MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-16 13:03:30+00:00
> The Forer/Barnum effect is why horoscopes, myers-briggs, enneagrams, fortune tellers, and similar parlor tricks work.

I'd argue it's also true of actual therapy.

It's not like therapists can see through your skull and interpret patterns in your brain. They mostly listen intently, and ask some pointed questions, and make you fill in the blanks yourself, too.

Which is to say:

1) I'm not sure if seeking immunity from this effect to full extent possible is a good idea;

2) It makes no sense to round ChatGPT off with the horoscopes and quacks, if the difference between that group and genuine therapy or spiritual help is a matter of tiny details, not of kind.
Engineers at our startup don't build features anymore
by s4293918 | 2025-06-16 13:03:52+00:00
At our startup, engineers don't build features anymore. They build APIs that internal tools like Zapier, Make and N8n can connect to. Most "features" like running an SQL query, sending a push notification when product X is ordered gets built by ops or product folks using those tools.

If you've got the idea, you build and ship it yourself. It's fast, empowering and it keeps engineers focused on building a reliable, scalable, secure set of APIs. It also forces us to write better, cleaner APIs and the APIs stay stateless and focused. Debugging can be hard and sometimes duct-tape logic quietly piles up.

I think it's better than the usual model where eng is the bottleneck for every new flow. Has anyone else tried this kind of setup? Where does it fall down or is it the new normal?
by akavel | 2025-06-16 13:05:04+00:00
I had some light contact with Prolog long ago during my studies - I have a rough idea how it is used and what it can be useful for, but only on surface, not deep at all. I keep hearing about Datalog since, as some amazing thing, but I don't seem able to understand what it is - i.e. to grasp an answer to a simple question:

what is that Datalog improves over Prolog?

Just now I tried to skim the Wikipedia page of Datalog; the vague theory I'm getting from it, is that maybe Prolog has relatively poor performance, whereas Datalog dramatically improves performance (presumably allowing much bigger datasets and much more parallelized processing), at the cost of reducing expressiveness and features in some other important ways? (including making it no longer Turing-complete?) Is that what it's about, or am I completely missing the mark?
by westurner | 2025-06-16 13:05:43+00:00
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43738580 :

> FWIU this Superfluid Quantum Gravity [SQG, or SQR Superfluid Quantum Relativity] rejects dark matter and/or negative mass in favor of supervaucuous supervacuum, but I don't think it attempts to predict other phases and interactions like Dark fluid theory?

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43310933 re: second sound:

> - [ ] Models fluidic attractor systems

> - [ ] Models superfluids [BEC: Bose-Einstein Condensates]

> - [ ] Models n-body gravity in fluidic systems

> - [ ] Models retrocausality

From https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=38061551 :

> A unified model must: differ from classical mechanics where observational results don't match classical predictions, describe superfluid 3Helium in a beaker, describe gravity in Bose-Einstein condensate superfluids , describe conductivity in superconductors and dielectrics, not introduce unoobserved "annihilation", explain how helicopters have lift, describe quantum locking, describe paths through fluids and gravity, predict n-body gravity experiments on earth in fluids with Bernoulli's and in space, [...]

> What else must a unified model of gravity and other forces predict with low error?
by aaronbaugher | 2025-06-16 13:07:24+00:00
That's exactly how it is for me. If I can visualize the whole task from start to finish, it's generally easy to go ahead and knock it out. If there's a part I'm unsure of, I can put it off forever. That's also true if one of the steps is "call so-and-so and ask about such-and-such," if I don't know what the answer is going to be. That uncertainty blocks the whole project in my mind.

Starting to write this comment was easy, because I knew what I was going to say before I started typing; but writing a book seems impossible, because I can't hold the whole thing in my mind at once. Funny thing is, this comment has changed and expanded since I started it, but since I didn't expect that, there was no uncertainty and I didn't hesitate to start it. Now if I could just find a way to fool myself about bigger projects.
Ask HN: How do I market to consumers as a solo dev about to go to uni?
by Alex-Programs | 2025-06-16 13:08:13+00:00
Hi!

I've spent my gap year making a language learning tool[0]. It's been somewhat successful, but I really don't have a sustainable marketing strategy (e.g. SEO or ads) - it's all from me sharing it, making blog posts, etc. I'm going to uni in ~2.5 months, and I'd like to be able to keep it growing, even as most of my attention goes towards my studies.

My users are really happy with it, the conversion rate is good, and there's been a surprising amount of word of mouth from them already, but it's just not quite enough.

I've had some limited success from Reddit text ads, but their algorithm is determined to optimise for cost per click, rather than conversions, and it's only getting worse over time. Text in general is a lot easier for me to work with.

X ads don't work at all. Nor do Google or Reddit banner ads, or Adwords.

SEO is an expensive labyrinth. I've made some progress there, paying for some backlinks and having a high quality blog, but not enough to rank for the keywords that matter. I do have some capital (single-digit thousands of £), and I'd be willing to use it, but only if I know it'll actually give me a good return.

I made an affiliate program with generous payouts (my entire profit margin and then some - 50% of all revenue for 6 months), aaand nobody's used it. I suppose I need to treat that as an entire separate marketing task.

I made the world's best machine translator (https://nuenki.app/translator), and that's cool and has got me some users, but again, doesn't scale.

Maybe it's the landing page? People are much more likely to convert if I give them even a one or two sentence summary of it beforehand, so maybe it isn't explaining it well enough.

Anyway, yeah, I'm not really sure where to go from here! I'd appreciate any advice.

[0] https://nuenki.app
by moffkalast | 2025-06-16 13:08:32+00:00
That's usually the case if there's only a few people with solar or if your local infrastructure is overbuilt, since grids typically aren't designed to handle residential power generation.

If there's too much solar in your area (which will be the eventual end result everywhere) you get net billing, where you don’t get charged for the energy you use, but they won't pay you a dime for anything over what you use or will even disconnect you if you overproduce so the local substation doesn't explode because it wasn't specced for any of this shit.

The end result is that you don't get paid for any of your daily overproduction and still get billed at night, the worst of both worlds. It incentives people to buy batteries and store the peaks, with grid power being mostly optional.
by IAmBroom | 2025-06-16 13:09:25+00:00
No.

The support structure that is carrying the weight of the building is not a floor.

It's bedrock, a/o concrete pylons. Force doesn't ever take a 90-degree turn. Floors are only structural to carpet, furniture, and meatbags (tensioning members aren't part of the floor, even though they run parallel to them).
by ForHackernews | 2025-06-16 13:10:07+00:00
"5 Alternative Representations Restore Performance To test whether the failures reflect reasoning limitations or format constraints, we conducted preliminary testing of the same models on Tower of Hanoi N = 15 using a different representation: Prompt: "Solve Tower of Hanoi with 15 disks. Output a Lua function that prints the solution when called."

Results: Very high accuracy across tested models (Claude-3.7-Sonnet, Claude Opus 4, OpenAI o3, Google Gemini 2.5), completing in under 5,000 tokens.

The generated solutions correctly implement the recursive algorithm, demonstrating intact reasoning capabilities when freed from exhaustive enumeration requirement""

Is there's something I'm missing here?

This seems like it demonstrates the exact opposite of what the authors are claiming: Yes, your bot is an effective parrot that can output a correct Lua program that exists somewhere in the training data. No, your bot is not "thinking" and cannot effectively reason through the algorithm itself.
by rorosen | 2025-06-16 13:10:17+00:00
Thanks! I was also surprised that there are very few tools to work with the seekable format. I could imagine that at least some people have a use-case for it.

Yes, the name is a combination of zstd and seek. Funnily enough, I wanted to name it just zeek first before I knew that it already exists, so I switched to zeekstd. You're not the first person asking me if there is any relation to zeek and I understand how that is misleading. In hindsight the name is a little unfortunate.
by spacechild1 | 2025-06-16 13:10:25+00:00
You are absolutely right of course! No idea, why I thought std::function existed before C++11. Mea culpa!

> Furthermore absolutely no one should use std::bind, it's an absolute abomination.

Agree 100%! I almost always use a wrapper lambda.

However, it's worth pointing out that C++20 gave us std::bind_front(), which is really useful if you want to just bind the first N arguments:

struct Foo { void bar(int a, int b, int c); }; Foo foo; using Callback = std::function<void(int, int, int)>; // with std::bind (ugh): using namespace std::placeholders; Callback cb1(std::bind(&Foo::bar, &foo, _1, _2, _3)); // lambda (without perfect forwarding): Callback cb2([&foo](auto&&... args) { foo.bar(args...); }); // lambda (with perfect forwarding): Callback cb3([&foo](auto&&... args) { foo.bar(std::forward<decltype(args)>(args)...); }); // std::bind_front Callback cb4(std::bind_front(&Foo::bar, &foo));

I think std::bind_front() is the clear winner here.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-06-16 13:10:32+00:00
It's instructive to look at how the Netherlands went from car-focussed design in the 1970s to their modern multi-modal designs nowadays. It just needs the political will, which in the Netherlands was helped with the Stop The Child Murder campaign (Stop de kindermoord).

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Transportation_Planning_Casebo...
by drysine | 2025-06-16 13:11:18+00:00
Out of the 6 sites you listed only the last one fails to open for some reason. Tor works too.

Regarding "essential reads" - have you heard of Ukrainian drones controlled via mobile internet? Expect mobile internet to be off from time to time. That's the reality we live in until Russia wins this war.

OTOH, I expect internet censorship to get stricter, like there are talks about blocking telegram again, and there is nothing good in it for us.
by el_don_almighty | 2025-06-16 13:11:39+00:00
I have been looking for something that would ingest a decade of old Word and PowerPoint documents and convert them into a standardized format where the individual elements could be repurposed for other formats. This seems like a critical building block for a system that would accomplish this task.

Now I need a catalog, archive, or historian function that archives and pulls the elements easily. Amazing work!
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-06-16 13:11:57+00:00
In one breath: scientific vigor required for your opposition.

In the next breath: "anyone who disagrees with me is a loser."

> Those that make the claims that LLM's are capable of suffering, that they show signs of consciousness need to deliver. If they can't, it is reasonable to assume they are full of shit.

Replace LLM with any marginalized group. Black people, Jews, etc. I can easily just use this to excuse any heinous crime I want - because you cannot prove that you aren't a philosophical zombie to me.

Defaulting to cruelty in the face of unfalsifiablility is absurd.
by steven_okrstool | 2025-06-16 13:12:10+00:00
Over the past few months, we surveyed 200 early-stage startup teams to understand how they're using OKRs in practice - what works, what breaks, and where the impact shows up.

Some standout takeaways:

- 68% said OKRs helped them reach $1M ARR faster - 39% saw measurable impact within 1–3 months - 89% wish they had started sooner - Most began using OKRs around the 6–10 person mark

The biggest benefits reported were improved alignment, faster decision-making, and easier weekly check-ins.

I’d love to compare notes with this community:

- How have OKRs helped (or hurt) your team? - What do you wish you’d known earlier? - Are there better alternatives for early-stage startups?

(Full report drops tomorrow. Previewing it here first).
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-06-16 13:13:25+00:00
that is one of my pet peeves: people who try to dominate discussions or make them about themselves (you might notice they say "I" a lot)

another way you might see it manifest: a simple question is asked, and without pausing to hear the answer, the questioner then goes on a long speech about their personal experiences and why they're asking the question and what the meaning of the question is etc etc, rephrasing the question several different times along the way

if you're actually interested in learning the answer to your question: *think* about the question first; compress it into 1 short sentence (5-10 seconds long) ending in a question mark; say it; and as soon as you hit the question mark, immediately be silent so the answerer can actually answer the question and get to other questioners

if you're worried they might not understand the question that way: do it anyways, and if they don't, wait for a chance to ask again (after others have had theirs)
by viraptor | 2025-06-16 13:14:00+00:00
And Spotify is not interested in improving at all. One artist I liked got some generated things added as new albums years ago and I still can't find a way to tell them they're different artists using the same name. The band is not active it seems and not interested in raising the issue themselves. Spotify ignored all the feedback I tried to send. They really don't give a fuck as long as money keeps coming.
by codesnik | 2025-06-16 13:14:02+00:00
from what I know, prolog looked declarative, in a way that you just encode relations and it figures out the answers, but it really depended on the order of those rules, and some additional instructions like "cut" which not only prevented waste computations, but could affect the results.

datalog on the other hands is more or less a relation db with a different syntax.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-16 13:15:14+00:00
People still say Twitter instead of X. Of course people are going to continue using the name used when something was first introduced and engrained into their day to day vs the rebrand. It would be funny if ssl.com just redirects to tls.com and get upset when people still refer to it as ssl. The only successful rebrand attempts have been company names like when Comcast became Xfinity or MCI becoming Worldcom type situations
Ask HN: Would your team use a zero-mutation CLI to audit Kubernetes RBAC access?
by tutran-se | 2025-06-16 13:15:17+00:00
We recently went through a SOC 2 audit and hit a wall when it came to Kubernetes RBAC. The auditor asked, “Can you show who had access to secrets across your cluster during this window?” We ended up: - Dumping RoleBindings and ClusterRoles with kubectl - Manually parsing YAML to figure out permissions - Taking screenshots of shell output It was brittle, slow, and painful.

So we built a tool: Permiflow — a CLI that scans your cluster's RBAC and generates clean, audit-ready reports without touching your cluster.

What it does: - Scans Roles, RoleBindings, ClusterRoles, ClusterRoleBindings - Flags risks: cluster-admin, wildcard verbs, secrets access, etc - Outputs: Markdown reports (easy to share with GRC/auditors), CSV + JSON (for automation) - Supports drift detection: diff two scans and see what changed - Can fail CI if risky access appears (--fail-on high) - Doesn’t use agents, CRDs, or mutate anything (read-only)

We’re not sure if this is: - A real pain other teams feel too - Or just us over-engineering an audit script

Would this be useful for your team? Would you expect it to integrate into CI, GitOps, or just be a one-off tool?
by jakupovic | 2025-06-16 13:15:44+00:00
Bought my copy at a flea market. Installed it on my Compaq, 233mhz or so, 128mb. Got it going by booting the system using the floppy. The article doesn't mention it much, but the distribution came with a booklet helping you install the distro. and an intro to unix. This was my start. For a while all I had was the text interface as X and GUI was a problem to get going. Then the modem, you ever try to dial up, never having used computers before, using new to me everything. Still love it to this day. I also went and got my RHCE, which was pretty hard. Anyway, enough remembered...
by lsuresh | 2025-06-16 13:15:52+00:00
Thanks for the kind words. :) We hear you on the dialect differences.

An interesting case of a user dealing with this problem: they use LLMs to mass migrate SparkSQL code over to Feldera (it's often json-related constructs as you also ran into). They then verify that both their original warehouse and Feldera compute the same results for the same inputs to ensure correctness.
by meyusufdemirci | 2025-06-16 13:16:15+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Meteus, an API that helps developers post to platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, X, and Tumblr from backend code — without needing to fight each platform’s unique OAuth, content formatting, or media upload flows.

It was born out of frustration with how inconsistent and restricted these APIs are. Meta’s Graph API requires reviews and scopes, TikTok’s API is still mostly private, and Pinterest requires platform approval. Managing all of these across one app got painful — so I abstracted the process.

Meteus is:

API-only (no dashboard, no frontend) Built for devs who want to automate publishing from code Supports scheduling, multi-platform posts, image + video content A typical request looks like:

{ "platforms": ["instagram", "tiktok", "pinterest"], "text": "This post was sent via one API.", "imageUrl": "https://cdn.meteus.dev/example.jpg", "schedule_at": "2025-06-20T10:00:00Z" }

Right now there’s a waitlist while I onboard the first developers manually. The API docs and code example are on the homepage: https://meteus.dev

I’d really appreciate:

Feedback on the API design or naming Input on use cases I might be missing Any lessons you’ve learned from dealing with social APIs Thanks!

– Yusuf
by ForHackernews | 2025-06-16 13:16:19+00:00
> Recent reports have claimed that most 7th graders are unable to independently derive the Pythagorean Theorem, however our analysis reveals that these apparent failures stem from experimental design choices rather than inherent student limitations.

When given access to Google and prompted to "tell me how to find the length of hypotenuse of a right triangle", a majority of middle-schoolers produced the correct Pythagorean Theorem, demonstrating intact reasoning capabilities when freed from the exhaustive comprehension requirement.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-06-16 13:16:22+00:00
Mostly whatever the earliest version pytorch supports. While 3.9 is supported until the end of this year, torch wheels and other wheels in the ecosystem were always troublesome in 3.9. So 3.10 it is.

3.9 would have been the preferred version if not for those issues, simply because it is the default on MacOS.
by bArray | 2025-06-16 13:16:41+00:00
Trying adding "ass", it explodes [1]. Not sure if that's because of keywords such as 'class' or something else? "dumb" is really on the uptake [2].

[1] https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,d...*

[2] https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,d...*
by vanderZwan | 2025-06-16 13:17:19+00:00
Bjarne has his moments - I like his saying that somewhere buried underneath all of C++'s complexity there's an elegant language struggling to get out, and I'm sympathetic to his frustrations and believe he does have good intentions there.

But he can also contradict himself sometimes in this regard, because he also often uses a variation of calling C++ a language for "people who know what they are doing" as a sort of catch-all dismissal of critiques of its footguns.

The whole problem is that very few people can claim to truly "know what they are doing" when it comes to all of C++' features and how they interconnect, dismissing that by (implicitly) telling people to just "git gud" is missing the point a bit.

But again, he's only human and I do get the urge to get a bit defensive of your baby.
by drob518 | 2025-06-16 13:18:29+00:00
That’s a great theory but in practice such a “flag day” almost never happens. The last time the internet went through such a change was January 1, 1983, when the ARPANET switched from NCP to the newly designed TCP/IP. People want to do something similar on February 1, 2030, to remove IPv4 and switch totally to IPv6, but I give it a 50/50 chance of success, and IPv6 is already about 30 years old. See https://ipv4flagday.net/
by James_K | 2025-06-16 13:18:31+00:00
It's still pretty simple. I think you are really underestimating the ability of humans to do rote activities. Especially since we could give the human a pen and paper in this case and let them write stuff down on it to give parity to the AI which can write words in its output.

It seems pretty clear to me that learning how to go about following an arbitrary set of rules is a part of general intelligence. There are lots of humans who have learned this skill, and many (mostly children) who have not. If the AI has failed to learn this ability during its extensive training, and critically if it cannot be taught this ability as a human could, then it's certainly not "generally intelligent" to anywhere near the human degree.
by b3lvedere | 2025-06-16 13:18:35+00:00
A large enough object coming close enough to our planet could also do that.

Humans have and will continue to destroy lots of living and non-living material. Unless some huge global awareness or higher sentience will reduce that immensly very quickly, humanity as we know it, will end on this planet. With the rising CO2 levels i doubt our intelligence will get any better.

And the planet will quietly do its dance around its star..
by joshstrange | 2025-06-16 13:19:49+00:00
Someone who knows how to solve problems and can also code, but I feel I can get a good feel of that from the other tests we give. We also have a problem solving test with a real example we dealt with that is simple enough to understand and is another good filter.

The first coding tests proves they can at least string together a bit of code, explain it, and make minor changes to it. The problem solving test proves they can think critically and understand a new problem and offer solutions to it. Lastly, we have a debugging test where they have to fix existing code with a handful of bugs. Between these and the conversations we have have with applicants we have (so far) a very good success rate in hiring.