MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yorwba | 2025-06-17 06:48:37+00:00
> the snapshot file refers to some commit hashes that do not appear to point to any surviving public repo

That sounds a bit worrying from a "reflections on trusting trust" perspective. Who's to say that those non-public commits didn't introduce a compiler backdoor? But I guess the more likely explanation is that somebody did some last-minute hotfixes that were later reworked before inclusion in the permanent record.
Show HN: A boilerplate for Kotlin Multiplatform to launch Android and iOS apps
by VivienMahe | 2025-06-17 06:51:04+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm an indie developer who has been building mobile apps for a while.

After repeating the same setup across projects (auth, CI/CD, payments, notifications), I built a boilerplate to save time and focus on actual features.

KMPShip is a Kotlin/Compose Multiplatform boilerplate that helps you build Android and iOS apps from a single shared codebase.

It includes: Shared codebase (for UI, domain and data layers), Firebase Auth, Google/Apple sign-in, In-App purchases & subscriptions, local & push notifications, CI/CD setup, full documentation and a small community space for support.

It's a paid product, so the source isn’t public. But I’m happy to answer technical questions or share how it’s built.

Would love your feedback or thoughts.

Thanks!

https://www.kmpship.app/
Show HN: Zentra – The AI Travel Planner
by hridyaagrawal | 2025-06-17 06:52:13+00:00
Just shipped Zentra - The AI travel planner that actually does the work for you!

Links:

- Try it: [https://zentra.hridya.tech/](https://zentra.hridya.tech/) - GitHub: [https://github.com/hridaya423/zentra](https://github.com/hridaya423/zentra) (A would mean the world)

What is Zentra? Zentra is an AI-powered travel planner that creates complete, personalized day-by-day itineraries with smart recommendations. Just tell it where you want to go and your preferences - it handles the rest.

Why I built this: Tired of spending hours researching destinations, comparing activities, and piecing together itineraries? Zentra turns your travel ideas into ready-to-use plans so you can spend less time planning and more time exploring.

Key features:

- Full day-by-day itineraries tailored to your interests - Smart recommendations based on location, budget, and travel style - Clean, easy-to-follow format - No more endless tabs and travel blog rabbit holes

If you find Zentra helpful, I'd really appreciate a on GitHub! Always looking for feedback to make it better.
by bruce511 | 2025-06-17 06:52:25+00:00
>> I do not want to download another messaging app. I mean, how annoying is it that your friends and family didn't download that last three apps you told them were better than WhatsApp

Um, you want to communicate better, but you exclude apps to download? I'm getting mixed messages here.

However you identify the core of your "problem". You can't really pick anything in isolation since network effects dominate.

Plus, it seems like you're a jumper, always looking for the next shiny thing. You've offered 3 apps, which is apparently 3 more than your social group need.

I also notice you're ready to jump shop based on an announcement, not on any actual harm or inconvenience to your group. This is a hard sell.

I say none of this to criticize you, but rather so you can see a bigger picture. Social Media is about Social, not Media.
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-17 06:52:45+00:00
> Why should anyone appreciate paragraphs of text from someone who thinks Europeans can't use payment cards?

I'm German, so I'm basing my statement on almost 34 years of living here. In case you want some more details from an actual bank, read this [1].

Basically, we don't need credit cards, not even for renting cars, because we have robust regulation and our own national cashless payment schemes plus SEPA. Direct debit is just fine for us.

[1] https://n26.com/en-de/blog/taboo-of-credit
by frm88 | 2025-06-17 06:52:56+00:00
You might want to have a look at the usage stats of payment cards (here specifically credit cards) globally. You would realise that usage is low in Europe, compared to the US. https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/people_with_credit.... Most payments are done with regular banking and/or bank specific cards. The latter are not accepted by online platforms, the former has indeed transfer fees in many countries. The grandparents explanations are valid.
by andsoitis | 2025-06-17 06:52:57+00:00
> But the idea itself is eternal. The idea of the number 1 doesn’t “need” the universe.

Ideas are mental concepts, thoughts, or notions that exist in the mind.

As far as we know, there’s no evidence of mind-independent ideas. We can only access ideas through our minds, so we have no way to verify they exist without minds.
by metaphor | 2025-06-17 06:52:59+00:00
For decades, Guam has had an invasive brown tree snake problem that completely decimated its native bird population and then some. Your wife's proposed solution reminded me of something the military actually tried: parachute thousands of dead mice "pumped full of painkillers" across the island...no joke[1].

I suppose the key difference in liability here is: see a dead mouse on Guam, hope your pet doesn't eat it...see one of your wife's rabbits (live or dead) in Florida, immediately cordon off and notify local UXO disposal team.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/two-thousand-mice-dropp...
by enord | 2025-06-17 06:53:15+00:00
It’s a real shame Dijkstra rubbed so many people the wrong way.

Maybe his incisive polemic, which I greatly enjoy, was all but pandering to a certain elitist sensibility in the end.

To make manageable programs, you have to trade off execution speed both on the cpu and in the organization. His rather mathematized prescriptions imply we should hire quarrelsome academics such as him to reduce performance and slow down product development[initially…] all in the interest of his stratified sensibilities of elegance and simplicity.

Sucks to be right when that’s the truth.
by anonzzzies | 2025-06-17 06:53:35+00:00
I was following this since it started. I dislike modern code experiences because of many of the things, especially devops, they fixed. But it being not fully open source always held us back and we developed our own solution with common lisp and some typing sauce that keeps us free from all the modern dev and deploy crap. Everything runs easily on your laptop as well as in the cloud without any difference and, outside running a simple script to set up some vps or cloud hoster. Happy darklang went apache license and looking forward how their deployment looks now as not self hosting is just never ever an option: all companies become frauds in the end so we need to be able to move any time.
by someothherguyy | 2025-06-17 06:53:53+00:00
"It is true that we have been trying to avoid the word battery, since technically speaking it is not what we have. Anyhow, the word caught fire, and was a big part of the media success, and it probably was McGrath’s invention. Of course if we were to generate electricity from the heat, it would at least act like a battery does: taking in electricity and giving back electricity."

(2022) https://www.treehugger.com/viral-sand-battery-isnt-what-it-s...
by illiac786 | 2025-06-17 06:55:07+00:00
I am not terrified, rather scared of loosing control, hurting people I like, feeling ashamed forever afterward, the usual. I use to not give shit but I’m old now and I have a much bigger social net I care about.

But I do know people which I would categorise as really terrified of loosing control.

Maybe “letting loose” was the wrong expression here, I meant “loosing control” rather.
by jiveturkey | 2025-06-17 06:55:14+00:00
Absolutely the density of 12 terminals over what amounts to skyscraper on edge, is high. But cruise ships are not packed into city blocks. The density of terminals over ship-in-ocean sized areas is quite low. The density is very much more sparse than a countryside or farm area. So it feels unlikely to me that you are going to saturate the visible satellites. And those satellites will be very underutilized at their locations not quite over land yet.

Only recently (2025) has Starlink been documented to pass data between satellites and only for new ones. Cruise ships have had starlink for several years so the most common case will likely still be a single hop. Most cruises hug closely enough to the shore (within 100 miles) that a second hop isn't required.

It's not really a thousand passengers, it's just 12 terminals. Sure, those terminals are well oversubscribed vs a normal user terminal, but given the documented terminal-to-ground-station ratio (quite high), I'm pretty doubtful a cruise ship or 2 significantly impacts (or is impacted by) ground bandwidth. The density of users is just at the wrong scale for it to be significant.
by dagw | 2025-06-17 06:55:47+00:00
It’s interesting some folks can use them to build functioning systems and others can’t get a PR out of them.

It is 100% a function of what you are trying to build, what language and libraries you are building it in, and how sensitive that thing is to factors like performance and getting the architecture just right. I've experienced building functioning systems with hardly any intervention, and repeatedly failing to get code that even compiles after over an hour of effort. There exists small, but popular, subset of programming tasks where gen AI excels, and a massive tail of tasks where it is much less useful.
by Elaris | 2025-06-17 06:55:52+00:00
It always seems to go like this. An app starts out simple, focused on privacy and a clean experience. But after a while, growth slows down, money becomes a bigger concern, and ads slowly get added. I understand why companies do it, but as a user, it’s frustrating because you already know where it usually ends up.

WhatsApp was great because it didn’t have ads and kept things private. Once they start changing that, it usually doesn’t stop with just one small change.
by jona-f | 2025-06-17 06:55:53+00:00
As a nihilist my sense of meaning seams to be compatible to yours. I don't deny that we can come up with all sorts of meanings but the point is that there is no intrinsically higher meaning to everything, it's all made up. In fact, the awareness of this is the basis of my nihilism. That doesn't mean, that I don't like some meanings more than others, otherwise I had no reason to act whatsoever.
by dunyakirkali | 2025-06-17 06:56:31+00:00
In any growing company, it’s easy for teams to fall into an "us vs. them" mindset, celebrating our own group while mistrusting others. But as engineering managers, we have the power to bridge those divides. This article explores how to turn tribal instincts into team-wide alignment through transparency, shared goals, empathy, cross-team collaboration, and a renewed sense of belonging. When “us” starts meaning all of us, everyone wins.
by mrkiouak | 2025-06-17 06:58:20+00:00
I would love to see comments for other fun/entertainment oriented sites using GenAI people have seen. I think I've read a lot from what the big Foundation Model Co's are developing, but really interested to hear what more "indie" folks are doing. https://blog.google/technology/google-deepmind/ancestra-behi... is interesting, curious to see more.
by Nursie | 2025-06-17 06:59:19+00:00
Offensive to good sense, not aggressive.

Mysticism usually seems to me to imply a poor grasp on reality and can be accompanied by all sorts of baseless claims to knowledge and (often naturalistic) fallacies. It often goes hand in hand with silly beliefs about crystals, alt-med and all sorts of other crap.

"We don't know" is fine. "We don't know, therefore these specific lines of bullshit" less so.

But I didn't post the above to say that my views on mysticism are correct or even to provoke a discussion about it. I posted it to provide a counterpoint to the bizarre notion that one must be into mysticism to experience aspects of the psychedelic experience.

We may interpret the experiences very differently, of course, but the claim that part of it is closed to those who don't subscribe to witter about "the goddess" is ironically very egotistic.
Show HN: Paygo.network – no subscription AI tools
by robbsch | 2025-06-17 07:00:00+00:00
Can't be the only one paying all the possible subscriptions for AI models I barely use. I was integrating OpenAI APIs for a project I've done recently, then I thought I would be way better if I used APIs myself instead of the 20$/month subscription - I use Claude more, but for certain things, I prefer ChatGPT - I created my own playgroup chatbox, one thing led to another, launched public beta 1 yesterday. Plan to integrate Stripe for payments today, other APIs by the end of the week, and focus on image and video generators next. It's invite only atm, so use "PAYGBETA" when registering. Appreciate any feedback! Tx.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-06-17 07:00:56+00:00
Stop shooting at me, damn it, I'm Sam Altman!

Of course, that was an error on my part. I should only be shooting at other people and actually not in the part of the city at all, it's definitely a mistake on my part and I will rectify immediately. Thank you again for pointing it out to me!

You're still shooting at me!
by komali2 | 2025-06-17 07:00:58+00:00
> of the people, by the people, for the people

The People, historically, are immigrants. The facts back my argument.

15% of the population are immigrants since 1860.

Drops to 5% in the 60's to 80's, maybe that's the cause of your short-term understanding of American history, since in recent memory immigration was quite low (and thus begins the decline of American prosperity at the same time, interesting).

Increases back up to 15% in the late 2000's... right as we have historic increases in markers for prosperity (overlay the same chart against the stock market).

We are returning to the proper state of America, as the world's melting pot, and the most successful and prosperous nation on earth as a result.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/imm...
by kevinventullo | 2025-06-17 07:01:09+00:00
I’m not sure I follow the question. I think of plumbing as being the exact kind of verbose boilerplate that LLM’s are quite good at automating.

In contrast, when I’m trying to do something truly novel, I might spend days with a pen and paper working out exactly what I want to do and maybe under an hour coding up the core logic.

On the latter type of work, I find LLM’s to be high variance with mostly negative ROI. I could probably improve the ROI by developing a better sense of what they are and aren’t good at, but of course that itself is rapidly changing!
by prmoustache | 2025-06-17 07:01:14+00:00
I think it depends on the demographic.

I still see a lot of people who are afraid of purchasing on the internet and give out their card number. My mother in law ask her daughters to call her a uber when she needs one because she is afraid of installing the app and giving her credit card number[1]. Yet she has all the social medias installed on her smartphone.

[1] The irony is she apparently don't care the her own daughters would have to take that risk for her.
by MichaelRo | 2025-06-17 07:01:40+00:00
I was in high school (about 14-15 years old) when I recall drawing lines and circles with BASIC on ZX-Spectrum and it was horribly slow. Was thinking of making some simple games and tried graphics mode but it was just too slow to achieve anything.

So I switched to HiSoft Pascal and line and circle became instantaneous but still I didn't dare program Tetris in graphics mode. So I used text/character mode, compiled from Pascal and was fast enough to play. (In regular BASIC, I couldn't make it work).

Then I installed HiSoft BASIC compiler and my regular BASIC was now fast enough for TETRIS. On the other hand if you think that in 48Kb of RAM they had to fit the video RAM about 8 Kb, the BASIC compiler, my BASIC code, the compiled code and use some RAM for stack and variables ... crazy. Fun times...
by pSYoniK | 2025-06-17 07:01:43+00:00
I've been reading these posts for the past few months and the comments too. I've tried Junie a bit and I've used ChatGPT in the past for some bash scripts (which, for the most part, did what they were supposed to do), but I can't seem to find the use case.

Using them for larger bits of code feels silly as I find subtle bugs or subtle issues in places, so I don't necessarily feel comfortable passing in more things. Also, large bits of code I work with are very business logic specific and well abstracted, so it's hard to try and get ALL that context into the agent.

I guess what I'm trying to ask here is what exactly do you use agents for? I've seen youtube videos but a good chunk of those are people getting a bunch of typescript generated and have some front-end or generate some cobbled together front end that has Stripe added in and everyone is celebrating as if this is some massive breakthrough.

So when people say "regular tasks" or "rote tasks" what do you mean? You can't be bothered to write a db access method/function using some DB access library? You are writing the same regex testing method for the 50th time? You keep running into the same problem and you're still writing the same bit of code over and over again? You can't write some basic sql queries?

Also not sure about others, but I really dislike having to do code reviews when I am unable to really gauge the skill of the dev I'm reviewing. If I know I have a junior with 1-2 years maybe, then I know to focus a lot on logic issues (people can end up cobbling toghether the previous simple bits of code) and if it's later down the road at 2-5 years then I know that I might focus on patterns or look to ensure that the code meets the standards, look for more discreet or hidden bugs. With an agent output it could oscilate wildly between those. It could be a solidly written search function, well optimized or it could be a nightmarish sql querry that's impossible to untangle.

Thoughts?

I do have to say I found it good when working on my own to get another set of "eyes" and ask things like "are there more efficient ways to do X" or "can you split this larger method into multiple ones" etc
by endgame | 2025-06-17 07:02:19+00:00
The ACCC did win a $3M AUD judgement against them for their refund policies:

* https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million... (not currently loading for me)

* https://archive.is/9mE7i#selection-4964.0-4978.0 (archive of the above)

> The Court held that the terms and conditions in the Steam subscriber agreements, and Steam’s refund policies, included false or misleading representations about consumers’ rights to obtain a refund for games if they were not of acceptable quality.

> In determining the appropriate penalty to impose on Valve, Justice Edelman noted that “even if a very small percentage of Valve’s consumers had read the misrepresentations then this might have involved hundreds, possibly thousands, of consumers being affected”.

> Justice Edelman also took into account “Valve’s culture of compliance [which] was, and is, very poor”. Valve’s evidence was ‘disturbing’ to the Court because Valve ‘formed a view …that it was not subject to Australian law…and with the view that even if advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with the Australian law the advice might have been ignored”. He also noted that Valve had ‘contested liability on almost every imaginable point’.

Valve's notice to consumers is archived here, and no longer on their live website: https://web.archive.org/web/20180427063845/https://store.ste...

I can find news articles saying that the court action began in late Aug/early Sep 2014.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/steamowner-v...

Here's an old reddit comment discussing how Valve failed to implement AUD and KRW pricing on schedule, and speculates that at least in Australia's case, it's because of local compliance reasons.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/38dlvd/the_real_reas...

But I can't find anything that definitively ties the rollout of refund policies to an attempt to get the ACCC off their back. The comments on the above reddit post show that GOG and Origin had active refund policies at this time.
by oliwarner | 2025-06-17 07:03:53+00:00
They've only built two of these things in production. I think it's okay to use forecast costs when it's this early. I assume they'll get better at this, production gets cheaper and the bulk of the material will actually be a logistics cost rather than materials, so putting sticker prices on these might not translate well.

But the "smaller prototype" is 8MWh. Their estimate of $25/kWh would make that $200k, and this 100MWh unit should scale to $2.5M but there have already received many times that in funding. Who knows.
by invaliduser | 2025-06-17 07:04:18+00:00
But how can it be a problem? Working on a project just for fun is totally valid. Is this not «Hacker News»?

For the record, this is the definition of being a hacker by Stallman: «Being a programmer doesn't mean being a hacker: it means appreciating playful cleverness. Now, you can program without being playfully clever and you can be playfully clever in other fields without programming.»
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-06-17 07:04:30+00:00
>People think best in 2d.

no they don't. some people do. Some people think best in sentences, paragraphs, and sections of structured text. Diagrams mean next to nothing to me.

Some graphs, as in representations of actual mathematical graphs, do have meaning though. If a graph is really the best data structure to describe a particular problem space.

on edit: added in "representations of" as I worried people might misunderstand.
by tomhow | 2025-06-17 07:04:59+00:00
OK, I may have been too quick to pattern-match on characterising someone's writing as being LLM-generated. Sorry for that. However we do want to be careful about criticising someone’s writing style; the guidelines ask us to avoid that.

Also, suspicions about the changing frequency of certain phrases in HN comments can easily be tested:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&prefix=false&query=%22...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&prefix=true&query=%22I...
by avastel | 2025-06-17 07:05:20+00:00
Author here: I work in bot detection, and wrote this post to explain why privacy-conscious users (VPNs, Brave, LibreWolf, etc.) often get flagged or blocked by anti-bot systems.

I’ve seen a lot of frustration in threads here, so I wanted to offer a technical perspective on why these false positives happen, and how detection systems interpret signals from non-mainstream setups.
by plasticeagle | 2025-06-17 07:06:16+00:00
ChatGPT and Gemini literally only know the answer because they read StackOverflow. Stack Overflow only exists because they have visitors.

What do you think will happen when everyone is using the AI tools to answer their questions? We'll be back in the world of Encyclopedias, in which central authorities spent large amounts of money manually collecting information and publishing it. And then they spent a good amount of time finding ways to sell that information to us, which was only fair because they spent all that time collating it. The internet pretty much destroyed that business model, and in some sense the AI "revolution" is trying to bring it back.

Also, he's specifically talking about having a coding tool write the code for you, he's not talking about using an AI tool to answer a question, so that you can go ahead and write the code yourself. These are different things, and he is treating them differently.
by stas2k | 2025-06-17 07:06:54+00:00
I still remember getting a USSR clone(Leningrad) at 5 years old. It is probably earliest memory I have.

Did not know English, could not read anything, but still spent hundreds of hours first playing, and then tinkering with it.

There was no OS to mess up, and it booted instantly to a Sinclair BASIC prompt.