MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Best way to integrate multiple customer data sources into one journey map?
by MarianSteyn | 2025-06-09 07:26:59+00:00
For those working in data or product, how are you solving the problem of connecting user data across tools?

We’ve got marketing attribution, CRM activity, billing data, and product usage all in different systems. We’re considering Fivetran + BigQuery + Looker, but I’d love to know what stacks or strategies others have used — especially if you're automating it at scale.

Bonus if you have advice on keeping the pipeline maintainable long-term.
by Traubenfuchs | 2025-06-09 07:27:05+00:00
We live in a post quality age.

Consumers just don't care.

AI dialed this to the max: The early vibe coding startup catches the worm. Working with designers, doing A/B tests, QA, product management, nowadays all of this will make you lose to the competition.

You just need to get something out that looks as if it works, that makes users feel as if it works, whether it really does or not, whether the quality is atrocious or good.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-06-09 07:27:46+00:00
I don't think that the core product is nearly complete, even though I'm happy to keep paying for it. I still find myself falling back to Google for things like weather, flight info, or restaurants. I also put a family member on it that has to search for home products regularly as part of their contractor job. Google's decline was making that impossible. They wanted kagi to surface interesting results beyond SEO'd junk sites, which it mostly failed to do (though still better than Google).
by p_l | 2025-06-09 07:27:53+00:00
It's more a reference to "sola scriptura" and the dismissal of scientific thought related to it. Similar movement happened, with way more success, in Islamic world AFAIK.

And yes, protestants were actually going more apeshit about heliocentrism than catholic church. The preface "explaining away" heliocentrism as just mathematical device instead of description of reality was by lutheran theologian, the catholic church being big patron of astronomy at the time.

It was mathematicians and astronomers who were against heliocentric model who were "expert witness" for inquisition, and despite their arguments the only thing inquisition struck was pieces about theology. Galileo got slammed originally for claiming his work as established fact, and the further problems were more political in nature when he attacked pope in his next book and alienated his previous supporters. Not great, not terrible, honestly pretty good outcome for the time period.
by belorn | 2025-06-09 07:28:17+00:00
What modern recursive DNS uses is called Query Name Minimisation, and is enabled by default by some.

If you include the TLD as part of "Lot of people are going to know who you are and what you're looking up", ignoring any mitigating effect of Query Name Minimisation, the number of people is identical to any other setup.

For ISP resolver it will be the ISP and the owner of the domain name through web logs.

For public DNS resolver it will be the public resolver and owner of the domain through web logs.

for personal recursive resolver, it will be the TLD and the owner of the domain name through dns and web logs. The TLD job in this case is to give you the authoritative name servers of the domain name that the owner of the domain has.

With Query Name Minimisation, the TLD only get the domain name without any subdomains. They can't see the distinction between a user reading hacker news, or a user going to the main page of ycombinator to read about YC invests.
by robocat | 2025-06-09 07:29:00+00:00
I'm using ChatGPT and you can edit the personalisation prompt to program a personality (I'm trending towards a surreal character with my current prompt). It feels kinda like asking an actor to act in a specific manner.

The previous article "out with the girlboss, in with the trophy wife -- Gen Z’s rejection of millennial feminism, in 3 tiktoks" is also eye-opening (although wouldn't meet HN submitting guidelines): https://giraffetales.substack.com/p/out-with-the-girlboss-in...
by m101 | 2025-06-09 07:29:46+00:00
Ignore the other comment on here.

The problem is that if you look at the detail it's far less obvious, and to see this one needs to be sceptical of the stories one has been led to believe.

Things to get you started:

- look up energy return on investment (ERoI) by different energy sources

- look up lifetime co2 cost of different energy sources

- look up recent grid interconnection fees by generation type

- look up Spain's recent power outage and things like "inertia"

- look up how much waste is create by different energy sources over their lifetimes, and consider that nuclear plants will probably be pushing 100+ years eventually

- consider that having solar panels in some parts of the world don't work in winter so it means you can't actually get rid of older infrastructure at all (and hence you need to keep it running)

- on electrification of transport ask yourself why we choose to put extremely valuable electrical energy into locomotion when alternatives exist

- consider that when we "greenify" our grid through solar panels we often only export that pollution abroad

- consider why all these things need such massive government subsidy

The only real solution to our electrical problems is a combination of nuclear and gas, and the reason we haven't chosen more nuclear is entirely self inflicted.
by cornholio | 2025-06-09 07:31:17+00:00
Zig is not a memory safe language and does not attempt to prevent its users from shooting themselves in the leg; it tries to make those unsafe actions explicit and simple, unlike something like C++ that drowns you in complexity, but if you really want to do pointer wrangling and using memory after freeing it, zig allows you to do it.

This design philosophy should lead to countless segfaults that are the result of Zig working as designed. It also relegates Zig to the small niche of projects in modern programming where performance and developer productivity are more important than resilience and correctness.
by Jedd | 2025-06-09 07:31:56+00:00
Probably true.

But for those of us outside the USA bubble, it's incredibly tring to have to intuit geo information (when geo information would add to the understanding).

As others noted in sibling comments, TFA had in fact mentioned in passing their location (in their quoted prompt to chatgpt, and at the very end of the third supporting point for the decision to go for an Nvidia 4070) 'California, CA'. I confess that I skimmed over both those paragraphs.

Now, sure, CA is a country code, but I stand corrected that the author completely hid their location. Had I spotted those clues I'd not have to have made any assumptions around wall power capabilities & costs, new & second hand market availability / costs, etc.

I think I mostly catered for those considerations in the rest of my original comment though - asserted power sensitivity makes it surprising that a higher-power-requiring, smaller-RAM-capacity, more-expensive-than-a-sibling-generation-16GB card was selected.
by Gisbitus | 2025-06-09 07:32:26+00:00
This post was a wake up call. Last year I spent a week learning Swift the "old fashioned way" following Apple's tutorials, with not much to show for it when I was done. Even though I use AI for coding daily, since XCode doesn't natively support it, I just decided to not use it.

Seeing how far you went in just a couple of days, I realize now how much I missed out.

Congrats on the app!
by cyberax | 2025-06-09 07:32:30+00:00
I think, they have started blending in some AI results into the main search feed. And not just for ads, it would be understandable. My personal example, I was trying to find consultants that could help with passing the Apple Store review.

Somehow, Google decided to show me the ferry timetable: https://imgur.com/a/bgFax59

Like, whut?
by jrowen | 2025-06-09 07:32:52+00:00
I was certainly surprised when I saw images of the inside, and upon reflection wasn't sure exactly what I had had in mind or how that would have worked with the realities of infrastructure needs for a venue like that.

But still, it feels weird to express a sentiment of "well it didn't really live up to the sphere thing" while dismissing the massive obvious spherical component that was the innovative work of engineering/tech/art/whatever.
by AndyKelley | 2025-06-09 07:33:52+00:00
Fair enough, and yeah I hear you on the compilation cost of all the targets. We don't have aarch64 yet but in addition to x86_64 we do have an LLVM backend, a C backend, a SPIR-V backend, WebAssembly backend, RISC-V backend, and sparc backend. All that plus the stuff I mentioned earlier in 15s on a modern laptop.
by andirk | 2025-06-09 07:34:32+00:00
Example: Reddit is persistent on the user downloading the app when almost everything I digest from it is 95% plain text and basic images, and occasionally a video embed. There is zero use for an app when the World Wide Web was made for this type of content since the early 1990s.

Maybe that's more an app vs mobile web argument, but the point is adding complexity that adds no value is really annoying.
by mediumsmart | 2025-06-09 07:34:45+00:00
I just rewrote a wordpress site made 7 years ago for a client as a static site. Replaced the index.html 4 image parallax with a 3 image css slider (mobile, desktop versions) and added 5 languages for the 5 pages the site has.

complete website now weighs 15.9 MB - 14.5 MB is images (395 including responsive versions plus fallback twin). The index page now has a total of 558KB while the same page in the old WP site clocks 21MB - (5.7MB for the 4 images) which it loads in steps 8MB - then 17MB and jumping to final 21MB when I move the cursor from the reload button over to the page.
by cyberax | 2025-06-09 07:35:42+00:00
Might be location-dependent. I'm on a trip in Turkey, and the corretct link to US ESTA is the first result. However, if I switch to a VPN to my home, I get garbage for the first 5 results.

I also have my own WTFs with Google, I even started collecting them: https://imgur.com/a/bgFax59
by wjnc | 2025-06-09 07:35:58+00:00
About the weather patterns. We live near a large area of natural dunes. In school we were taught that the natural dunes reflect sunlight, leading to rising air. Although I can't remember the exact meteorology (rising air generally leads to rain) they showed us the precipitation patterns and the surrounding areas get more rain and the dunes less. As a layman, I except forest vs. concrete will lead to similar situations. More rain near forests, less near concrete. Is that what you see on radar?

I now see that u/steve_adams posted pretty much the same point. I wonder how I was taught this 25 years ago in high school, with local graphs for evidence, and it still isn't scientific consensus. Super local weather models aren't a thing? (This is in jest, they obviously are a thing. Perhaps it's harder than I imagine.)
by defrost | 2025-06-09 07:36:35+00:00
I have no particular love of the Catholics but as a point of history it wasn't the heliocentrism that saw Galileo on trial over a book he was asked by the Church to write, a book that drew heavily on data gathered by other Church sponsered observers of the cosmos.

His crime was "mocking the Pope" (who he (IIRC) got on quite well with earlier in time) by casting him as a useful idiot asking dumb questions.

His trial was pushed not by the Pope (again, IIRC) but by others who he had savagely mocked in other works who saw their chance to exact revenge.

This is more a tale of the curmudgeonly partial outsider within a highly political top heavy bureaucracy falling foul of ladder climbers with a personal axe to grind.
by nobody9999 | 2025-06-09 07:36:42+00:00
>DNS over HTTPS exclusively exists because stuff like Pi-hole started eating into Ad Revenue for Google. That's why this "feature" is so hard to disable in the browsers as well.

Exactly. Which is why I point my Pi-Hole at my own recursive resolver.

Can my ISP see those queries? Sure. Are they using transparent proxies to redirect my queries to their resolvers? No.

Is my ISP cataloguing all my recursive resolutions? Maybe. But probably not. Theoretically, they could, but mirroring all the traffic to storage for tens of millions of customers seems exorbitant, unnecessary and wasteful.

More likely, I'd expect that at some point (likely the router interface at my local head-end), they use Netflow[0] and/or something similar, to characterize the IP-based traffic being transmitted through it. The collected data wouldn't contain the DNS queries themselves, so my ISP would need to rely on just the Netflow data.

And while it is possible for ISPs to correlate DNS queries to Netflow streams[1][2], using a recursive resolver rather than their resolver makes it more cumbersome for them (or Cloudflare, or Google, etc.) to do so.

Regardless, I'd much prefer that my recursive resolver use encrypted communications, not so much between it and the root servers, but between it and authoritative servers. The former would be nice, but depending on the encryption overhead (TLS or even just TCP connections to the root servers would require significant extra resources), likely impractical.

>DNSCurve exists and was a far better solution

Is there any recent activity WRT that protocol? I found some stuff from at least a decade ago.

The IETF's DNS Private Exchange[3] (dpriv) working group has a few interesting things, but it sure would be nice to have the DNS equivalent of smtp's 'starttls'[5] feature, perhaps ala RFC9539[4]?

Perhaps one day there will be mainstream support for that.

What I do works for my use case, but likely isn't workable for many (most?) other folks.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetFlow

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.05682

[2] https://github.com/maganiss/FlowDNS

[3] https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/dprive/documents/

[4] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9539.txt

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunistic_TLS
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-09 07:38:05+00:00
And it takes more than an hour to listen to one. If you had motivation (such as not being able to get a good player) you'd figure out a system to rip a single disk right when you want to play it. And probably to start playing before it's done ripping.

Also the bulk of cheap drives out there do at least DVDs at 8x and CDs at 24x (which are roughly the same RPM), so with a smidge of motivation you'd also get one of those and be ripping CDs in closer to 5 minutes.

I'd probably make a little project where I buy 4 drives for $70 total, and once in a while I spend an hour ripping 30-40 CDs while listening to whichever one appeals to me the most out of the batch.
by hoseja | 2025-06-09 07:38:07+00:00
What a silly gadget.

Also by the way the Normandy beaches were NOT fortified with bunkers very much at all (unlike what you might have seen in Saving Private Ryan), just trenches and sandbags. A large portion of Omaha beach casualties were inflicted by a single machine gun nest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Severloh
by wtmt | 2025-06-09 07:38:07+00:00
I’ve never even tried the free tier of Kagi because it’s limited and because the paid tiers are expensive (just like in your situation). I’m not looking for a free solution and I do pay for email (though not like tens of dollars a month, which is expensive).

Kagi’s official position is not to support regional pricing (visit https://kagifeedback.org/ and search for “regional pricing” to go through the “Implement regional pricing” thread). The service is probably out of reach even for many people in the first world. Even its family tier is expensive.

Hopefully, when it reaches a much higher number of users, it’s able to reduce prices. Or it can just remain a niche service and potentially be disrupted by a competitor.
by nehal3m | 2025-06-09 07:38:31+00:00
I think you're overestimating the amount of stations we'll need (or maybe I'm underestimating it, let's find out). People tend to carry over habits from fossil fuel vehicles to electric ones, but there's a significant difference: You have a gas station at home. A very cheap one, and using it is as easy as plugging into a standard outlet. I drive electric and on most days I use a little less than half the battery charge. When I return home a standard outlet can get it back to full by the next morning; the only time I ever stop at a public charger is when I'm on a long trip, and those are few and far between.

I appreciate that not everybody will have the opportunity to charge their car at their own house, but a significant percentage will, and they're motivated to since it's by far the cheapest way to drive.

But maybe I'm missing something?
by SllX | 2025-06-09 07:38:51+00:00
I mean I'm fine with them as they are now, corporate-structure-wise. What happens if Kagi starts to suck? I stop paying for it and move on with my life, so rather than worrying about what could happen, I'll just enjoy it for what it is now.

If nothing else, Google taught me that just because something is great today doesn't mean it will necessarily be great tomorrow. I can't get attached.
by Mindwipe | 2025-06-09 07:39:12+00:00
> Well, countless court rulings in Europe?

> e.g., https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2007/05/finland-court-br...

That case was a) from a district court and didn't even set precedent in Finland, never mind Europe-wide and b) more importantly was overturned on appeal, with the court of appeal noting that the original court has misunderstood the meaning of the word "effective."

https://www.turre.com/court-of-appeal-overturned-the-css-dec...

> This method is authorized by a French law decision CE 10e et 9e sous­sect., 16 juillet 2008, n° 301843 on interoperability.

That decision pre-dates France's enactment of the anti-circumvention provisions in the European Directive. It doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of system, because there was no law of the sort at the time.

VLC continues to be distributed mainly because the Streisand Effect means that nobody in the film industry wanted to relitigate the case after the anti-circumvention provision went into effect, not that these are legal in the EU.
by titzer | 2025-06-09 07:39:23+00:00
For Virgil I went through three different compile-time interpreters. The first walked a tree-like IR that predated SSA. Then, after SSA, I designed a linked-list-like representation specifically for interpretation speed. After dozens of little discrepancies between this custom interpreter and compile output, I finally got rid of it and wrote an interpreter that works directly on the SSA intermediate representation. In the worst case, the SSA interpreter is only 2X slower than the custom interpreter. In the best case, it's faster, and saves a translation step. I feel it is worth it because of the maintenance burden and bugs.
by GoToRO | 2025-06-09 07:40:12+00:00
In my locale it was the same. Ultimately those kind of companies didn't actually have the job and I ended up with a company that is 100% remote.

What I saw were companies that posted job ads (as in actual online ads) to hide the fact they were losing customers and had no jobs, companies that tested what the applicants would tolerate (RTO) and so on. Also a lot of companies posponed everything 6 months so the new budgets get in. They need the people but they can't afford them.
by pontifier | 2025-06-09 07:41:03+00:00
Garbage in, Garbage out... My experiment with vibe coding was quite nice, but it did require a collaborative back and forth, mostly because I didn't know exactly what I wanted. It was easiest to ask for something, then describe how what it gave me needed to be changed. The cost of this type of interaction was much easier than trying to craft the perfect prompt on the first go. My first prompts were garbage, but the output gradually converged to something quite good.
by esskay | 2025-06-09 07:41:38+00:00
I think it depends on the usecase (and budget) as to what's 'best' really. I've got Proxmox running on a couple of servers and it's great.

But I also run Unraid on the main NAS server purely for its ZFS drive setup. Being able to throw in a bunch of drives of various sizes and brands on a home machine is pretty valuable and saves a huge amount of money.
by lipowitz | 2025-06-09 07:42:05+00:00
I think that's kind of sad. There are a lot of good technologies that require some investment to understand them and a lot of worse is better approaches that end in a mayhem that is ultimately a terrible work environment.

For a while it seemed like investment would win but now I think we will have massive tombs of poorly written stuff that can only be worked around with even more LLM generated solutions. It is like the software bloat problem we've had recently but on steroids.
by echelon | 2025-06-09 07:42:08+00:00
Our genome is a machine, from the nucleotides to the packing, to the enzyme activity, to the metabolic flux.

Our bodies are bigger machines made of lots of little machines.

Our minds or conscious egos or "souls" are the neurotransmitter and activation activity of the connectome and all of its cells and synaptic weights and metabolic activity. They're our lived experiences for as long as our brains can function. Minds experience and produce wonderful things.

If you divorce the body from the mind, there is no "person". Just a very complicated machine. A very valuable machine full of parts.

A human body in a vegetative state is not a person. It's a dormant machine. People may have emotional attachment to that vestige, but it is no longer capable of being a person. It is not a person.

We use brain dead humans for organ transplant all the time. If you understand the premise, then it isn't that far-fetched that we might grow vegetative humans in a lab for medical use and research.

Bodies that never have brains can never become persons. They're no different from plants.
by climb_stealth | 2025-06-09 07:42:33+00:00
For me part of it is supporting a project that is worth getting behind. I like that someone goes against the big ad-supported players in a field where it would seem impossible.

Features like boosting the niche forums I browse for search results is just a bonus on top.

I agree that I could go back to DDG and not feel like I am missing too much, but that doesn't bother me.
by wtmt | 2025-06-09 07:43:22+00:00
Not GP, and I’m in a totally different country than the GP, but I’d be willing to pay USD 2 a month for a duo plan. I’d be willing to pay on an annual basis too, since small monthly payments usually incur higher processing fees (percentage wise) for the seller. Just for comparison, this amount would be equivalent to a Spotify Premium Duo subscription (with its regional pricing).
by andirk | 2025-06-09 07:43:24+00:00
I too use my share of simplifications (Brave Browser, Ghostery, archive.is ) but the fact is until ~2008, web content was auxiliary to the main form of content ingestion via newspapers, magazines, TV, radio. Now that the Web is one of the main forms of content distribution, there's paywalls, ads, newsletter modals. People deserve to get compensated for their contributions, but it's really annoying how poor flashy web design has become ubiquitous at least partially for that reason.