MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GGByron | 2025-07-09 04:17:53+00:00
"The main technique is keeping things simple."

Orwell also knew to avoid clichés, and lo, he made a much stronger argument for simplicity in his essays. "Keep it simple" means nothing by itself and Adams does not explain the concepts he hints at or even call them by their proper names.

None of the above would seem obnoxious had he actually cited Orwell.
by chvid | 2025-07-09 04:18:31+00:00
HN censorship/moderation is weird/off-putting at times. This story is right up our alley - funny and on-point with the broader ai discussion.

Though it also seems somewhat censored on x; it is possible that turning grok into "MechaHitler" was a concerted effort by a group of people. Similarly to how a bunch of kids from 4chan turned a Microsoft bot into a raving racist a few years back.
by ingohelpinger | 2025-07-09 04:20:07+00:00
exactly, Bulgarian here, born in Germany in 1988, so I lived with the DM and then experienced the Euro throughout my entire life, until 2023 when I decided to go back to BG. The Euro will make BG a debt slave on Germanys and France terms. Watch critical infrastructure being sold to China or who knows, just like Greece had to do it.
by kazinator | 2025-07-09 04:21:55+00:00
I integrated gzip into TXR Lisp in 2022. I evaluated all the choices and went with that one because of:

- tiny code size; - widely used standard; - fast compression and decompression.

And it also beat Zstandard on compressing TXR Lisp .tlo files by a non-negligible margin. I can reproduce that today:

$ zstd -o compiler.tlo.zstd stdlib/compiler.tlo stdlib/compiler.tlo : 25.60% (250146 => 64037 bytes, compiler.tlo.zstd) $ gzip -c > compiler.tlo.gzip stdlib/compiler.tlo $ ls -l compiler.tlo.* -rw-rw-r-- 1 kaz kaz 60455 Jul 8 21:17 compiler.tlo.gzip -rw-rw-r-- 1 kaz kaz 64037 Jul 8 17:43 compiler.tlo.zstd

The .gzip file is 0.944 as large as the .zstd file.

So for this use case, gzip is faster (zstd has only decompression that is fast), compresses better and has way smaller code footprint.
by missedthecue | 2025-07-09 04:22:20+00:00
I had a recurring charge on my Capital One credit card and canceled it from my Capital One app. The next month, the charge went through again and they proactively gave me an account credit equal to the charged amount, with an emailed apology. I'm not sure why they couldn't cancel it, or if it will go through again this month, but it surprised me!
by scubakid | 2025-07-09 04:23:19+00:00
I'm glad to hear you have a workflow for updating current finances that's already serving you well. I do plan to add a lot more automation/integration options, it's just always a question of where to invest my time to deliver the most value to the community efficiently.

Something people don't always realize instantly is that with a long-term planning tool, the point is to spend the bulk of your time focused on the future, not fixating on all the latest daily stock price fluctuations... in fact, those can sometimes be a source of noise/distraction.
by Johngibb | 2025-07-09 04:23:51+00:00
I am actually asking this question in good faith: are we certain that there's no way to write a useful AI agent that's perfectly defended against injection just like SQL injection is a solved problem?

Is there potentially a way to implement out-of-band signaling in the LLM world, just as we have in telephones (i.e. to prevent phreaking) and SQL (i.e. to prevent SQL injection)? Is there any active research in this area?

We've built ways to demarcate memory as executable or not to effectively transform something in-band (RAM storing instructions and data) to out of band. Could we not do the same with LLMs?

We've got a start by separating the system prompt and the user prompt. Is there another step further we could go that would treat the "unsafe" data differently than the safe data, in a very similar way that we do with SQL queries?

If this isn't an active area of research, I'd bet there's a lot of money to be made waiting to see who gets into it first and starts making successful demos…
by zippyman55 | 2025-07-09 04:24:18+00:00
I downloaded this and wrote a small program to filter on 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 move puzzles. I also segregated by rating. Then I ran them thru stockfish (there are some errors) and generated several years worth of daily puzzles. It’s part of a daily chess feed I have for my club. So, puzzles get harder thru the week, similar to NY times crossword puzzles. I uploaded this to my cheapo web server. I give credit to lichess and provide a link to play the position on the lichess.org website.
by trinsic2 | 2025-07-09 04:24:21+00:00
In my mind, there is a difference between a person using there own creative thinking to create a derivative work from learning about a subject and making money off of it versus a corporation with a language model that is designed to absorb the works of the entire planet and redisrubtes that information in away that puts them in a centralized position to become an authority on information. With a person, there is a certain responsibility one has to create meaning from that work so that others can experience it. For-profit companies are like machines that have no interest in the creative expression part of this process hence there is a concern that they do not have the best interests of the public at heart.
by db48x | 2025-07-09 04:24:54+00:00
With 106,000 companies doing this, that’s less than $1,000 each. Do you think that _your_ company could review all of its marketing materials for compliance with a new FTC rule for less than that? How much would you as a consultant charge one of those companies for your assistance?

But if you don’t like the rule, talk to your local Congresscritter and ask them to propose a bill to amend or remove it. Complaining about it in snarky internet comments isn’t going to get you anywhere.
by dvt | 2025-07-09 04:25:38+00:00
Why are you being such a stick-in-the-mud? It's an interesting and inspiration post on HN about a successfull bootstrapped indie startup. HN is primarily a startup & tech-driven community, so obviously we're all interested in stories like this. In fact, I miss the days where HN was almost solely startup post-mortems or success stories. How is the post even remotely self-congratulatory spam?
by somenameforme | 2025-07-09 04:26:41+00:00
You're conflating two things. There is indeed conscription in Russia, Scandinavia, and many countries in the world where people are expected to do some period of time of military training within a country. These people are generally not used in active conflicts, though it does entail enrollment in the equivalent of Selective Service in the US meaning they can be called up later (2 years in Russia) for "real" service in the case of a draft/mobilization. Russia carried out a limited mobilization once early on in the war in 2022, and it was horrifically unpopular, leading to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians from the country. People don't want to risk being called up to possibly die for a war they may not even agree with. Since then they have relied exclusively on volunteer forces.

Ukraine, by contrast, immediately after the war began they made it illegal for men of "fighting age", which they define as between the ages of 18 and 60, to leave the country. And they have been relying on forced conscription for an ever larger percent of their entire armed forces since then. This is why you can find countless highly disturbing videos of Ukrainian TCC (conscription) officers brutalizing and even killing civilians in efforts to conscript them and throw them on the front lines. Wiki has some sampling of incidents here [1] which I will not quote. In many cases they are, again, quite disturbing.

People really have no clue what they are supporting over there.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_Center_of_Recruitm...
by blahedo | 2025-07-09 04:27:29+00:00
Random observation: I remember seeing the second round of euro bills and momentarily thinking, "EBPO? cool, but why did they add Cyrillic to the design?"

It was specifically for Bulgaria, the only EU country to use the Cyrillic alphabet. Eurozone membership was a distant thought at that point, but they knew they'd be in eventually. Now's the time!
by Merovius | 2025-07-09 04:28:28+00:00
In practice, currently, that depends on inlining decisions. If the function taking the function (say `node.insert`) is inlined, then yes. There are also other optimizations, like escape analysis, that matter here: the compiler can prove that the arguments to `node.insert` only escape into the `cmp` passed in. That decision is kept as metadata on `node.insert` even if it is not inlined. So if you pass a method expression to it, it can actually look at that and decide that the arguments don't escape from it either and hence that they don't escape overall. Whereas if you pass a `func` field, it can make no assumptions.

My larger point though, is that with the `func` field the compiler can't optimize things even in principle. A user could always reassign this field (if nothing else using `*t = *new(FuncTree)`). So the compiler has to treat it as a dynamic call categorically. If the `func` is passed as a function, then at least in principle, it can prove that this function can't get modified during the call so can make optimization decisions based on what is being passed to it. For example, even without inlining, a future compiler might decide to compile two versions of `node.insert`, one with general dynamic calls and one specific one for a specific static function.

My philosophy when it comes to API decisions that impact performance is, not to make them too dependent on what the compiler is doing today, but just to take care there is enough information there, that the compiler can do an optimization in principle - which means it either will do it today, or we can make it smarter in the future, if it becomes a problem.
by mc32 | 2025-07-09 04:29:47+00:00
What choice did Greece have? Germany was not extending favorable terms, they were punitive, so what choice did they have but take the least awful choice? Syriza tried but Germany had the upper hand and of course didn't give an inch --though Syriza tried very hard.

Varoufakis would argue the severe terms imposed by the creditors/negotiators exacerbated the fiscal issue. Yes Greece had issues but the creditors's terms exacerbated the problem, made things worse.

It's kind of like borrowing from a loan shark to pay off debts --on average, you're better off not. But hey, once you take it, you either pay up, or you lose something dear to you.
by anitil | 2025-07-09 04:29:59+00:00
This is really cool. I was initially skeptical about the 'AI' pitch on your page but having played with it I think that should be your number one pitch, particularly on HN.

For people reading: Using FakerJS and any Yaml/Json library it'd be "easy" to mock things like String or Object, but (if I understand correctly) this goes much further and looks at the name of the entry and something something ai and gives you a realistic response.

So a string called 'username' returns a valid name, which is already handy, but it also matches the 'email' field, which is even better. And the name even matches the country (I got an Italian-seeming name with an address in Italy)

I'm impressed, I'll be sharing this with people at work.
by harrisi | 2025-07-09 04:30:11+00:00
I'm not saying Vercel won't exist, they almost certainly will.

What I mean is that the goal seems likely to be to influence how software development is done in every way possible, from deployment to client code. Vendor locking, with even more control. I'd pitch Vercel as "Heroku's growth plan but more control of everything." Maybe with a bit of EEE thrown in, but who knows.
by zippyman55 | 2025-07-09 04:30:37+00:00
At scale, It gets a little harder trying to explain the solution. There is often a combinatorial explosion of move possibilities, so it’s not easy to just say MATE IN 4 if there are 40 or 50 potential responses all leading to mate. Granted they are obvious mates but there may be users who do not see the obvious mates.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-07-09 04:32:06+00:00
> If you knew your target system was using fixed-width integers, you'd use this.

Usually `system` in this context refers to the machine you run the program on, not the language itself, or at least that is how I interpreted it. I guess there used to be systems with BCD math supported by hardware, and I guess those could have variable precision. I'm not sure if it was arbitrary (ie it could still overflow), but one could presumably detect overflow and increase the memory allocation. But once you have a software system doing your math rather than a machine instruction it seems like you need to prove the correctness of that implementation not just the general concept.
by stouset | 2025-07-09 04:32:27+00:00
Tests should not generally need to be rewritten unless you’re changing the externally-visible behavior API of a function or library (either the literal API, its effects, or its semantics).

If you’re changing the tests because you’ve changed the internal, non-externally-visible logic of your code, your tests are almost certainly providing you negative value.

Being able to refactor and re-run your existing test suite to ensure consistent behavior is possibly the important property of a good test suite.
by mrtksn | 2025-07-09 04:32:30+00:00
It’s also more of a generation thing though. The older people are nostalgic about the past and their youth and for a country that experienced 2 decades of very low birth rates that’s the 70s and 80s and those years are under the communist rule and very good years for Bulgaria as the country was experiencing economic boom from computers and electronics manufacturing.

Also, under under the Communist rule supported by USSR, they indoctrinated people into a version of history that Turks are the absolute evil, and Russians are the absolute angels saving them from the ottomans.

I.e. in pre-EU era it was called Ottoman slavery, later they start calling it Ottoman era as it was more accurate as Ottoman’s system was based on collecting taxes and resources from the conquered places when giving them plenty of autonomy. Obviously not ideal but far from slavery.
by jandrese | 2025-07-09 04:35:49+00:00
There are even Easter Eggs and additional tasks. If you click on the system description button for each emulator it will give you a list.

I couldn't get the later emulators to work correctly though. My mouse kept flying off to the right of the screen for some reason. Also unfortunate is the scaling and tilting effect makes the screens look real bad on my machine. Just ugly aliasing artifacts everywhere.
by gnabgib | 2025-07-09 04:37:16+00:00
Seems like an editorialized title (based on machine translation):

Pangu's Sorrow: The Sadness and Darkness of Huawei's Noah Pangu Model Development Process

Which coincidentally, a translated fork of this repo was posted 2 days ago (16 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44485458
by nico | 2025-07-09 04:37:30+00:00
I had a subscription with an account that I couldn’t access anymore, and there wasn’t any other way to cancel

So I contested the charge through the bank. They would refund me, but then the company would charge me again for the subscription

This went on for several months. At some point the card expired, the bank automatically sent me a new card, and somehow the company was still able to charge the subscription to my new card, even though I couldn’t even access my account

It was a couple of years ago, and I don’t remember how I finally stopped it. But it was kinda shocking to me to see the charges “jump” through different cards. Especially given that usually any service that I don’t want cancelled, gets immediately cancelled if my card on file expires
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-09 04:38:28+00:00
It's what always happens in Texas. People see cheap areas to build and recreate in without doing any historical research about risks. Local governments are also often inept and reactive because they're small town hillbillies who don't believe in climate change either and perhaps aren't even full-time public administrators. It's 97.5 for riverine flooding on the FEMA all causes risk map tool (until DOGE defunds that). Build and camp on high ground in high drainage density areas, create permanent reminders in the form of flood gauges to maintain awareness, and refund ATX NWS for the 2 senior flood prediction forecasters who were pushed out. And practiced preparedness plans and require insurance in AE flood zones for all those who live in those areas.

Flash Flood Alley exists from Medina county to the south to Cooke and Grayson counties in the north. Uvalde had 22" fall in 3 hours in 1935.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Flood_Alley

https://www.cityofdenton.com/ImageRepository/Document?docume...

Edit: I live on high ground in FEMA zone X within a mile / 2 km of the Guadalupe river.
by wobfan | 2025-07-09 04:42:12+00:00
Not gonna lie, I actually have canceled many service because of this single reason. If I get the feeling they want to hide these options specifically to keep me in a subscription, I immediately feel the urge to cancel even more, and also it gives me the feeling that the service itself is obviously, objectively, not good enough that they can just be honest and offer a easy cancel option - because they fear that too many people would.
I'm a 16-Year-Old Self-Taught Developer – Built 700 Projects
by RajGuruYadav | 2025-07-09 04:43:00+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Raj Guru Yadav, a 16-year-old self-taught programmer from India .

Over the past 3 years, I’ve built over 700+ projects — mostly small to mid-level apps, tools, games, AI bots, voice assistants, logic experiments, and UI systems.

I never attended a course or bootcamp — I learned everything from YouTube, documentation, and experimenting on my own. I use:

Languages: Python, JavaScript, C++, Java, HTML/CSS, Ruby

Tools: Firebase, GitHub, ChatGPT, Replit, VS Code

Recently, I developed something called Blob AI – a glowing, voice-reactive digital assistant with smart responses and visual effects (I’ll share it soon in a Show HN post).

Why I’m Here I’ve been silently reading Hacker News for a while, and now I want to:

Join the dev/startup conversation

Learn from experienced builders

Get feedback on my journey and ideas

Ask questions and maybe help others too

If you're a dev, founder, educator, or just curious – I’d love to connect. Ask me anything: about learning to code young, building fast, staying consistent, or how I come up with ideas.

Thanks for reading. — Raj Guru Yadav GitHub: coming soon @rajguruyadav_official
by Ygg2 | 2025-07-09 04:44:30+00:00
> And its debt shows that. Their governments have had a big part of the blame. Hell, at one point they didnt have enough money for citizens to withdraw from banks.

Sure but so do the creditors. If you keep giving mortgages to anyone with a drivers license that's on you buddy.

At almost no point is there enough money for citizens to withdraw their money. Modern banks don't keep their assets as cash.
by scubakid | 2025-07-09 04:44:49+00:00
after that first Show HN back in 2021, the majority of our growth has been product-led and word-of-mouth.

some bloggers and thought leaders in the financial independence space also found the tool and shared it in the early years, which helped get some momentum going.

we're finally starting to make a little headway now with SEO, and we're beginning to reinvest/experiment with some paid channels for the first time this year.
by somenameforme | 2025-07-09 04:46:09+00:00
Effective propaganda, when truth is not on its side, does not simply ignore the truth. There's an ICC arrest warrant out for Netanyahu for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and so forth. Never saying genocide and ignoring all allegations would be a red flag to the point of absurdity. You'd never convince anybody that wasn't already completely convinced.

So the way that real propaganda works is by taking some issue people generally feel a way about, expressing some empathy towards that, and then working to shift that person's perspective. For instance here [1] is the first article you linked: "UN rights expert accuses Israel of acts of genocide". It not only spends much of the article softly trying to undermine these claims, but even leans on one of the most classical propaganda techniques - appeals to emotion. This is a quote from that article:

----

Not surprisingly, Israeli diplomats are angry [at the claims]. Its ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Meirav Eilon Shahar, described the report as "an obscene inversion of reality", and accused Ms Albanese of questioning Israel's right to exist. Many Israelis, too, are likely to be shocked. And the suggestion of genocide, towards a state which was founded as a direct result of Nazi Germany's genocide of Jews, will cause deep offence.

In the wake of 7 October attack, and the fact that so many Israeli families are still waiting for news of loved ones taken hostage, hearing such outspoken condemnation is hard. Noam Peri, whose father Chaim was taken hostage, also travelled to Geneva. Her focus, naturally, is that her father not be forgotten.

"My father was kidnapped from his own home," she said. "He's an 80-year-old person that was sitting in his home with my mother, and he was brutally taken from there, and has essentially disappeared since. He has no communication, with no-one in the world."

----

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68667556
by kragen | 2025-07-09 04:47:42+00:00
Yes, PG is influential primarily because of his writing. He wrote On Lisp, which is still well-regarded today, before founding Viaweb. Viaweb itself did not make him well-known; there were many newly wealthy dot-com millionaires at the time, and he was just one of many, except that he wrote far more persuasive essays. At the time that I wrote https://paulgraham.com/redund.html we were discussing programming language design on a mailing list, and there was not yet any suggestion of a VC fund.

The reason he got into venture capital was that some of those essays urged ambitious young people to start startups, drawing on his own experience, and specifically to write SaaS software in Lisp, as he had. The Y Combinator fund came afterwards, and its dealflow came from the people who had been persuaded by those essays. That's why the first version of Reddit was written in Lisp.

If Y Combinator had not been successful, he would have remained well known for his essays.

Though some of his ideas were not correct, looking back, it is hard to name any other writer of persuasive essays of the past quarter century whose work has been similarly impactful, except perhaps Mencius Moldbug. Moldbug's work may turn out to be less impactful—I certainly hope it does—but it's too early to tell.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-07-09 04:48:06+00:00
Yep, for many applications, versioning is the lightweight solve.

But.. aws backup is still nice, if a bit heavy. I like common workflows to restore all stuff (ddbs, managed dbs, buckets etc) to a common point in time. Also, one of the under-appreciated causes of massive data loss is subtly incorrect lifecycle policies. Backup can save you here even when other techniques may not.
by babyshake | 2025-07-09 04:49:34+00:00
You can use privacy.com as another commenter has written. But one catch is I believe you can be on the hook for subscriptions where your card no longer works but you haven't cancelled your subscription. So they can send you invoices and even send it to collections. Although I strongly feel that at least for transactions of a sufficiently small size (normal retail subscriptions) cancelling your card should be legally considered sufficient enough for voiding your future subscription. I'm open to hearing counter arguments but I think the consumer shouldn't have to jump through even the smallest of hoops setup by vendors in order to indicate that they are no longer interested in future transactions.