MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stanko | 2025-07-08 21:31:29+00:00
Hey HN, This is a small project I made for a meetup (Creative Coding Amsterdam's poetry afternoon). With all the hype around LLMs these days, I wanted to create something silly and fun.

I ended up with Glitchy BARD, which generates crappy poetry. It uses source text transformed into n-grams, while rhymes rely on the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary[0]. For the voice, I used the native SpeechSynthesis API instead of a fancy AI one.

Everything runs on the client, but you can share a song via URL, which includes the random number generator seed.

It's open source[1], though the code is a bit chaotic as I was experimenting a lot and never cleaned it up. A blog post about the CSS glitch effect[2] even gained some traction on HN.

I'd like to turn this into a proper talk, mostly because it was so much fun to make and touched a lot of different areas - language models, rhymes and poetry, pixel art (which is a pain do to on web), speech synthesis, CSS animations... I gave an internal presentation at my company and got very positive feedback.

So let me know what you think and if you have any questions about BARD, please shoot.

[0] http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict

[1] https://github.com/Stanko/bard/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44221907
by dekhn | 2025-07-08 21:31:47+00:00
This is my conclusion (and the path I've taken - basically max our index and retirement accounts).

I've explained this to people and been told I'm stupid and irrational. Another thing I saw was families moving from the. midwest to the bay area (to work for FAANG) and getting tons of pressure from their back-home families to buy a house, and then spend a miserable decade living in a Sunnyvale housing complex.

Our plan is to wait for kids to leave home, retire somewhat early and buy a modest house in an area with lower costs and a political climate I can tolerate.
by zdp7 | 2025-07-08 21:31:53+00:00
I think you may not be familiar with how it works typically in the US. In the US residential streets are almost always 2 way stops. The streets on the narrow sides of the blocks only typically stop when two of these roads cross. Residential areas are laid out to minimize those crossings. Bigger streets than those are controlled by lights. Most people shouldn't come across more than two 4 way stops. Unless you are driving to another residential area. My case is an outlier in that I have to cross from into the older part of town that isn't on the typical NSEW grid. For my drive 1.5 mile drive, one way is four 4 way stops (42 intersections) and the other is two (21 intersections). I'm not sure your wave is necessarily better during the day you almost always have multiple cars at the intersection. I'm not sure if in your description if only one car would go at a time, but in a 4 way stop it pretty much syncs up so the majority of the time two cars are crossing at the same time. Not much of a burden.
by baobun | 2025-07-08 21:32:05+00:00
I guess this part

> there should be one LLM context that is reading tickets, and another LLM context that can drive MCP SQL calls, and then agent code in between those contexts to enforce invariants.

I get the impression that saurik views the LLM contexts as multiple agents and you view the glue code (or the whole system) as one agent. I think both of youses points are valid so far even if you have semantic mismatch on "what's the boundary of an agent".

(Personally I hope to not have to form a strong opinion on this one and think we can get the same ideas across with less ambiguous terminology)
by gavmor | 2025-07-08 21:32:07+00:00
> Is this the index action of the widgets resource or the show action of the widget-list resource? is a question you will never have to ask yourself or your team. The widgets page is called WidgetsPage and available at /widgets.

Hm, uh, seems like now we will be forever asking ourselves this question about /widgets.

That being said, it looks good! Might get me back into ruby if I can come up with a project for it.
by duxup | 2025-07-08 21:32:13+00:00
The executive branch's ability to simply de-staff and de-fund organizations whose existence is enshrined in law seems like a clear imbalance as far as the separation of powers goes. Effectively a line item veto of sorts across every aspect of government / law. A magical power that only the executive branch is being granted (coincidentally only when the executive branch's political party matches the majority of SCOTUS).

Does congress pass a law that says for an agency to do a thing with a veto proof majority? Doesn't matter, executive branch can just choose to de-fund and de-staff it ...

The fact that SCOTUS indicates they're not making the final call on this right now seems to simply play into the hands of those who don't really care to follow the law anyway.

It's doubly strange that with a single party now controls congress and the executive branch and they clearly have the power to actually change the law utilizing many other elected representatives who are presumably responsive to the people ... the executive branch is still granted this extra power to simply ignore the will of congress.

To be clear I think nobody in the executive branch, of any given party, independent, or otherwise should be granted these powers. Same goes for the magical immunity granted Trump not long ago. If anything the executive branch and those in power should be subject to far more legal scrutiny.
by FredPret | 2025-07-08 21:33:05+00:00
If ARR grows enough, there should be plenty of room in there to pay the founders.

For extreme examples of ARR growth at 0% profit paying off, look at Uber, Amazon, and ServiceNow. I know these are very much outliers. All three had rapid revenue growth but profits at (or far below) zero. But for all three, the founders are sitting pretty today.

https://valustox.com/NOW

https://valustox.com/UBER

https://valustox.com/AMZN
by msgodel | 2025-07-08 21:33:13+00:00
The ugly thing is that you're most likely to get laid off when the market is down. I've argued this with people so many times and I think some of them are finally starting to see what I was saying.

btw I don't think getting rid of at will employment will change that. These cycles are so long they'll certainly find a way to get rid of you during a down cycle if they want to.
by umbra07 | 2025-07-08 21:33:26+00:00
> Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad.

but then why do they constantly run banners implying that Wikipedia will shut down if I don't donate right now?
by stanko | 2025-07-08 21:33:50+00:00
Hey HN,

I needed a few simple graphs for a blog post [0]. Instead of slapping together a few SVGs and moving on, I decided to write a whole library to parse CSS keyframe animations and convert them to interactive graphs.

It ended up being a rabbit hole, with a lot of caveats. But it was fun to make, and I'm really happy with the graphs it produces.

I'm not sure how useful it will be for others. If you end up using it, I'd love to see how - feel free to reach out.

It's open source [1] under the MIT license. Written in TypeScript with no dependencies.

Let me know what you think!

[0] https://muffinman.io/blog/css-image-glitch/

[1] https://github.com/Stanko/monorail
by bruce511 | 2025-07-08 21:33:58+00:00
It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.)

Congratulations for walking this line correctly.

I agree that some sort of market validation is necessary to at least pretend you are on the former not the latter. Those early usage spikes are helpful reminders that there is a business here somewhere.

I'll also make a note that you spent time on marketing from the early days. Writing blog posts, promoting said posts, having a Discord server, committing to answer emails, all of this is marketing and its likely lead to success more than the code.

I notice whenever there was a dip in revenue, marketing (in the form of more blog posts) was the response. I suspect that was intentional, and definitely a better approach than "let me go away and silently code more features."

So there are valuable lessons to others here. Congratulations not just on the current success but also on sharing the path that leads to success. Ultimately you can show the way, but you can't make people learn from it.

Oh, and I like the bootstrapping approach. I did the same, and I'm not sorry. It's longer and harder but also skips an enormous amount of extra work.
by dlcarrier | 2025-07-08 21:34:25+00:00
They both also default to much lower increases in rent than the US average, so it's off on both ends of the equation. Over the last few decades, inflation-adjusted rent has increased by several percent per year: https://nowbam.com/rent-prices-vs-inflation-and-income-growt....

The calculators are useless if the data going into them is useless, but even if it perfectly reflected past national averages, that doesn't make it a great predictor of future local results. If you're buying a bunch of properties spread throughout the country and over time, it could be useful, but for individual choices it's probably not. Here's a great read on the uselessness of comparing a bunch of averages to individuals: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24186666-the-end-of-aver...

From a broad perspective, most investors don't rent property out at a loss, so in general it's going to be more expensive to rent, unless you own a property for a short enough amount of time that closing costs play a significant role. Even then, occupancy rates aren't 100%, so average rent needs to make up for that. On the other hand, the margins aren't super wide, so rent is still in the general ballpark of the price of ownership.

In the end, if you want to rent then rent, and if you want to own than own. The pricing difference isn't enough to make an uncomfortable living situation worthwhile. Do you prefer the control and long-term stability of owning your property over the effort it takes to manage it yourself? Then buy! Do you prefer the freedom of moving often and the convenience of someone else managing and maintaining your property over the ability to live somewhere indefinitely or chose how your residence is remodeled? Then rent!
by brightball | 2025-07-08 21:35:14+00:00
Comfort, speed, preference, flexibility, lack of benefit on web projects where all data is by default a string, your ORM has already mapped the types directly in the database and will transform everything automatically without repeat definition, you're dealing with a lot of JSON API calls that may change where you don't _need_ all of the data so being forced into a situation of strictly typing 3rd party nested substructures can created a lot of wasted time...

Just off the top of my head. To each their own.
by LinXitoW | 2025-07-08 21:36:18+00:00
We're talking about the rising star, the golden goose, the all-fixing genius of innovation, LLMs. "Just don't use it" is not going to be acceptable to suits. And "it's not fixable" is actually 100% accurate. The best you can do is mitigate.

We're less than 2 years away from an LLM massively rocking our shit because a suit thought "we need the competitive advantage of sending money by chatting to a sexy sounding AI on the phone!".
by abujazar | 2025-07-08 21:36:54+00:00
Well, this is the very nature of MCP servers. Useful for development, but it should be quite obvious that you shouldn't grant a production MCP server full access to your database. It's basically the same as exposing the db server to the internet without auth. And of course there's no security in prompting the LLM not to do bad stuff. The only way to do this right in production is having a separate user and database connection for the MCP server that only has access to the things it should.
by gregnr | 2025-07-08 21:37:07+00:00
The limitation is that it is data-only (no DDL). A large percentage of folks use Supabase MCP for app development - they ask the LLM to help build their schema and other database objects at dev time, which is not possible through PostgREST (or designed for this use case). This is particularly true for AI app builders who connect their users to Supabase.
by andrewflnr | 2025-07-08 21:37:30+00:00
> It feels as though there must be sufficiently advanced civilizations out there witnessing this exact scenario play out without the necessary technology to stop it. Though that fate would be horrifying.

I suspect this is not actually that common. Giant impacts are more common in early solar systems; things eventually settle into nice circular orbits like we have now. Whereas intelligent life does seem to take a while to evolve, so probably more common later in a solar system's life cycle.
by alganet | 2025-07-08 21:39:42+00:00
Thanks for the interesting historical additions.

I am not, however, approaching this from a political perspective.

What I said applies to Indian, Japanese, Native American, even Abrahamic and possibly many others. All of these have been used in the past by charlatans of various kinds.

The kinds of charlatans I'm referring to are not strictly political. Honestly, I was thinking of cheap cults and schemes (like I previously illustrated by my Häagen-Dazs comparison in another comment).
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-08 21:40:11+00:00
Capitalism, plain and simple. I don't like it either, but that's the way all fundraising has devolved down to. And hell, it's been that way even decades ago with images of starving little African kids being used for emotional manipulation.

In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-08 21:41:37+00:00
> The meaning of the word "El" changed over time and by the time most of the Bible was written it did simply mean God.

That is not correct; the word simply meant "god" long, long before there is any attestation of a god that might use it as a name.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ilum#Akkadian
by orangecat | 2025-07-08 21:41:45+00:00
The banners is malicious compliance.

That's true, but I'm still going to blame the EU. The nag screens were absolutely a predictable response, and if the regulators didn't spend half an hour thinking about unscrupulous data marketers would react to the regulations, then they are bad at their jobs. And even after that, they've had years to fix the regulations and haven't done so.
by bgnn | 2025-07-08 21:42:56+00:00
I don't know what's it like to work with their chips, but I worked at one of them designing chips. There is often a block designed by someone 10 years ago but left the company, it has bugs, but nobody dares to touch it and fix it because "we knyiw ots bugs" and nobody really knows what's happening under the hood. So someone writes a wrapper for the next gen, to add new features. This person soon leaves the company.. rinse and repeat. I've seen wrapper of a wrapper of a wrapper on 10th gen of a product in 5nm process of a product line started its life when 90nm was state of the art. Most of the the bugs accumulated over the years were still there. They won't fix it as long as a big customer doesn't complain about it.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-07-08 21:43:09+00:00
> most investors don't rent property out at a loss

I was under the impression that this was actually fairly common in places with rapid house price appreciation. Which includes a good portion of the places where people want to rent. The main source of profit for the landlord is the capital appreciation rather than the rent, so they're willing to rent at levels that wouldn't be profitable if they weren't also planning on profiting from the rising prices.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-08 21:43:20+00:00
> I bet if I had been looking much more deeply into these fan-fiction sequels, I could have found one that was as exceptional as the original Matrix.

> Lesson learned: scripts for sequels of movies that have a strong fan-base should be written by people who really care about the franchise (and have good ideas).

It seems like the lesson there is "if you make 2000 independent attempts at something, you'll probably get a better best result than if you make 1".
by titanomachian | 2025-07-08 21:43:33+00:00
Yes, since you were just needlessly acting out your skeptic points with someone agreeing with you, I did get offended. I believe it’s a common thing to feel offended when I engage people in good faith and get attacked. I feel specially offended when I try to make ammends and get attacked again. Anyways, this could have been a great conversation. I hope you’re happy knowing you have been right along. Or have you? Oh, no! But you’re a skeptic! How can we know now? Tun-dun-duuuuun Bye-bye
by saclark11 | 2025-07-08 21:43:41+00:00
Advertising any UUID/GUID generator as cryptographically secure, or relying on it to be so, is a mistake, in my opinion.

You use a UUID when you need a universally unique ID whose guessability properties are not a critical security requirement. While the V4 UUID spec (which this package does not implement, but most users might assume it does) states that a UUID implementation SHOULD be cryptographically secure [1], it also states that they MUST NOT be used as security capabilities [2]. This is b/c they are not intended as secure tokens, but many users mistakenly assume them to be suitable as such. Not to mention, V4 UUIDs only have 122 bits of entropy, not 128, since 6 bits are reserved for version and variant information, which many users don't realize.

So you can generate a UUID that is suitable as a secure token, but at that point don't call it a UUID. Just call it a secure token. And if you need a secure token, use something like Go's `Text()` function from `crypto/rand` [3].

The situation reminds me of how the Go team updated the `math/rand` and `math/rand/v2` packages to use a CSPRNG as a defensive measure [4], while still urging users to use `crypto/rand` in secure contexts.

[1]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9562.html#unguessability

[2]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9562.html#Security

[3]: https://pkg.go.dev/crypto/rand@go1.24.5#Text

[4]: https://go.dev/blog/chacha8rand
by throaway5454 | 2025-07-08 21:44:15+00:00
You would know where words came from based on the way they're spelt. That would let you know how to pronounce them. It's the exact same thing people do now we just do it without thinking.

The systems at work in English are not nonsensical like people like to parrot. To say it's not phonetic is just wrong on every level as well.

Frankly I'm fine with the historical oddities that have led to modern English. If non native speakers have issues, that's tough luck for them!
by kragen | 2025-07-08 21:44:56+00:00
It doesn't require any special commitment because it doesn't cost me anything. Certain people do post a lot of really boring comments about it, but I'm not the one posting those comments, and I don't care about those people's opinions, so I don't care.

I don't believe I'm actually doing those people any injury, so while they're obviously free to continue requesting different formatting of my posts, I'm free to ignore them.

I think it's important for people to be able to complain about things that bother them, for the reasons described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44501817. In that thread, we were discussing a different commenter requesting that an author please not use AI for editing his own books, although the request was made in a particularly obnoxious fashion. Consider "Please don't play your music so loud at night", "Please don't look at my sister", or "Please don't throw your trash out your car window". But "please format your dates differently" doesn't seem like a very important request, even if it were phrased politely, to the point that it makes me (and, as I've seen, others) think less of the people who are making it.

If my date formatting really bothers them, they're free to stop reading the site. After having looked at their comment histories, I wish some of them would, because the only thing they ever post are similarly vacuous complaints. If people had to choose between reading a site where I posted and they didn't, and a site where they posted and I didn't, 100% of people would choose the former. (Others do occasionally post something worthwhile, but nothing that inspires me to wonder how I could earn their admiration.)

So, these days, I can easily ignore it.

Especially the day after this comment of mine got voted up to +151: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44491713
by Robbinghook | 2025-07-08 21:44:59+00:00
Acharu is an original Tamil word deformed slightly. In the ancient it was called "Anchuaru". There are two Tamil words combined together into one word. The two words are Anchu & Aru. Here Anchu means five and Aru means six. In the ancient during the havesting time any excess vegetables that can't be consumed or sold were preserved with lime or acetic acid. Usually the people use five or six vegetable together for taste and flavor. Hence the name Anchu(five)+aru(six) became Acharu.
by mtmail | 2025-07-08 21:45:21+00:00
They tried to copy Yahoo (marketing was "Yahoo is toast") with minimal design (very fast page loads) and less ads. Yahoo was full of banner ads and kept adding more and more. If I recall correct they used text ads, similar to Google Adsense instead. That's something that came up around the time and was still in the infancy. Could've worked but myway tried to cover too many product categories. It was the time of portals where a portal homepage had to have everything from news to fashion to astrology. I worked in that industry but didn't use myway.

"2002, The Excite Network launched an online portal called MyWay.com, which replicated many of Yahoo's popular features without advertisements, fees, and intrusive privacy policies. In the same year, the company launched several entertainment products, such as, SmileyCentral and PopularScreensavers, and changed its name to Focus Interactive. In November 2015, the MyWay site posted, "After many years, we have decided to shut down the MyWay website. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindspark_Interactive_Network
Show HN: Gtime – A colorful CLI tool to compare and convert time zones
by renovate5141 | 2025-07-08 21:45:53+00:00
Posting on behalf of my friend, I'm spreading the word, and I find it quite useful, so I thought I'd share it with y'all

Hi HN!

Built gtime, a Python command-line utility to look up, compare, and convert time across global cities. It supports fuzzy search, favorites, meeting time conversion, and a live/watch mode — all with colorful terminal output via Rich.

Created this tool because existing CLI options felt too limited or clunky. gtime aims to make working with global times fast and pleasant, especially for remote teams or frequent schedulers.

Try it:

$ pip install gtime

GitHub: https://github.com/savitojs/gtime

Feedback, feature requests, and issues are welcome!
by IshKebab | 2025-07-08 21:46:11+00:00
> or inevitably gets tired

The triggers are so light, I fail to see how anyone could get tired. It basically requires no more grip than just holding it.

> Or the amazingly useless "smart power" feature that just varies the power almost completely randomly as I vacuum an otherwise perfectly smooth hard floor.

Oh no Dyson did that too? I assumed it was just Shark.

It's clearly a hack so they can lie about amazing pickup and battery life (....but not at the same time)