MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beezlebroxxxxxx | 2025-07-06 13:46:08+00:00
This is something that really only seems like a mystery when viewed from an explicitly academic context. Speaking many languages is the norm for many people, and speaking many, many, languages is a very refined ability. When you think of language as "purely" mental and private then it seems "mysterious", but once you rid yourself of the mentalist (Cartesian in philosophical terms) confusion and focus on language as public behavior, then it's not mysterious at all.
by OjotCewIo | 2025-07-06 13:47:02+00:00
> company that isn't looking to grow

I don't think such a thing exists (unfortunately). Show me a business leader that says, "oh we've been successful, we've got orders and new clients lined up, but no, I won't hire more workers, more managers, and turn our flat org structure into a hierarchy, because I want my employees to have a sustainable and fulfilling work experience, and because I want my current customers to enjoy the usual, stable service or product quality". Only a unicorn would not perceive saying "no" to growth as leaving money on the table.
by martin-t | 2025-07-06 13:47:16+00:00
I wonder why you called it asocial.

Asocial people are great because they lack exactly this kind of status seeking and don't feel the need to engage in zero-sum social games. They just do what they like, which often is something actually productive or fun.

This behavior is anti-social. It actively harms everyone else except the person (or group) doing it.
by jltsiren | 2025-07-06 13:48:38+00:00
In many fields of R&D, the effort required to maintain a steady pace of improvement grows exponentially. Maybe you develop AGI one year by spending $X, and the next year you need $1.2X to make it 110% as good. For a while, you can keep investing more, and the productivity improvements from AGI also help a bit. But eventually the pace slows down, as the world economy is too small to sustain it.

Maybe self-improving AGI just the next technological advance required to sustain 2% annual economic growth.
by jzb | 2025-07-06 13:48:48+00:00
No, because “better products” won’t exist. That’s the complaint: every company is rushing to throw AI into their stuff, and/or use it to replace humans.

They’re not trying to satisfy customers: they’re answering shareholders. Our system is no longer about offering the best products, it’s about having the market share to force people to do business with you or maybe two other equally bad companies that constantly look for ways to extract more money from people to make shareholders happy. See: Two choices of smartphone OS, ISP regional monopolies or duopolies, two consumer OSes, a handful of mobile carriers, almost all available TVs models being “smart TVs” laden with spyware…

(I’m speaking from the US perspective, this may not be as pronounced elsewhere.)
by jen20 | 2025-07-06 13:49:03+00:00
> The salesman can cut the car you want from your buying options, or stick conditions on it that will make up for the difference with the other models.

My favourite approach to this is to write an email to all dealerships within the radius I’m willing to go, explaining what I want, then “publicly” make them bid for my business in a thread with their peers. I’ve had it work several times now.
by firesteelrain | 2025-07-06 13:49:03+00:00
I believe this isn’t true otherwise NASA would be doing this

- Earth isn’t a universal reference

- GPS uses WGS84

- GPS is bound to the Earth’s surface and center

- It’s Geodetic

- There's no universal “equator” or “prime meridian” beyond Earth

- Space uses inertial frames or celestial coordinate systems (right ascension and declination, or galactic coordinates)
by NBJack | 2025-07-06 13:49:27+00:00
I've loved this site since I first learned about it. In today's increasingly densified office spaces (in my area at least), this has been an even bigger help to me.

The latest app redesign has been fantastic.

It's worth a small donation just to get access to the huge library he built.

Note that the vast majority of his content is stuff he, personally, recorded on site, mixed, and sliced into equalizer bands. That includes an Irish coastline, an underground waterway, and several forests.
by cedws | 2025-07-06 13:50:22+00:00
Are you asking me specifically or in general?

I'm in my 20s and the way a significant portion of relationships start in this generation is via dating apps. If you aren't using dating apps, and don't have social circles, there's just no social fabric to build from. Believe me, I've tried activities, they don't really work. It's extremely difficult to build enough rapport with someone in the space of 1-2 hours that they'll care enough to ever meet up again.
Show HN: ParsePoint – AI OCR that pipes any invoice straight into Excel
by marcinczubala | 2025-07-06 13:50:59+00:00
Hi HN,

I run a small ecommerce shop and, until recently, spent way too many evenings copy-pasting supplier invoices into Excel so my books stayed clean and my expense tracking was granular. It finally hit me that I’d rather invest that time in code than in Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V, so I built ParsePoint.app.

Why I built it • Manual invoice entry was swallowing 4 hours every month. • Accounting software APIs felt heavyweight for my use-case; I really just wanted clean rows in a spreadsheet. • I love tinkering with AI models and needed an excuse to spin one up in production.

What it does 1. Upload a PDF (or forward an email). 2. ParsePoint’s AI OCR extracts line-items, amounts, tax, dates, etc. 3. Download a ready-to-pivot Excel/CSV file or hit the API to drop the data wherever you like.

Under the hood • Frontend: React • API: .NET 8, PostgreSQL • AI layer: an open-source VLLM model fine-tuned for document layouts

Outcome so far • My own workload: from 4 hours/month to less than 10 minutes. • Early beta testers (other solo-store owners) report similar time savings and fewer bookkeeping errors. • The pay-as-you-go credit system means no subscriptions or lock-ins—use it only when you need it.

I’d love feedback on the tech approach, pricing model, or anything that looks off. All comments welcome, and I’m here to answer every question.

Thanks for reading! Marcin – maker of ParsePoint.app
by cluckindan | 2025-07-06 13:52:21+00:00
The opioid epidemic is not a great example, as it began by overprescription of legal, regulated medicinal drugs. The problem blew up when authorities started cracking down on those prescriptions, and the newly dependent started seeking drugs from illegal sources. Those sources included clandestinely produced heroin and fentanyl, leading to massive numbers of overdose deaths.

In other words, it was the enforcement of prohibition that ultimately caused more societal and health issues than the quasi-legal sales of hard drugs. It definitely wasn’t the doing of ”humane and sensible” policies!

So you see, it is actually a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption.

The system can only regulate drugs when they are legal.

Illegal drugs combined with enforcement of prohibition pits producers, traffickers, dealers and users against the police and ultimately the army, which are usually the only groups of people who have a state-sanctioned mandate to use violence against other people.

How could violence not result, when it is an integral part of the alleged ”solution”?

Just add pervasive income inequality, throw in some general lack of future prospects mixed with widely publicized lies about the billionaire class being entirely self-made through hard work, and baby, you got a stew going, and the people getting thrown in the hot water are already boiling over.
by bcbernstein | 2025-07-06 13:52:21+00:00
Thanks! Front-end: Vite + React + React-Leaflet for the map UI. Data: Curated spots are just a local JSON array; user-added spots go to Firebase Realtime DB (so no Supabase in this case but that's probably better longer term). Hosting: the static Vite build is served from a tiny Node/Express wrapper on Heroku. Because Firebase handles the write endpoint, I get SSL, auth options, and rate-limiting for free.

Right now anyone can add a place without an account; the “abuse protection” is: Very small audience (for now) Firebase security rules (lat/long bounds, char limits) Manual moderation—if something looks off, it’s a single click to delete in the console. If the map gets popular I’ll add reCAPTCHA or gated auth.

Cool to see people adding stuff around the world!

Anything you wish it could do?
by mjsir911 | 2025-07-06 13:52:56+00:00
Hi pkdpic!

As one of the founders of the hackerspace you've visited out in seattle & a fellow recurser that you might've heard about the space from, I can drop to you some of my notes & learnings from two years in of devhack.

the biggest piece of advice by far that I pulled from a bunch of european-style hackerspaces (& HacDC, my formative hackspace) has been: Just do it. Find a physical space, start doing meetups, promote it a bit and cool folks will find you.

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/attach...

We at devhack took a very word-of-mouth based approach to promotion and that has prevented what a lot of comments here are trying to mitigate in terms of attracting the wrong crowd too quickly -- although I think there's lots of value in creating a space which supports eccentric folks / ppl with diverse backgrounds.

Founding a hackspace is a very learn-as-you-go experience, has been very fulfilling and has had plenty of hiccups that we've had to react to as they come. The most important part is to have fun and create a fun space for you and your friends.

Also, put a roller rink in your space. very important and wish we had that
by coldpie | 2025-07-06 13:53:47+00:00
Yeah, he got his fame in the mid-2000s when he found a vulnerability in the Playstation 3 OS and some idiot lawyers at Sony sued him for it. He parlayed that into a cool, anti-corporate hacker persona, and then got hired by the most powerful corporations and people on the planet to try to give their tech companies some cool hacker cred. It's honestly a pretty funny career arc. I don't dislike the guy, he found a way to get his bag, good for him. But he definitely got played by the pros.
by ksec | 2025-07-06 13:54:23+00:00
On site like [1] Total Real Returns running on Crystal, response time could be sub 10ms but you are fundamentally limited by latency between you and server. Which could be 150ms if you visit to US server from Valeriepieris Circle, where 50% of population lives.

[1] https://totalrealreturns.com
by OjotCewIo | 2025-07-06 13:54:36+00:00
Agree with your points about public institutions and NGOs. Where I live, having NGO projects on your CV could even work against you (in case you were looking for a government job, down the line).

> floor tiling, plumbing, roofing, ... All honest work, good pay, visible results, and zero bullshit

I'm not sure. First, you need to be good at it. "Leaving tech" does not necessarily imply "good at trades". Second, you need to be very flexible in the quality vs. delivery time tradeoff (and personally I find that really difficult). Third, I'm not keen on talking with clients directly. Fourth, even if there's a general contractor, representatives of the different trades always blame each other, when things go wrong, or the schedule slips.
by Joker_vD | 2025-07-06 13:54:42+00:00
Well, there is a case for PDFs in a .zip, but it's when you're e.g. downloading some set of documents from your e-government site, and it's like 4 PDFs, all cryptographically signed: so you get a .zip with 4 PDFs in it and 4 .sig files with matching names.

But in emails? Just attach however many PDFs you need and send, they don't really compress anyway; and I think most web-mail fronts actually allow you to download all the attachments as a single .zip — but obviously those .zip-files are not maliciously crafted (I hope, at least).

Also, now that I think of it, forwarding the PDF you've extracted and visually reviewed instead of the original .zip-file would defeat this attack (unless, of course, it's the PDF file that's schizophrenic).
by justsomehnguy | 2025-07-06 13:55:28+00:00
sigh

Yes, it moves a lot. Because there are 300m+ people there[0]. But if you just search for a 'USA train network' and compare that to a 'Europe train network' it would be pretty self evident.

Also take a note of the cargo distribution of the US train traffic in the link you provided yourself:

>> Of all the rail cargo, approximately 91% is made up of agriculture and energy products, vehicles and parts, construction materials, coal, chemicals, food, metal, minerals, and paper.

Most of it is not transported by the trucks in the first place. And what matters the most is what you need a proper network distribution so you only haul the last 50-100kms on the trucks, instead of the "trips [what] can take several days at high speeds"[1]

So you brought the wrong metric in the numbers measuring contest.

[0] and let's ignore what China and Russia has a quite comparable numbers of tonne-kilometers: 2.525, 2.518, 2.222.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44479968
by ManlyBread | 2025-07-06 13:55:43+00:00
This is my experience for the past 10 years I've been working in the industry. As soon as someone finds out I am more capable at something than the rest of the colleagues on the team I get to do all the work in that area yet receive nothing in return. Every time I tried to bring something up as an example of doing something more my achievements were downplayed as part of the regular duties or my mistakes were put on the pedestal instead. There were also calls to do more, even though I already was doing more than the average programmer on the project. Nothing was ever enough.

In my current job I aimed to be painfully average at everything I do and so far I haven't seen any difference. I still get the same reviews I was getting all these years and the salary increases are still as mediocre as the ones I was getting when I was trying my best. My only fear is that this strategy might lead to complete stagnation. I am already bored out of my mind and I would switch jobs in a heartbeat, but I can't currently do that due to variety of reasons.
by rossy | 2025-07-06 13:55:44+00:00
I don't see how AI can become democratized. (I don't follow this stuff too closely, but) it seems like larger models with less quantization and more parameters always outperform smaller models of the same type, and that trend isn't stopping, so if/when we get consumer hardware and local models that equal today's SotA SaaS models, the SotA SaaS models of that time will be even better, and even more impossible to run on consumer hardware. Not to mention that local AI is reliant on handouts from big business - both in base models that the community could never afford to train themselves, and in high-VRAM GPUs that can run big models, so if SaaS AI is more profitable, I don't think we'll be "allowed" to run the SotA at home.

Human skill was already democratized in that anyone can obtain skills, and businesses have to be good at managing those people if they want to profit from those skills - ultimately the power is in the hands of the skilled individuals. But in the hypothetical AI future, where AI has superhuman skill, and human skills are devalued, it seems like there will be a more cynical, direct conversion between the money you can spend and the quality of your output, and local/self-hosted AI will never be able to compete with the resources of big business.
by majora2007 | 2025-07-06 13:55:44+00:00
This is similar to how I use Claude (bought a Pro sub this year). I like to group up context into the UI and have it either look over my approach or write some skeleton code, then I do the heavy lifting myself.

It's faster for me to do it manually (and I still learn) than having to find hard to spot bugs from the AI output (as it always outputs some weird stuff).
by perching_aix | 2025-07-06 13:56:01+00:00
Not sure I follow?

These were the things that were said:

> It is crazy how secret services (...) now have a green pass

Step-function.

> think this is new

Step-function.

You're the only person describing a gradient ("it's worse now").

> Not knowing something isn't the same as knowing something that is not.

This is what I'm saying. That this kind of thing having been speculated on by a lot of people the GP above then believed doesn't mean those folks had actual information backing all of that up.
by greentec | 2025-07-06 13:56:04+00:00
Hello Hacker News!

Thank you for your interest in my previous post. This time, I've written a blog post about the game and the process of creating it.

In the original Minesweeper, there are inevitable 50/50 moments where you have to rely on luck. In the game I created, 'Explainable Minesweeper,' I eliminated these guessing situations. However, I also prevented the maps from becoming too easy! How? By using logical deduction, you can solve puzzles that initially appear to be luck-based. The blog post explains the process in more detail.
by tomhow | 2025-07-06 13:56:08+00:00
Ok, I definitely need to step away from this thread because where I am it’s nearly midnight on a Sunday night and I’m emotionally exhausted after dealing with some family illness this evening. That’s what’s exacerbated my impatience with the topic and duration of the discussion. It’s just not how I expected/hoped to be spending my the last hours of my Sunday night when I just posted a routine mod comment about a url change. Sorry for letting that get the better of me.

That Tomte sees it as a problem is interesting, because I wouldn’t have been surprised to find they also used some kind of scripts to find articles to post; indeed I just casually assumed they did, at least to some extent. I mean that not as an accusation, just an impression I’d picked up from observing their posts over many years.

Ok, point taken about how it makes you feel about HN. I’ll think more about it as we continue to work on ways to improve everything.
by fud101 | 2025-07-06 13:56:24+00:00
Act of recording is right. Pen and paper is efficient and you get a safe way to archive it once you fill the book up, it can go into storage or the bin. It's fool proof, doesn't have bugs or network timeouts, costs nothing and will give all the benefits of journaling without the downsides of digital distractions. I hate how every tech enthusiast thinks their addiction to technology is of benefit to humanity at large.
by nla | 2025-07-06 13:57:25+00:00
Congestion pricing is manufactured to create a new tax class. First they let over 100k Ubers on the roads where there were only 32k taxis. Then they added bike lanes. Then they added two bus lanes. Then they closed streets. Then they added more bike lanes. Then they added 'floating islands. Then they added 'pedestrian walkways' in the street -- next to the sidewalks. Some avenues are down to one lane. Viola! Congestion. All of the money goes to the bankrupt MTA. The Democrat supermajority in NYS/NYC wins again.
by Anamon | 2025-07-06 13:58:07+00:00
"Also an observation: once the LLM gets it wrong, it will continuously get it wrong"

Oh yes, so very very much! I often see people keep iterating, not just with coding assistants but also general knowledge or research queries, when the first response is obviously wrong. I don't think that has ever ended up in a better response down the line. If the first response is garbage, then that means garbage is all this particular LLM is able to give you in return for what you ask. All the iterating does is travel through randomland - often until the person doing the prompting gets a response which they, for some reason, find more acceptable, even if it's just as wrong as all the others.

Don't give LLM second chances.
by bsenftner | 2025-07-06 13:58:31+00:00
What you're describing is specifically the subtle nature of LLMs I'm pointing at; that changing of a single word to a close synonym is meaningful. Why and how they are meaningful gets pushback from the developer community, they somehow do not see this as being a topic, a point of engineering proficiency. It is, but requires an understanding of how LLMs encode and retrieve data.

The reason changing one word in a prompt to a close synonym changes the reply is because it is the specific words used in a series that is how information is embedded and recovered by LLMs. The 'in a series' aspect is subtle and important. The same topic is in the LLM multiple times, with different levels of treatment from casual to academic. Each treatment from casual to formal uses different words, similar words, but different and that difference is very meaningful. That difference is how seriously the information is being handled. The use of one term versus another term causes a prompt to index into one treatment of the subject versus another. The more formal the terms used, meaning the synonyms used by experts of that area of knowledge, generate the more accurate replies. While the close synonyms generate replies from outsiders of that knowledge, those not using the same phrases as those with the most expertise, the phrases used by those perhaps trying to understand but do not yet?

It is not randomly changing things in one's prompts at all. It's understanding the knowledge space one is prompting within such that the prompts generate accurate replies. This requires knowing the knowledge space one prompts within, so one knows the correct formal terms that unlock accurate replies. Plus, knowing that area, one is in a better position to identify hallucination.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-06 13:58:36+00:00
It's funny but I find AI helps me out when I'm feeling tired.

I like the chatbots that respond immediately, agentic systems like Junie that go off and do a lot of research and ask a lot of permission and then come back with something broken in ten minutes feel like an exhausting waste of time.

Sometimes I get a great answer immediately and it's helpful in debugging because often a bug is in my blind spot. Sometimes I get an answer that isn't quite right but gets me thinking in the right direction. Sometimes it is just plain wrong. I had one argue about whether I could use a null in a switch statement in Java, checking the manual it's clear you can in JDK 21. On the other hand, if I asked coworkers or people online it would be basically the same story.
by mayneack | 2025-07-06 13:58:38+00:00
I haven't seen suggestion of businesses suffering

> Others have said it would hurt businesses in the congestion zone. The report, however, says pedestrian activity inside the zone was up 8.4% in May, compared with the same period last year, while outside the zone only saw an increase of 2.7%.

And from an earlier post

> And just to take a different kind of measure, The New York Times visited 40 storefronts on a stretch of Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village to gauge how businesses felt about congestion pricing. People working in four of those businesses said the change had been positive, 10 said it had been negative — and 25 said it had had no impact.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges...
by echoangle | 2025-07-06 13:58:42+00:00
> Looking at the RFC it's never explained why this is needed.

Chapter 5.1 (Suggested Uses) has at least some vague suggestions:

> Some uses for the LOC RR have already been suggested, including the

> USENET backbone flow maps, a "visual traceroute" application showing

> the geographical path of an IP packet, and network management

> applications that could use LOC RRs to generate a map of hosts and

> routers being managed.
by arexxbifs | 2025-07-06 14:00:03+00:00
Opting out is easy, we can just stop using products from Microsoft, Apple, Meta and Google. Of course, for many that also means opting out of their job, which is a great way to opt out of a home, a family, healthcare, dental care and luxuries like food.

I don't think it's entitlement to make a well-mannered complaint about how little choice we actually have when it comes to the whims of the tech giants.