MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by blooalien | 2025-06-07 02:38:17+00:00
> It requires effort to care about stuff even after bad shit has happened to you. It requires effort to look for the best in situations. It requires effort to think that maybe tomorrow could be better. It's easy to just say "fuck it, I don't care".

All of this is 100% true, but it's also incredibly draining after literal decades of being on the wrong end of abuse and hatred purely for daring to care, and hope, and try desperately to make anything even the tiniest bit better. After a point, it eventually becomes just too much effort for zero (or negative) return.
by TruffleLabs | 2025-06-07 02:41:33+00:00
And Forth was invented by Charles Moore while at NRAO!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore?wprov=sfti1#E...

"In 1968, while employed at the United States National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Moore invented the initial version of the Forth language to help control radio telescopes."
Ask HN: What non-AI projects are you working on?
by kikki | 2025-06-07 02:45:40+00:00
We must be at critical mass now - I’m pretty tired of every project or business I see being something LLM based. I get it - it’s the new thing - but there’s such little creativity in this space right now it’s just not very interesting? I used to be so excited to read about the startups happening from the community on HN!

What cool projects or startups are people working on that aren’t (at least directly) caught up in the AI hype?
by enceladus06 | 2025-06-07 02:46:08+00:00
Actually it was $1.7 billion USD https://oig.hhs.gov/reports/all/2014/an-overview-of-60-contr... for contracts for a heavily-bureaucratic application process.

Or pay slightly more in tax & actually spend less in healthcare per capita like UK/Canada/Au/NZ, and you just go to the doctor and don't worry about ambulance bills. But neither political party wants that, so we don't do it.
by theamk | 2025-06-07 02:46:32+00:00
Most SaaS contribute to economic productivity though. I see the uptime of local services that our IT maintains, let's just say it's not good. By paying a monthly fee for Slack, we get a working communications system which much better uptime than what we could get from self-hosted.

This is very specific contribution in economic productivity, as the company gets no work done when the communications system is down.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-06-07 02:46:47+00:00
I asked this in the other thread (no response, but I was a bit late)

How does anyone using AI like this have confidence that they aren't unintentionally plagiarizing code and violating the terms of whatever license it was released under?

For random personal projects I don't see it mattering that much. But if a large corp is releasing code like this, one would hope they've done some due diligence that they have to just stolen the code from some similar repo on GitHub, laundered through a LLM.

The only section in the readme doesn't mention checking similar projects or libraries for common code:

> Every line was thoroughly reviewed and cross-referenced with relevant RFCs, by security experts with previous experience with those RFCs.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-07 02:46:56+00:00
Your loss, then. There is a reason that "shoot the messenger" attacks are referred to as ad hominem fallacies.

There may be loads I don't like about a16z, but this article contained lots of interesting insights and actual data. You don't have to agree with their conclusions to get tons of value out of the information they present.
by Aloisius | 2025-06-07 02:47:58+00:00
Sure, if you start requiring age verification for all sorts of other things, it becomes harder to infer anything except for the subset that are verifying their identity for the first time at 2 in the morning.

Of course, understanding that requires a fair bit of technological knowledge.

I imagine most people, when visiting a porn site for the first time and asked to verify their age, if sent to a process that asks them to upload their ID or show their face on camera will simply refuse to do so - regardless of any assurances as to privacy.

This seems to have happened when Louisiana started requiring age verification - driving people, both children and adults, to sites that don't comply with the law, proxy servers, VPNs or Tor. I doubt it'll be any different in France.
by johnnyjeans | 2025-06-07 02:48:32+00:00
> I'm not sure where you're getting the "Apple holds soft power over FreeBSD" thing from.

The only thing I've ever heard from FreeBSD-land, not paying attention to users, but the maintainers and the tools. Apple comes up. In the same manner that RedHat and others come up for Linux. How to explain? It's an abstract pattern. Transparent, understandable.

I mentioned somewhere about the connection through ix systems. And honestly to project, if I was a maintainer of something used between Netflix and Apple, I'd prioritize Apple. Apple has outlived IBM. If you know your history, you know how serious that is. If you've got authority over something as large as FreeBSD? Yeah, you don't ignore that kind of actual power especially when it's personal. Like I say, all based on guesses. But some things are hard to mistake.
by theamk | 2025-06-07 02:50:39+00:00
Unless you mean copyright / trade-secrets specifically, then IP laws don't really help SaaS that much.

For example take Google Workspace - email, calendar, docs. Google has no particular patents for those, and I've never heard about startups in this area not getting traction because of IP troubles.

Same goes with Jira, or Github, or Slack, or AWS S3 - all of those don't have particularly many patents and in fact there are plenty of alternatives, self-hosted or otherwise. People still pay for them happily.
by tombert | 2025-06-07 02:50:57+00:00
I don’t disagree, as I said I am often a cynical and fatalistic person as I have gotten older.

This is why I respect old people who seem to still manage to be stay optimistic and trusting of people in the world. I don’t think that’s “natural”, I think it’s an effort that these people put into seeing the world as a potentially good place.
by sitkack | 2025-06-07 02:51:42+00:00
It is copium that it will suddenly stop and the world they knew before will return.

ChatGPT came out in Nov 2022. Attention Was All There Was in 2017, we were already 5 years in the past. Or 5 years of research to catch up to, and then from 2022 to now ... papers and research have been increasing exponentially. Even in if SOTA models were frozen, we still have years of research to apply and optimize in various ways.
by drodgers | 2025-06-07 02:52:02+00:00
> Prompts as Source Code

Another way to phrase this is LLM-as-compiler and Python (or whatever) as an intermediate compiler artefact.

Finally, a true 6th generation programming language!

I've considered building a toy of this with really aggressive modularisation of the output code (eg. python) and a query-based caching system so that each module of code output only changes when the relevant part of the prompt or upsteam modules change (the generated code would be committed to source control like a lockfile).

I think that (+ some sort of WASM encapsulated execution environment) would one of the best ways to write one off things like scripts which don't need to incrementally get better and more robust over time in the way that ordinary code does.
by toast0 | 2025-06-07 02:53:45+00:00
> But with how Apple operates, it's really hard to believe they'd pull downstream from something they don't have some kind of soft power over. They do still pull downstream AFAIK? Maybe that's changed?

Apple doesn't merge often. They basically haven't merged kernel tcp since 2002. When I started using OSX in 2011, they hadn't merged userland for several years, and when I stopped in 2019, they had only merged once.

They famously stopped picking up bash when upstream changed the license, and most of the FreeBSD userland doesn't change that frequently, so most things you wouldn't notice a difference. cal(1) started highlighting the current day at some point, tar probably grew new compresion arguments, etc.

Apple certainly was a major contributor/driving force/etc of LLVM for a while, not sure if they still are? And LLVM was adopted by FreeBSD, so maybe that's where this idea is coming from?
by d--b | 2025-06-07 02:54:13+00:00
You could argue that photography didn’t kill all painting or that Ikea didn’t kill all manual woodworking.

But photography created a lot more images and ikea allowed people to own a lot more furniture.

If we draw a parallel, it means that we’re going to see a lot more production of tech stuff. Like tailor made video games for a specific individual, custom apps for local businesses / institutions, etc.

This could lead to a lower dependency on the big platform, and perhaps to actually more work.

Impossible to be sure though
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-07 02:54:19+00:00
This article is about AI applications, not core foundation models. None of the initial 3 companies mentioned (Cursor, Lovable, Gamma) train there own models from scratch, nor do they need to. E.g. I get tons of value from Cursor, but I also still pay for ChatGPT Plus.

There is also enough competition in the core model space that these apps don't need to have an Achilles heel by being reliant on a single vendor. E.g. I think Cursor was smart to let you "bring your own API key".
Show HN: Cpdown – Copy any webpage/YouTube subtitle as clean Markdown(LLM-ready)
by ysm0622 | 2025-06-07 02:56:53+00:00
TL;DR: I built a Chrome extension that copies webpage content or YouTube subtitles as clean, clutter-free Markdown with one click (or a shortcut). It even shows the token count, making it super handy for LLM prompts!

Hi, HN!

I often copy information from the web into my notes (Obsidian) or to feed context to LLMs for summaries/translations. So I built cpdown, a browser extension for this.

cpdown lets you convert any webpage/youtube subtitle into clean Markdown and copy it to your clipboard with a single click (or a keyboard shortcut).

Here are the key features:

* Intelligent Content Extraction: Uses Mozilla's Readability or Defuddle (by the Obsidian devs!) to strip away ads, sidebars, and other noise, focusing only on the main article content. * Clean Markdown Conversion: The extracted HTML is then neatly converted to Markdown using the Turndown library. * Token Count for LLMs: It calculates and displays the token count of the copied text using tiktoken. This is super handy for knowing if you're within limits before pasting into LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude. * YouTube Transcript Copying: On YouTube video pages, it can copy the full transcript in Markdown format, automatically adding the video title as an H1 header. * Customizable Options: You can choose your preferred content extractor (Readability/Defuddle), opt to wrap copied content in a code block, and more.

cpdown is completely free and open-source, built with WXT, React, and TypeScript.

You can grab it from the Chrome Web Store or check out the source code on GitHub. I'd love to hear your feedback, feature requests, or any suggestions!

* Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cpdown/knnaflplggjd... * GitHub: https://github.com/ysm-dev/cpdown

Thanks for checking it out!
by declan_roberts | 2025-06-07 02:57:34+00:00
These posts are funny to me because prompt engineers point at them as evidence of the fast-approaching software engineer obsolescence but the years of experience in software engineering necessary to even guide an AI in this way is very high.

The reason he keeps adjusting the prompts is because he knows how to program. He knows what it should look like.

It just blurs the line between engineer and tool.
by thrance | 2025-06-07 02:59:19+00:00
> Heh. You know what. I will let you figure it out on your own. I am ok with waiting.

Please, enlighten me. Tell me of a place that went from functional democracy, then started policing hate speech and ended up a totalitarian state because of it.

> Honestly, I have realized that no one is actually going to stop me from saying what I want to say.

Uh, good for you I guess? But what do you even mean by that? That you are magically immune to censorship? Because you aren't.

> You do realize this is not a great argument right? You are supposed to be held to a higher standard. Just because an idiot does idiot things does not give you a license to be an idiot.

Literally why should I hold nazis to a higher standard? You seem oblivious to the very real danger of far right extremism. Being charitable to nazis is how they get into power, and how you actually lose your freedom.

Those aren't just "idiots" or "assholes", they're very dangerous people, and have nothing good to contribute to society. Tolerating their behavior for too long is how you get masked ICE agents abducting American citizens in broad daylight.

> It is because by undermining asshole speech, you undermine your own.

This is simply not true. Look at how hate speech is implemented in European society. There are clear, legal boundaries. Simply being an asshole online does not get you censored. You have to go much, much further.

That is the slippery slope fallacy. Policing neonazi activity today doesn't lead to censorship of all political opponents tomorrow.

To the contrary, controlling nazi speech and other hateful ideologies helps guaranteeing the perennity of the freedom (of speech, and others) of the rest of the citizenship.

If you reject this basic idea, I fear we have nothing more to exchange.
by theamk | 2025-06-07 02:59:49+00:00
That's just called "over time, some products become worse and more expensive"

Every commercial company is free to charge whatever they want, it's not rent-seeking (unless there is a monopoly, but your argument is applies to small companies as well).

And yes, the fact that you cannot find the software you need for the pricing model you like sucks.. but it is not rent-seeking. And the fact that my local Home Depot does not have cheap, but reliable refrigerators is not rent-seeking either. At worst, it is collusion between manufacturers.
by benlivengood | 2025-06-07 03:01:54+00:00
I think you have to be pretty close to the actual fireball to die within 20ms, and most fireballs would be air bursts 1km altitude or higher.

As I understand it the main reason there isn't instant disintegration out to hundreds or thousands of meters is that as soon as enough initial gamma and X-rays turn surrounding material into plasma most of the energy released goes into fireball formation because the plasma is virtually opaque to all EM and the fireball grows in volume as a plasma until expansion reaches equilibrium with compressed surrounding air, everything at the plasma/gas interface is incandescent and radiates as a black body of ~10,000C which transfers a lot of heat but not sufficient to atomize many centimeters thick objects unless they are very close.

Portions of the towers that suspended initial nuclear tests survived, for example.
by grg0 | 2025-06-07 03:02:27+00:00
SaaS may not be a particularly good example because like others have mentioned, there are costs to it, and it's up to you to decide whether the price is worth the convenience.

The anti-subscription sentiment is not without merit, however. Software that just runs on your computer now has a fucking subscription for no reason. Adobe, games, etc. That is rent-seeking, because I want to pay for the goddamn thing once and own it. I don't care for support or upgrades; if I do, I'll buy the newer version.
by toast0 | 2025-06-07 03:02:29+00:00
If you want a high profile example, look at what Netflix CDN does.

Could you do that work with Linux? Probably --- but nobody who does is talking about it as much.

This kind of high throughput service has been a FreeBSD niche since forever too. Walnut Creek CDROM, Inc ran what was reportedly the world's busiest ftp site, ftp.cdrom.com on FreeBSD in the early days of the internet.

Yahoo ran on FreeBSD (I worked there 2004-2011) WhatsApp ran on FreeBSD (I worked there 2011-2019) Both were leaving FreeBSD when I left, but sadly, I didn't leave to work somewhere else with FreeBSD :p
by jdminhbg | 2025-06-07 03:03:46+00:00
> I think the purpose of the change was to "increase revenue"

Yes, but in a specific way: they were trying to offset the tax cuts they wanted so they could pass it via the reconciliation process and avoid the Senate filibuster. They didn't actually care about this revenue and the assumption from most people was that the specific carve-out would disappear in some future bill.
by onecommentman | 2025-06-07 03:03:47+00:00
This seems to be just par for the course for very large companies I’ve been associated with. Major downsizing exercises are so painful and expensive that you go overboard a bit when you execute one, because you don’t want to have another one for a while (say 4 years in this case). The extra money you pay in returning some employees on a lucrative contract basis is made up for by the sheer size of the headcount reduction and the speed and simplicity of implementation. “Kill them all and let God sort them out.” “The kindest executioner has the sharpest blade.”
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-07 03:05:37+00:00
I think this has an interesting consequence for founders and employees at startups in this day and age, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about it.

On one hand, it means you can "fail faster". That is, if you're a startup employee, and you don't see "hockey stick" growth that is looking crazy impressive at the end of year 1, you should know that the chances of your equity being worth more than a token are basically zero. Starting around the dot com boom, I worked in numerous startups, and for some of them we were still chugging along in years 3-4 with the hopes that our "semi-OK, decent growth" would turn vertical any day now. I've seen numerous startups that started in the 2015-2020 timeframe (so existed for 5-10 years) where they didn't outright fail but common got wiped in an acquisition. That's more a consequence of the rise in interest rates and difficult fundraising environment, but it's really rough to plug along at a company for 5-10 years, think you're doing OK, and then your stock is worth nothing. So from a startup founder/employee perspective, you get signal faster and don't have to waste time.

Simultaneously, though, it seems like any idea that would take a decent amount of upfront investment and time would be hella difficult to get funded, and I think that's unfortunate.
by Supermancho | 2025-06-07 03:06:28+00:00
I remember the day I mentioned this in my high school^ honors sociology class and the eventual valedictorian exclaimed that I was stupid to think that. The system has been broken for longer than I have been alive, but the indoctrination has been working to make up for it.

This was a Blue Ribbon School 1992-1993 yup. https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/programs/nclbbrs/list-2003...
by Latty | 2025-06-07 03:08:15+00:00
What latter part? They did not get due process. They were targeted for their speech, the administration explicitly said so. The post-hoc rationalisation by claiming they are gang members with laughable evidence (mostly having completely and obviously unrelated tattoos) doesn't mean it wasn't for speech, and without due process they can grab anyone and make that claim without any proof.
Show HN: A photo backup idea – to your own storage, not iCloud/Google
by Nainiket | 2025-06-07 03:08:29+00:00
I’m working on a privacy-focused photo backup concept. Instead of syncing to cloud services like iCloud or Google, the idea is to let you back up photos directly to your own: PC or laptop HDD or NAS Private cloud or VPS It will use a secure peer-to-peer approach (similar to Tailscale) so your data stays in your control. I’m still validating the idea — would love feedback! If you're interested, join the waitlist: https://myphoto-vault.netlify.app
by hollerith | 2025-06-07 03:08:56+00:00
>minors will be looking at porn. You're not going to stop a horny 16 year old.

Sure, but this law will drastically reduce the amount of time the average 16-yo looks at porn. Also, if you are going to engage in a vice, then it is healthier if you have to exert some effort or run some risk (if only the risk of trying to access porn and failing) to do it rather than being able to do it perfectly safely from the convenience of your home -- and it is healthier if there is a delay between the impulse to look at porn and when you actually start looking.
by muststopmyths | 2025-06-07 03:10:19+00:00
There is no "max amount of file handles per process" on Windows.

The C runtime has limitations as you indicated. The Win32 API does not.

File,Socket and other handles to NTOSKRNL objects (GDI is its own beast) are not limited by anything but available memory. some of the used memory is non-pageable in the kernel, and there is a limit to the non-pageable memory (1/8 of RAM, I think), so it's not as simple as RAM/(handlecount*storagecost per handle).
by muth02446 | 2025-06-07 03:11:21+00:00
Another small language is Cwerg [1] (tutorial: [2]) A C-like low level language with a Python inspired syntax.

The frontend has a self imposed line budget of 10kLOC.

[1] http://cwerg.org [2] https://github.com/robertmuth/Cwerg/blob/master/FE/Docs/tuto...
by johnnyjeans | 2025-06-07 03:12:20+00:00
> And LLVM was adopted by FreeBSD, so maybe that's where this idea is coming from?

Partially, but after seeing the Jordan Hubbard connection, there's a lot of layers to this. May have reinforced my biases, but it's definitely non-trivial according to my hippie-tier anarchist baseline. Oops. Worst case scenario of answering your own question.

But your reply does give me actually contradicting evidence. It wouldn't surprise me that distance has grown to the point of total atrophy, given the general trajectory Apple has been on since 2012 or so. This is why I ask these questions, because the people on the ground give the most informative answers.

As Ptahhotep advises circa ~2300BCE:

> Fine words are more sought after than greenstone, but can be found with the women at the grindstone.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-06-07 03:12:46+00:00
The correctness bug was due to combinations of features. I'm curious if you've looked into combinatorial testing which NIST claimed knocks out almost all bugs when 6-way testing was used.

https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/automated-combinatorial-testi...

My intro to other categories of test generation was usually this paper:

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/saswat/research/ASTJSS.pdf

Maybe see of your team can build combinatorial- or path-based testing in Zig next.
by genocidicbunny | 2025-06-07 03:12:46+00:00
I would assume it's somewhat speaking to the prevalence of many informal landing strips, and also that river landings are probably fairly common too. I'd have to imagine places like Alaska might also have to deal with that, especially if you have small local 'airlines' (which are probably just a handful of bush planes really) that operate from an actual registered airport.
by MisterBastahrd | 2025-06-07 03:13:34+00:00
Coonass is a pejorative that Cajuns from Louisiana received during WWII when they were asked to be translators for the French resistance. The language in Louisiana diverged into cajun French and Kouri Vini (creole French) over the 200 years since Louisiana was first colonized, so modern French didn't line up and there was still a bit of a language barrier. The French called these people connasse, which basically means stupid because of this, but the cajuns took it as a kind-hearted nickname and brought it back home with them. Many cajuns were and still are upset that the term is ever still used to refer to them because it's a coarse word they feel belittles their culture, so if you're in the company of them and you don't know how they'll react, you might want to wait until they bring it up.