MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spreeni | 2025-07-03 09:48:33+00:00
Hey, Couchers backend volunteer here - this is a very good and valid question as many of us have gone through the same disappointment with Couchsurfing.com in the past. This is an excerpt from our FAQs on that topic:

"How will you prevent this platform from ever becoming a for-profit like Couchsurfing™ did?

We fundamentally believe that attempting to make a profit out of couch surfing is a bad idea. It introduces incentives that damage the community and would not make financial sense — the couch surfing idea, based on non-transactional experiences, is not monetizable. This is about societal value, not monetary value.

We are keeping the platform as a non-profit forever. Our plan to follow this relies on three fundamental pillars:

1. We are legally established as a non-profit foundation, and our constitution contains provisions that prevents the company from ceasing to be a non-profit, or transferring its assets to an entity that is not a non-profit.

2. We will carry out a policy of distributed moderation, so that we will engage hundreds of moderators as volunteers around the world to moderate their own communities. We will make the platform reliant on volunteers, and so the entity controlling the platform could not be a for-profit business without violating laws in many countries. The foundation would have to remain as a non-profit to continue operating.

3. Our code base is open source and anybody can spin up an alternative instance. If the community ever comes to feel that the leaders of the platform are not acting in their interest, they can simply fork the codebase, making a copy that is under control of new management.

Finally, we do hope that you can trust our Founders (Aapeli and Itsi) and Board Members in their promise to keep the platform not only community-led, non-profit, and open-source, but in line with the greater interests of the global couch surfing community."

https://couchers.org/faq
by kabdib | 2025-07-03 09:48:43+00:00
my LLM win this year was to give the corporate AI my last year's worth of notes, emails and documents and ask it to write my self review. it did a great job. i'm never writing another one of those stupid bits of psychological torture again

otherwise i'm writing embedded systems. fine, LLM, you hold the scope probe and figure out why that PWM is glitching
Ask HN: Ideas to acquire "good taste" in programming?
by danielciocirlan | 2025-07-03 09:49:07+00:00
This is a question for senior programmers:

What helped you get "good taste" in how you think and approach your code? By "good taste" I mean sensitive intuitions, fast and deep understanding of code, quick spotting of problems that might occur, informed tradeoffs, good command of base principles that apply to many tools/frameworks/libraries/languages.

What did it for you? Books? Training? Mentors? A team/project? ___?

Experience, time and trial/error are obvious answers; I'm looking for what made the difference for you.

I'm also curious if you think this skill can be taught or accelerated, other than osmosis from a mentor.
by 2d8a875f-39a2-4 | 2025-07-03 09:49:25+00:00
The author puts the BLUF: "The actual bottlenecks were, and still are, code reviews, knowledge transfer through mentoring and pairing, testing, debugging, and the human overhead of coordination and communication."

They're not wrong, but they're missing the point. These bottlenecks can be reduced when there are fewer humans involved.

Somewhat cynically:

code reviews: now sometimes there's just one person involved (reviewing LLM code) instead of two (code author + reviewer)

knowledge transfer: fewer people involved means this is less of an overhead

debugging: no change, yet

coordination and communication: fewer people means less overhead

LLMs shift the workload — they don’t remove it: sure, but shifting workload onto automation reduces the people involved

Understanding code is still the hard part: not much change, yet

Teams still rely on trust and shared context: much easier when there are fewer people involved

... and so on.

"Fewer humans involved" remains a high priority goal for a lot of employers. You can never forget that.
by skydhash | 2025-07-03 09:50:17+00:00
The true value of experience comes in two ways: Knowing when not to do something; and knowing the shortest path to produce the result needed.

More often, the result of juniors using LLM is a frankenstein ball of mud that is close to its implosion point. Individual features are part of a system and are judged based on how they contribute to its goal, not how they are individually correct.
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-03 09:50:35+00:00
> US has trump and I see no end of US anytime soon, sure some self-harm is happening right now but thats about it, that nation is stronger than that.

That remains to be seen. Trump and his goons are breaking apart the foundations of society as we speak, not to mention the decades of Republican gerrymandering. The complete and utter loss of trust in the US on the geopolitical stage is another huge issue, it will be a long time before Europe or Southern America trust the US again - the hope that Trump would be a short-term one-off event went out the window last year.

> Compared to hard focus on socialism that was (and still is) prevalent in EU, some better balance is required in these times.

Where outside of Spain does Europe actually have socialists even as part of the government?

Most countries here are run by the far-right (e.g. Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, the Netherlands), centrists/conservatives (Germany, Poland, Croatia), Social Democrats, neoliberals (France) or coalitions of these.

> Nah I am not worried about [Russia], they are consistently unable to wage modern war to benefit of us all.

Never underestimate the willingness of Russian leaders to sacrifice their population for meat-grinder wars.

> In the meantime we arm and train ourselves, stronger Europe is always better for any future scenario, internally and externally.

Agreed, the problem is we can't be arsed to actually evolve to a truly federal society anywhere close to the US. Economically there has been a lot of integration happening, but politically... oh that's one hell of a clusterfuck.
by noirscape | 2025-07-03 09:50:38+00:00
In my experience, writing code can be a bottleneck in the sense that it's pretty easy to end up in a scenario where you're effectively "drudging" through a ton of similar LOC that you can't really optimize in any other way.

GUI libraries are a pretty good example of this; almost all the time, you're probably gonna parse the form fields in the exact same way each time, but due to how GUI libraries work, what ends up happening is that you often write multiple lines of function calls where the only difference really is the key you're using to get the variables. You can't really turn it into a function or something like that either; it's just lines of code that have to be written to make the things work and although it should be really easy to predict what you need to do (just update the variable name and the string used in the function call), it can end up wasting non-marginal time.

LLMs being able to help with this sort of thing I would however more consider to be a failure of IDEs being unable to help with it properly than anything else. This sort of task is rote, easy to predict and should even be autogeneratable. Some IDEs even let you, but it's typically hidden in a menu pretty deep in the interface, needing to be enabled by messing with their ever increasing settings menus (when it probably could just be something it can autodetect by checking the file; y'know, that's the reason why people use IDEs instead of a notepad program); it's as if at some point, IDEs changed from assisting you with making code quicker to write to only really being able to somewhat inspect and lint your codebase unless you spend hours configuring them to do otherwise. I mean, that was in part why Sublime Text and VS Code got their foot in the door, even though they have a much smaller feature list than most traditional IDEs; compared to IDEs they're lightweight (which is pretty crazy since VS Code is an Electron app) and they provide pretty much equivalent features for most people. LLMs can often predict what's going to happen next after you've written two or three of these rote lines, which is a pretty good way to get the boring stuff out of the way.

Is that worth the sheer billions of dollars thrown at AI? Almost certainly not if you look at the entire industry (its a massive bubble waiting to pop), but on the customer fees end, for now the price-to-time-saved ratio for getting rid of that rote work is easily worth it in a corporate environment. (I do expect this to change once the AI bubble pops however.)
by pseudolus | 2025-07-03 09:51:11+00:00
Translation (courtesy Google Translate):

RIVM: almost everyone in the Netherlands has too much PFAS in their blood

Everyone in the Netherlands has PFAS in their blood, says the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). Moreover, almost everyone has too much of it and the amounts exceed the so-called medical limit value, according to research into 1500 blood samples from 2016 and 2017. Above that limit value, effects on the immune system cannot be ruled out, says the RIVM.

For years it has been clear that the Dutch ingest too much PFAS, mainly through food and also a little through drinking water. Now, for the first time, national research has been conducted into the amount of PFAS in the blood.

PFAS are a group of thousands of chemical substances that do not break down in nature: the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. They affect the immune system and some types are carcinogenic with long-term exposure. The chemicals end up in the environment because factories discharge or emit them. They are also found in, for example, fire-fighting foam and lubricants.

Not immediately ill Although everyone has PFAS in their blood, the type of PFAS does matter where someone lives. In residents of the Dordrecht region, where the Chemours factory emitted PFOA for decades, this PFAS variant was found more often than the average in the Netherlands. And around the Western Scheldt, where chemical company 3M in the Belgian Zwijndrecht discharged thousands of kilos of PFAS via the Scheldt each year, the amount of the PFOS variant was higher.

The RIVM is quick to add that the results of the blood test do not mean that everyone becomes ill from PFAS. "The effects depend on the amount of PFAS, the duration of exposure and someone's personal health situation. The RIVM cannot say at this time what the amounts found in the blood samples mean exactly for the health of the Dutch population."

Bright spot Because PFAS are all around us, it is virtually impossible for people not to ingest them, says RIVM researcher Joke Herremans. "That is actually only possible if companies ensure that fewer substances end up in the environment."

The Netherlands, together with four other European countries, has taken the initiative to ban PFAS everywhere in Europe. According to Herremans, that could help in the long term. "Since the substance PFOS was banned in 2008, we have already seen the amount in the blood decrease in research in France. That is a ray of hope."

Herremans and her colleagues are conducting follow-up research on blood samples from this year. "We hope to find that the level is also decreasing."
by epolanski | 2025-07-03 09:51:57+00:00
> the code would look like it does the right thing but actually not work at all, or just be much more broken than code with that level of "polish" would normally be

I don't understand, if they don't test the code they write (even if manually) it's not an LLM issue, it's a process one.

They have not been taught what does it mean to have a PR ready for being reviewed, LLMs are irrelevant here.
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-03 09:52:00+00:00
> The number of elderly Australians who live alone with no family, or no family nearby, is truely disappointing.

That's a thing across all Western societies, and we got unchecked rabid capitalism and a complete lack of industry structural politics to thank for that one. Young people not living in an urban area have little choice but to leave there to find employment and higher level education.
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-03 09:52:06+00:00
More like "liquid ass", please forgive the pun.

The core issue is that Apple et al all have their UX/UI in-house, which means on the payroll, which means they have to produce something new to justify their continued employment. But instead of devs who always have some bugs to fix or some old cruft to refactor, these opportunities are rare for UX/UI, mostly because you'd also need to employ proper support teams that have a way of aggregating customer complaints or improvement ideas (and legal FUD surrounding the question of "copyright on suggestions" - LWT famously bans their employees from even reading r/LastWeekTonight to avoid getting held liable if they use an idea someone suggested there) and to derive improvement ideas from there.

It's either "boom (every 3-4 years) or bust".
One line email taught me more about communication than months of building
by lebonnnn | 2025-07-03 09:52:33+00:00
I'm Francesco, as you might have read here I'm building a job application tool called interviuu, and this morning, like every morning, I was checking emails. After recent launch day my inbox looks like a mix of user feedback and people offering their services, but there was also this one message that really hit me.

"Interesting approach no free time don’t know what’s behind the curtain just pay the money good luck"

Super simple email, just a few lines, but the value was huge. Made me realize that if my startup doesn't have a free trial (or freemium plan) I have to communicate the real value of the product way better on the landing page or in any educational content.

I'm not saying this is some groundbreaking discovery or that it wasn't obvious, but there are certain interactions when you launch that make you pay attention to these obvious things a lot more.

So, for me, a clear, realistic view of what your product actually does can solve three major issues: - Potential misunderstandings and wrong expectations about what your product does - Doubts about product capabilities and how it actually works - For some users, that maybe aren't ideal early adopters but definitely exist, whether the product even exists behind the landing page and the brand

I feel like something I forget is that we're the founders and we've worked on this for months thinking about it almost every single day. We know that when A happens, B triggers, all the optimizations behind every single action users see on the frontend etc. But users? Most of the time (especially in early startups) they only have their pain point and your landing page to go on.

This is where all the side activities matter. If interviuu wasn't launched by Francesco (that's me, unknown founder) but by some well-known entrepreneur or influencer, a percentage of people landing on the page wouldn't have questioned what the product capabilities are. They'd automatically transfer their feelings about that person to the product (and that's an incredible communication and brand strategy led by amazing startup founders out there, especially on X).

If the world's best recruiter had built this product, they would've communicated different value etc.

Early startup feedback loops aren't just about the product. This simple morning email was a perfect example of how the feedback loop with users isn't just about improving the product as a digital product but it's about improving all aspects of your product (and brand).

How am I gonna try to fix all of this? I'm definitely adding a real demo video on the landing page (the Loom style one) and starting educational content (I'm still trying to figure out how).

Anyone else experienced this?
by Farid_agha87 | 2025-07-03 09:52:53+00:00
I’m working on a new tool called Bad Review Sniper, designed to help small businesses and sellers (like restaurant owners or Amazon merchants) manage their online reputation with less stress.

Problem: Bad reviews can really hurt small businesses — but most owners don’t have time to track every site (Google, Yelp, Foursquare, Amazon) or write good replies fast enough.

What it does:

Pulls in bad reviews from multiple platforms automatically.

Uses AI to suggest polite, on-brand replies (with human approval).

Highlights critical reviews that need urgent action (“Issues”).

Tracks competitor reviews to find opportunities.

Helps win back unhappy customers with follow-up flows.

Built with: I designed the full dashboard in Bolt
by Quarrel | 2025-07-03 09:53:02+00:00
Ok, let's just take your facetious argument on face value.

So that's $5.80 / hr in our land that has a minimum wage of $24.95 / hr. Still, a bit over 20%, crappy for sure (if it was true).

Now, of course, most people are not on the minimum wage, and definitely not here on HN. The tax system benefits those at the low end more though, so let us look at median wages.

Median hourly wages (in main job) are $40 / hr (Source: ABS - August 2024).

Median incomes are actually a touch higher (because not just main job), at $102,742 / annum, which attracts a tax rate of 21%, before the MANY MANY middle class welfare rebates we get (Source ATO tax calculator for 2024-2025).

So, for most of us, maybe we pay approximately our Monday to the State, but that gives us free school education, one of the world's best health systems per $ value (seriously, there are studies!), not to mention a relatively well functioning society (roads, police, firefighters, etc), on top of that we get the horrendous welfare state that you are bemoaning.

That welfare state includes things like the NDIS, which is out of control and needs to find an equilibrium between all the rent-seekers, but the ambition is amazing! We SHOULD support all our disabled people to be the best they can in society! Meanwhile, even with such a fuckup, we're doing ok. Pull your head out, mate.

Do we have issues? Hell yeah. But our terrible "social security state" is not the start of them at all.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-03 09:53:07+00:00
As a non-American, the most painful thing about all of this is seeing how much the world has relied on America's charity for so long.

Had other supposed economic powerhouses invested in their geographic and atmospheric science the same way the USA has, this would've been a rather annoying blip on the radar. We'd need to quickly get our backups out of storage and host them elsewhere, and go without American data points for a couple of years, but most things would be fine.

Instead, it's now becoming clear how much just about any country but China, Russia, and Iran has relied on American scientific investments, and even those seem to freely incorporate American data when it's provided for free.

I have no doubt that all of the atmospheric, oceanographic, and environmental science the American government has all been for strategic purposes, either directly providing information useful for the military of providing a believable excuse to install sensors all around the globe, some of which have been "enhanced". Still, as long as your country is friendly to the American regime, you were getting huge amounts of useful scientific data out of that deal, enough not to set up local alternatives.

Here in the EU, scientists have been scrambling to safeguard data like this since the day of Trump's reelection, but it seems like governments here don't seem to be all that interested in funding any of the work the Americans have been doing.
Show HN: Recivo – Receive Emails Programmatically
by WilcoKruijer | 2025-07-03 09:54:12+00:00
Hi HN, these last couple of weeks I've been building 'Recivo', a simple way to receive emails programmatically. There are plenty of API-based services that can be used to send emails, but receiving them is harder.

As a Recivo user, you create a new email address which will then immediately be available for receiving emails. A REST `/inbox` endpoint is exposed for retrieving these emails, this includes all data you would expect: subject, content, sender, and most importantly: attachments. You can also get notified of newly received emails using webhooks.

The main use-cases I'm thinking of right now is triggering AI agents using email or a very simple document upload flow to any SaaS (just forward an email to the SaaS). This is actually where the inspiration for Recivo came from, I really enjoy the flow of getting an invoice in my mailbox and forwarding it to my accounting software and then seeing it appear in the app. The agentic use-case seems promising, especially for workflows that still require a human in the loop. Asynchronous communication with an AI agent feels natural to me.

When you visit the landing page you're immediately given a randomly generated email address and a cURL command to try the API. Of course these demo addresses will expire, so you'll have to log in to create a non-randomized and permanent address.

I'm wondering if you see any other use cases for a "programmatic" mailbox. Please let me know what you think!
by lbschenkel | 2025-07-03 09:54:15+00:00
I was in a similar situation when I immigrated to Sweden ~20 years ago (I'm Brazilian).

Technically the law says that I'm supposed to carry passport + residence permit (first version was a sticker, then it became a card). However, the hassle of carrying them on a daily basis (and especially losing them!) is too much so I was left them at home. I made a color photocopy of both and put on my wallet instead.

Then later the Swedish tax office started issuing ID cards for non-citizens and I started carrying that (but also the photocopy).

As a foreigner I was not fully complying with letter of the law by doing that but to me the risk of losing my paperwork was far, far higher than being punished for not carrying those. I assumed that in practice if it was something serious they would look me up in the system anyway, or escort me home to produce my paperwork.

Not sure if I that was indeed the reasonable thing to do or if I got lucky, but I never had any problems.
by stuartjohnson12 | 2025-07-03 09:54:34+00:00
In the medium term I think you have to shift the work upstream to show that they've put in the labour to actually design the feature or the bug fix.

I think we've always had this mental model which needs to change that senior engineers and product managers scope and design features, IC developers (including juniors for simpler work) implement them, and then senior engineers participate in code review.

Right now I can't see the value in having a junior engineer on the team who is unable to think about how certain features should be designed. The junior engineer who previously spent his time spinning tires trying to understand the codebase and all the new technologies he has to get to grips with should instead spend that time trying to figure out how that feature fits into the big picture, consider edge cases, and then propose a design for the feature.

There are many junior engineers who I wouldn't trust with that kind of work, and honestly I don't think they are employable right now.

In the short term, I think you just need to communicate this additional duty of care to make sure that your pull requests are complete because otherwise there's an asymmetry of workload and judge those interns and juniors on how respectful of that they are.