MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Semantic-dictionary – A Python dictionary with semantic lookup
by eu90h | 2025-06-30 13:37:56+00:00
The idea is simple: a Python dictionary that uses semantic similarity during lookup. Say you're working on user preference extraction for an AI agent. In some cases, the model may output something like:

``` { "preference": "Database", "value": "sqlite3" } ```

but it (or a different model) may later request the user preference using a subtly different key:

``` { "action": "get_user_preference", "preference": "Database System" } ```

If we parse these responses and store them in a standard dictionary, we'll miss the similarity between the two preference keys "Database" and "Database System", whereas with SemanticDictionary, an embedding model would calculate the distance between the embedding vectors corresponding to the the preference keys prior to lookup.

I figured others may have similar needs so I thought I'd package it up for distribution. Hope you find something cool to do with this!
by colanderman | 2025-06-30 13:38:04+00:00
I find that directly propagating errors upwards is an antipattern. In many/most cases, the caller has less information than you do for how to deal with the error. (Your library, after all, is an abstraction, of which such an error is an implementation detail.) It also prevents you from returning your own error condition which isn't one that the downstack error type can represent.

It may be that you do in fact have to throw your hands up, and propagate _something_ to the caller; in those cases, I find a Box<dyn Error> or similar better maintains the abstraction boundary.
by w4 | 2025-06-30 13:38:19+00:00
It is readily understandable if you are fluent in the jargon surrounding state of the art LLMs and deep learning. It’s completely inscrutable if you aren’t. The article is also very high level and disconnected from specifics. You can skip to FAIR’s paper and code (linked at the article’s end) for specifics: https://github.com/facebookresearch/vjepa2

If I had to guess, it seems likely that there will be a serious cultural disconnect as 20-something deep learning researchers increasingly move into robotics, not unlike the cultural disconnect that happened in natural language processing in the 2010s and early 20s. Probably lots of interesting developments, and also lots of youngsters excitedly reinventing things that were solved decades ago.
by bityard | 2025-06-30 13:38:26+00:00
When we say Chinese government subsides, we are not talking about tax reductions or interest free business loans, we are talking about the Chinese government itself operating the business and selling the products at a steep loss in order to undercut and wipe out incumbent global competition in the world market so that China becomes the primary worldwide supplier of those particular goods.

This has already happened to consumer electronics, power tools, manufacturing equipment, solar panels, and batteries.

The strategy is especially effective on products with a high startup cost in markets that have to deal with high amounts of regulation and labor unions because being government-owned means you get to skip all that. There's no reason to expect that cars won't be next.
by csomar | 2025-06-30 13:38:35+00:00
I think the problem here is that we are comparing against price inflation (not salary inflation). If every company increased its prices, then that's the inflation. Customers will feel ripped off if their salaries didn't at least match inflation.

In other words, if your salary in 2005 was $50k when Mazda was $13k; then your salary should be $82k for a $22k Mazda3 to be the same price. Currently, a Mazda3 starts at $24k and will probably run at $26-27k: https://www.mazdausa.com/vehicles/mazda3-sedan

> All that to say that I think that inflation adjusted measure can still get you a fine car. As for the argument about income vs inflation in GP, I have no idea.

Kind of. But my understanding is that most salaries haven't caught up to inflation especially in the last few years when the US economy had the worst inflation.
by bangoose | 2025-06-30 13:38:40+00:00
Yeah, given a prompt for a website like "Tumblr Clone for Ascii Art", the LLM will pretend to be a HTTP server.

All client side requests are directly fed into the LLM and it will respond with raw HTTP responses that are then forwarded back to the client.

There is no persistence between requests. So if you want something dynamic it is best to describe specific routes.

An example prompt would be:

A tumbler clone but for ASCII art. Please make it have a fully functional infinite scroll. For the infinite scroll all requests to '/scroll' should be return a batched lot ascii art text to be embedded. The format for the /scroll requests will be a raw ASCII art followed by <br> for batching. Try to keep requests to a minimum for the infinite scroll.
by JohnFen | 2025-06-30 13:38:46+00:00
> Citizens won't stand for a government that stays technologically frozen while everything else rapidly advances.

I don't think that citizens care about how technologically frozen the government may or may not be. I think they care about whether or not the government is operating as it should. Those are two different things.

> Palantir represents the best path forward due to the relative imbalance between positive and negative potential outcomes.

I envy you your optimism. I think Palantir represents a very serious threat to this nation. Certainly not the only one, but a serious threat nonetheless.
by toolis | 2025-06-30 13:39:08+00:00
to each their own. if you do 1 small project per year, it might make sense to dig for 30 minutes in home depot bucket to find out you don't actually have the part you thought you have. doing that more frequently starts to become major waste of time. my tools don't live in gridfinity boxes, shallow tool drawers are good enough, but metric bolts, nuts and other stuff is neatly organised.
by bluGill | 2025-06-30 13:39:10+00:00
When Knuth wrote his paper compilers/optimizer were not nearly as good as today, and CPUs were much more deterministic (only disk access shows the issues we now see with cache misses). Most of his optimizations are things that the compiler will do better than you can (most is not all!) and so not even worth thinking about. Meanwhile the compiler will almost never turn a O(n^2) into O(n*ln(n)) despite that resulting in a much faster speedup than anything the compiler can do.
by nk_mishra | 2025-06-30 13:39:48+00:00
Hi HN, Nikhil here, CTO at Flexprice.

To add some context to our journey: before coming to HN, we launched on Product Hunt and spoke with over 100 companies to understand how they approach billing for AI and API-driven products. We’ve seen two main approaches:

1. *Homegrown billing stacks:* Many teams build their own systems in-house, but these quickly become a headache—especially as more products move to pure usage-based pricing or hybrid models with fixed fees. These systems are complex, require significant engineering resources to maintain, and ensuring accuracy is a constant challenge.

2. *Building on top of Stripe/Chargebee:* While these platforms are evolving to support usage-based billing alongside subscriptions, they still lack robust workflows for credits—which are becoming the new currency in usage-based models.

With Flexprice, our goal is to make it easy for developers to get started, integrate quickly, and address the less obvious pain points of usage metering and credits management. We’re focused on supporting all the pricing combinations we see emerging among AI-first companies, and on building an eventually consistent engine that can handle the realities of real-world usage data.

AI pricing models are evolving fast, and we’re eager to hear feedback from the HN community on where the pain points really are, so we can target them directly.
by finolex1 | 2025-06-30 13:40:03+00:00
Tourists get this impression by staying in the city centre. However, if you live in an outer neighborhood, what would be a 15 min car ride can easily become a 40 minute journey on public transport if you have to walk to the train station, take the train, and perhaps take a bus for the last mile. Now imagine you have a kid in tow or an elderly parent.

Yes, public transit is not a necessity here like in the States, but it's a nice convenience to have, and plenty of people are wealthy enough to pay for it.
How I turned $1 hockey puck into a payments network with Venmo rewards
by kp13 | 2025-06-30 13:40:35+00:00
I’ve been working on a way to help local businesses. Most are running on razor-thin margins. They either need to cut costs or drive more foot traffic. I’m trying to help them do both.

Here’s the problem:

Every time someone buys a $6 coffee, about 25¢ goes to payment middlemen. That’s a big hit for a café with 5–10% margins.

So I built something simple.

A small NFC puck sits by the checkout.

A customer taps their phone → gets a Venmo reward (via USDC). No app to download. No pointless points to collect. Just: Tap. Ping. Reward.

Businesses pick the reward ($0.25–$1) and set the rules. They only pay when someone makes a purchase. It’s free, and they stay in control. Customers love it. Merchants get repeat visits.

The reward is just the start — it builds habit, trust, and a new kind of network.

As this network grows, customers can spend them back at any participating spot. The same puck becomes a payment point. It cuts out Visa/MC rails — no 3% swipe fees.

It runs on stablecoins, but no one has to touch crypto.

Here’s what’s under the hood:

- Hockey puck + NFC sticker (<$1)

- App clip w/ optional app download

- Solana onchain check-ins

- USDC as the reward rail

- Plaid for purchase verification

- Venmo as off-ramp UX

No POS integration. No merchant setup. Just plug and play.

I put all of it — the idea, roadmap, traction — into a short memo.

If you’re an investor, founder, merchant, potential co-founder or just curious — would love thoughts.

Open to intros, critiques, weird ideas. Email me — kunal@trykeychain.com
by amszmidt | 2025-06-30 13:40:35+00:00
> Provocative question: would a modern Lisp Machine necessarily use Lisp?

Seeing that not even "Original Gangster" Lisp Machine used Lisp ...

Both the Lambda and CADR are RISCy machines with very little specific to Lisp (the CADR was designed specifically to just run generic VM instructions, one cool hack on the CADR was to run PDP-10 instructions).

By Emacs you definitely mean GNU Emacs -- there are other implementations of Emacs. To most people, what the Lisp Machine was (is?), was a full operating system with editor, compiler, debugger and very easy access to all levels of the system. Lisp .. wasn't the really interesting thing, Smalltalk, Oberon .. share the same idea.
by Ukv | 2025-06-30 13:41:24+00:00
> That still makes wallhacks possible if standing close to a corner.

That's what I'm thinking with the server-side behavior analysis to detect players seemingly using information their client was sent (in case they made a certain movement) but they shouldn't have actually seen (because they didn't make that movement). Though even without that, restricting wallhacks to corners that you could already almost immediately see around would already be a significant improvement.

> And otherwise what you describe makes netcode way more complicated, than it already is. Resulting in a worse game experience.

It's what I think is the ideal and would definitely take some work to implement in practice, but if implemented well I'd argue the measures would be invisible to players in almost all scenarios, and game experience would be superior to solutions that have rampant wallhackers and/or don't work on many machines due to invasive client-side anti-cheat.
by woodruffw | 2025-06-30 13:41:49+00:00
> The "I want basic encryption for this subdomain but not announce it to the world" seems rather sane as well.

Not really: we learned a hard lesson decades ago that encryption isn’t especially meaningful unless you know who you’re encrypting to. Self-signed certificates are the classic “your communications are secure, but you’re talking with satan” example.

As others have said: if you want to keep a specific subdomain label out of CT, you can issue a wildcard certificate instead. But the Web PKI as a whole is correct in not letting you do encrypted communication with a service without having some established notion of that service’s identity.
by aredox | 2025-06-30 13:42:03+00:00
You don't get it, the idea is to but a (super)capacitor bank at the charging station, just between the power network and the electric car. You discharge them fast into the battery and you modulate how fast you recharge them for the next client.

There is already a similar tech for buses in Geneva, Switzerland:

https://www.hitachienergy.com/news-and-events/customer-stori...
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-30 13:42:34+00:00
The problem isn't that they're effective. It's that they're a regulatory solution to the complaints that the same demographics had 20yr ago (it's too easy to back a big fashionable in the 00s SUV over a kid) and as a result of it now all cars have crap rear visibility because there's no reason to be good when you have the camera.
by brightUiso | 2025-06-30 13:42:59+00:00
Hey HN,

We just launched Airi, a powerful new feature inside Inov-ai that lets AI analyze and summarize customer feedback in real time—so product teams can stop guessing what users want and start building with clarity.

If you’re a SaaS founder or product manager, you know the pain: feedback comes in through dozens of channels emails, chats, surveys, app prompts—and it piles up fast. Tagging it, grouping it, making sense of it takes hours or never gets done.

Airi changes that. It automatically detects sentiment, extracts common themes, and even ranks what matters most to your users. We’ve trained it specifically on SaaS style product feedback, so it cuts through noise and surfaces actionable insights.

No more manual triage. No more spreadsheets. Just fast, clean signal. Try it at: https://inov-ai.tech

Would love your thoughts, feedback, or suggestions. We’re building this to help lean teams ship with confidence.

Thanks, The Inov-ai team
by Fraaaank | 2025-06-30 13:43:16+00:00
I should've been more specific. The study you link states that 'To prevent vitamin D deficiency, one should spend 15 to 20 minutes daily in the sunshine with 40% of the skin surface exposed.'. The screenshot on lume health shows a goal of 120 minutes.

Moreover, sun exposure is not by definition 'healthy'. Spending two hours in the sun at noon in the middle of summer does more harm than good.
by chis | 2025-06-30 13:43:29+00:00
It's a pretty car but I feel like they are mostly just selling a story about cost savings. Third party carplay screens can be bought for $150 so that just can't be very meaningful. The real cost savings is that it's a cheaply built EV with a small battery. Plus it's hard to get excited talking about the price a startup is claiming to sell cars at, before any have made it to consumers.

That being said the car looks sweet. I hope we have more startups making retro-vibe electric cars since the barrier to entry is much lower than with combustion engines.
by prathamxd | 2025-06-30 13:43:53+00:00
Impressive, Koshima! Billing at scale ,especially with high-frequency event ingestion and credits—is notoriously tricky, so it's great to see an open-source approach to solving these pain points. The real-time debugger and usage analytics API sound particularly useful. Curious how you handle deduplication and idempotency under heavy concurrency. Looking forward to trying this out!
by infecto | 2025-06-30 13:44:05+00:00
I am a big believer in this. Dentistry is one of the largest grifts in modern medicine, I would put it up there with Chiropractors. Go see 5 dentists and you will get 5 wildly different opinions. I am certain there are good ones out there but it’s way too hard to evaluate.

Unlike other areas of medicine it’s also one of those frustrating areas because there are interesting devices, pastes and tools that should be easy to purchase but are locked behind the gates of a prescription.
by robviren | 2025-06-30 13:44:08+00:00
Trying to make out paint for text (essentially a Large Symbol Model). Tokenize renders of PDFs with patches of some sort and see if I can make a multi language monochrome visual vocabulary where I can embed language and document metadata. I want to be able to convert my tax statements into musical compositions and render pride and prejudice as a 80s computer technical manual. Could also allow for direct language translation without the complex language tokenization we have today. Literally visual pattern understanding.
by honkycat | 2025-06-30 13:44:34+00:00
It's not AI. We are in a recession caused by fear and instability.

Tech may just be dying in general.

This could finally be the collapse we have been waiting for.

While the US was allowing capitalists to hoard all of the USs excess capital, China was facilitating the development of important industries via central planning.

Look at Intel. The owning class has become so greedy and incompetent. They aren't even running functional companies anymore: just grifting for government money then using that for stock buybacks.
Show HN: Sysadmin.ca Free Tools and Real-World Resources for Everyday Sysadmins
by WallyCanada | 2025-06-30 13:44:55+00:00
Built by an IT admin for IT admins, sysadmin.ca is a no-fluff, privacy-respecting hub of daily tools, vendor call prep templates, cheat sheets, outage trackers, and real-world sysadmin resources. It’s completely free, with zero signups and just one ad at the bottom to keep the lights on. Designed to actually help — not just talk theory. Feedback welcome!
by techdp | 2025-06-30 13:45:48+00:00
We've been building a GenAI application with fairly simple credit-based workflows to begin with. But just a month into launch, the workflows have started getting more complex, and we’re now rolling out 4 different pricing plans with volume-based tiers.

I was exploring how best to build a flexible credit billing system when I came across Flexprice — and I have to say, it's a great product.

Good to see you here on HN. Wishing you all the success!

Cheers.
by bmacho | 2025-06-30 13:46:57+00:00
> There have been proposals to inject sulfur into airline engines at high altitudes so this approach has been well studied. The first challenge is that even if it addresses the problem of global temperatures rising it does nothing to address other issues such as ocean acidification. At some point C02 levels become physiologically relevant to humans and it feels like living in a stuffy room all the time.

What about wars and cancer?

> The second problem is that it has to be maintained forever.

Any solution should be "maintained forever", at least until we have the ability to undo it, so basically everything while there are humans on the planet.
by mort96 | 2025-06-30 13:47:30+00:00
Wait but if "bits of memory" here was supposed to be "units of computation", that means that:

* The old assumption was that if you require t steps to complete, you need t/log(t) units of computation

* This new proof shows that if you require t steps to complete, you need sqrt(t) units of computation

Surely this doesn't make sense? Using any definition of "unit of computation" I would intuitively assume, computing t steps requires something proportionalt to t units of computation...
by reedf1 | 2025-06-30 13:47:31+00:00
I think it is possible that the widespread introduction of ChatGPT will cause a brief hiatus on hiring due to the inelasticity of demand. For the sake of argument, imagine that ChatGPT makes your average developer 4x more productive. It will take a while before the expectation becomes that 4x more work is delivered. That 4x more work is scheduled in sprints. That 4x more features are developed. That 4x more projects are sold to clients/users. When the demand eventually catches up (if it exists), the hiring will begin again.
by happosai | 2025-06-30 13:47:52+00:00
All cars have become a lot more bigger. I was just watching the movie Jewel of the Nile on Disney+. There was a scene, where a dictator and the protagonists cram into to Rolls Royce of 80s and I just thought the average suv these days has more interior space...

While flight travel has got cheaper by making seats more compact and planes more efficient, the cars go the opposite direction - drive luxuriously like kings and burn the planet with bigger and bigger gas guzzlers...
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-30 13:48:10+00:00
>The C pillars are too large and the body too high for you to get good sight to anything behind you in a modern vehicle.

Which is the work product of the 2000s era of "legislate to make cars better" advocacy.

90s SUVs rolled a lot, so they changed the rules to require them be strong, Strong made them hard to see out of in reverse so they added cameras. Now because both are regulatory required, at substantial cost, you can't even make a small vehicle that doesn't have both.

It's not like the Subarus and Volvo wagons of the 00s were lacking in rollover strength or rear visibility, but now that you have to have the features by law and when all the dust of engineering tradeoffs settles the modern analogues wind up just as bad to see out of as everything else, because why wouldn't you if you're required to have the mitigation technology. No reason for 2020s Subaru shove that stupid steel bar in the pillar (at great expense) to keep it sleek and skinny when they have to have the fat pillar mitigation tech installed by law.

How many times we gonna run laps of this feedback loop before we decide the problem is systemic?
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-30 13:48:24+00:00
You can get pretty close to this by (1) setting up certbot and (2) configuring your system to actually send emails if cron jobs fail.

I can see the use in a tool that will scan all certificates configured in local web servers and monitors for close expiration dates, though. Not just Let's Encrypt, but also any other ACME accounts and certificate directories you may need. The biggest challenge would probably be dealing with encrypted certificate files, and after that getting email set up correctly. Nobody seems to have made it because it's so easy to script or add to a pre-existing monitoring system, so this could be a fun open source project. You probably can't use the letsencrypt brand name, though.
by bluGill | 2025-06-30 13:48:32+00:00
In the US most visit that person twice a year. They have that ultrasound machine, but they only use it on people who don't visit that often - the machine just gets the build up do the point where manual tools can finish the job. If you brush/floss and visit regularly the manual tools are all they need.

In this was at least it looks like the US system is better. Of course there is no way nuance can be expressed in a short forum like this, but maybe you need to look at the Finland system to see if it is really good enough.
by mikewarot | 2025-06-30 13:48:43+00:00
It occurs to me that I need a separate electronics workbench, more than the 2 square feet that I can make by moving my keyboard out of the way. So, this month... my goal is to have everything set up on a workbench.

Generating an estimated $130 million per day (100 Megatokens/second) worth of GPT4 tokens at home will have to wait (plus I'd need to upgrade the power and AC in this room a bit to handle the estimated 750 Kw of power it would take)
by TrackerFF | 2025-06-30 13:48:46+00:00
Every undergrad study is, as of now, possible to pass with AI models. Some of them not only pass, but pass with flying colors.

The harsh reality is that academia as a whole needs to be revamped. The easy solution would be to revert back to paper only exams, and physical attendance - but that would also exclude a ton students. A huge number of modern students are online students, or similar programs where you don't need to show up physically. Moreover, I don't think universities / colleges themselves want to revert back, as it would mean hiring more people, spending more on buildings, etc.