote a variant of it for RSS too, since I was contemplating podcasts at the time and almost all podcast software is stupid and doesn’t support Atom, and it’s all Apple’s fault: https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2022-05-10-rss.xsl.)

At the time, I strongly considered making the next iteration of my website serve all blog stuff as Atom documents—post lists as feeds, and individual pages as entries. In the end, I’ve decided to head in a completely different direction (involving a lot of handwriting!), but I don’t think the idea is bad.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-06-27 07:03:02+00:00
Haha. I guess I had heard the story of dropbox, why not ftp, but I guess this was the story!

I guess it is funny to me that SVN/CVS was there in 2007 since I think git wasn't even invented at the time but now new people won't even know what SVN/CVS are, I only got to know them because I wanted to download a specific folder of github and some stackoverflow comment mentioned svn